Wings of Fire: Dragons, Steel, and Pom-Poms

VII - Pufferfish and Handshake Diplomacy

>Approaching the SeaWing Summer Palace, somewhere in the Kingdom of The Sea_

Well, what a fine use of my time this all has been. Mako lamented to herself for the umpteenth time on this trip.

Barnacle, Sailfish, Bonefish and herself had departed from their enclave in the mid-morning hours the day after Mako and the dragonets had returned with news of what transpired at the scavenger den. The dragons at the resulting meeting had decided it would be best to at least warn SeaWing guards at the palace of the inexplicable but nonetheless very real danger the scavenger den now posed to dragons flying or hunting near it.

To that end, the four dragons had been flying for a few hours now. They had opted for flying the majority of the considerable distance rather than swimming, so that the trip would go by faster. SeaWings were unrivaled across the dragon tribes for their swimming prowess, but being even the most powerful swimmer on the entire continent wouldn't cancel out the universal principle that water was far denser than air.

So even with their natural swimming talents, the Sea dragons found that it was just easier to cover the same distance in the air than it was in the water.

This didn't mean that the SeaWings were the unabated masters of both the waters below and the heavens above to be certain. Due to their bodies being optimized for swimming, with denser and heavier muscles in their tails and legs and less streamlined wings and flight muscles meant that SeaWings had a proportional disadvantage in the air compared to other Dragon tribes.

Even the MudWings, whose bulky bodies which provided them armor and physical strength on the ground but served an ailment in the air. They still nonetheless held a slim advantage over the SeaWings in the sky.

All this meant that SeaWings could not maintain long distance flying for as long as most other dragons, and meant that the quartet of dragons currently flying over the calm water would tire relatively soon.

Fortunately, they weren't far from where they knew their intended destination to be, the Summer Palace. The large secondary abode of the Queen and her royal council. The Summer Palace was known largely for two things. Not just among SeaWings, but dragons across the continent of Pyrrhia. The first was that it was actually above water, and the second was that its location was a closely guarded secret. With only SeaWings at all privy to its location.

The quartet of dragons making their way over there now of course knew where it was. They were going there rather than the Deep Palace, the underwater palace that was the primary seat of the SeaWing Royalty, because it was, for one: slightly easier to get to from their enclave without going near the scavenger den that started this whole mess, and two: because it was less likely that Queen Coral herself was currently present there. All these dragons wanted to do was hopefully run into a relatively high-ranking dragon in the palace and pass off their warning to them, rather than go to all the trouble of getting an audience with the Queen set up only to tell her that they're afraid of a scavenger den and that she should be to.

After flying for a little while longer, they approached a rather large and particular island along the chain that made up the Bay of a Thousand Scales that towered high out of the water and had a small grove of trees growing atop it. Barnacle signaled with his talons that they ought to begin their dive, so they collectively pulled their wings in close and plummeted-with-purpose to the sea below.

A comparatively risky maneuver, but one that these adults had all pulled off before. Seconds before hitting the water, they flared their wings to slow themselves, before quickly pulling them and their legs back as close to their bodies as they could, and braced their necks and spines for impact.

The four dragons all met the water with violent splashes despite their practiced form. Once their momentum had carried them a decent distance under the waves, they once again spread their wings and legs. SeaWings mostly swam using their powerful tail and leg muscles to paddle through the water, relegating their wings to directional control unless they needed a burst in speed.