Whiteout climbs on top of her brother and flops her wings out as wide as they will go. See, it's like she's covering him in moonlight!

That's very pretty and sweet and also she is standing on his face. He pushes her off.

She curls up in the nest next to him, entirely content.

Arctic grunts an acknowledgment but says nothing else in response. He, too is distracted with the adorable dragons in front of him, watching his daughter at play with her brother, feeling a wisp of joy and love in his heart. It's been difficult, being in this far too warm and unstructured land, but there are joys to be found, and this is certainly one of them. 

All right. They can just stay here, for a little while, and let their dragonets play. She hunches down, refolding her wings in a futile effort to prevent the wind from sneaking in under them and trying to lift them off her back.

"...we should get them home before the storm hits," she says, hoping it won't be heard as an attack.

Arctic, still enamored with the sight in front of him, looks up suddenly at Foeslayer's words. He looks at the sky, feels the wind, and sighs. "You're right," he tells her, and reaches down to scoop up his daughter to carry her home. She's very cute and pretty, even with all the dark scales, and he supposes Darkstalker isn't all that bad either, despite the disconcerting name. "They're very good, aren't they," he tells her, cradling Whiteout into his arms. "We made good dragonets, didn't we."

She scoops up Darkstalker and snugs him up against her chest, safe and warm.

"Yes," she says, loosening her wings and stepping to the edge of the nest. "We really, really did."

Her wings snap open to catch the wind as she launches herself into the air. The jagged landscape of stone and shadow wheels and spins below her, comfortable and familiar, a map written on her heart. She follows it to the cliffside cave she shares with Arctic, trying to keep her mind focused on love and happiness and cute dragonets and away from her daughter's strange IceWing name. It'll probably be fine, right? People tolerate Arctic, mostly. They can tolerate Whiteout too. And with those icy wings, it's not like she has any choice besides standing out dramatically.

Darkstalker catches hints of his mother's concerns, but mostly he's thinking about how flying is the best prettiest coolest thing and he wants to do it all the time always.

Arctic follows close behind through the dark and unfamiliar land, cradling his beautiful snow-winged dragonet in his arms. This place is still strange to him and even stranger in the triple moonlight, and he wishes he did not need to follow so close to be able to find his way. But they should be back at the cave soon, back at his new home, with new dragonets in tow, and having Whiteout in his arms makes it difficult to feel quite so frustrated at being somewhere that still feels so unsettling.  

What a lovely vantage from which to see this new and exciting world, full of light and shadow! She wraps her small arms around her father's forearm and leans her head against his pleasantly chilly scales and watches the world scroll by.

Of course this fragile peace doesn't last. It never does.

She tries, she tries very hard, not to snipe and snarl and snap in front of the children. And she can feel herself failing, but knowing how close she is to disaster never saves her; she yells at her mate just the same, and Darkstalker hides away in his bed, and Whiteout gets quieter and quieter until it's like she disappears, and sometimes, shamefully, she's glad her children are making themselves scarce because it means she feels less guilty for getting into it with Arctic. If only he weren't so aloof. If only he weren't so infuriating. If only he weren't such an IceWing.

But she does love her mate, and she does love her beautiful dragonets.There's times when it's hard to remind herself of that, even with Darkstalker who she loves as easily as breathing, times when it feels like she can't breathe through the stress and fury wrapped around her like a tangle of rope. But even so, she loves them all, and though her life may be painful and frustrating and full of strife and trouble, it's the life she built for herself with the mate she chose (shut up, Mother), and she's mostly more or less doing okay at it, she thinks, probably. Probably other families are just as bad. Hers certainly was. At least, at least, she loves her children for their own sake and not for how well they meet her lofty expectations and not for how useful they are as pawns in her schemes, Mother.

Darkstalker loves his mother and tolerates his father. In the first few months after his hatching it looks like he's going to grow up into a rambunctious child, always knocking over furniture and getting into scrapes; but he learns to move slower and hold himself more carefully, because nothing sets his father off faster than a misplaced tail sweeping someone's dinner off the table.

So much of his life is built around avoiding his father's wrath, or minimizing the inevitable spats between his parents. He learns to curb his instinct to come to his mother's defense, because Arctic always digs in deeper when he feels attacked from both sides, even when he's wrong and being stupid and should know it. He learns to move carefully and gracefully and make just enough noise that his father doesn't growl at him for 'stalking'. He learns to be very gentle with his sister, far more than has ever actually mattered to Whiteout herself, because if Father catches them roughhousing he'll assume Darkstalker is bullying her and that never ends well. He learns to always be listening to his parents' thoughts, always watching the short-term future, because whenever he lets himself get careless, sooner or later he's always made to regret it. At least when he's sufficiently vigilant, he can head off most of the little stuff.

Whiteout, by contrast, is a calm little creature, and mostly doesn't pay much attention to what's inside other people's heads. Where Darkstalker immerses himself in other people's minds to stay one step ahead of them, Whiteout prefers to get out of their way and find something else to do. Like watch a beetle crawl across the floor, or make pretty pictures out of the food on her plate.

She takes to reading a little faster than he does, but to writing much slower, because if you put an inkpot in reach of her claws she cannot stop herself from drawing with it. She's also much slower to talk, because talking requires having something to say and then going to the effort of saying it, and why would she bother when Darkstalker can hear everything she thinks in his presence? Her father hates hearing her thoughts translated through her brother, though, so she does eventually apply herself to the discipline of speech, just so Arctic won't be so upset. Her father being upset seems to be an inevitable fact of the universe, but that doesn't mean she likes it.

Arctic is... frustrated. Always, always frustrated. Even after years, the NightWing lands still don't feel like his home. His mate coddles their dragonets, letting them roughhouse and play without instilling in them any sense of discipline or honor. It is the way of this tribe, but he still cannot help but look at what little they have accomplished and wonder what circle they would be in now, even ignoring the loss of his own status. Fifth? Sixth? Whiteout especially, his beautiful daughter, is especially lacking, drawing and musing instead of doing. He still loves her, but he deeply wishes she were more normal. Though normal is in short supply in this home, what with Darkstalker rifling around in his thoughts and saying words for his sister, keeping her from learning to speak. Foeslayer thinks of his "talents" as a gift, not a curse, but he still has trouble looking at his son knowing that he's listening in. He still loves them all, but sometimes he wonders what things would have been like if he hadn't done what he did. 

Clearsight is in the library.

She spends nearly all of her time in the library. Her parents often joke that they should have let her egg hatch there instead of on the lunar hatching peak, sometimes in a more admonishing tone than an amused one as they tried to coax her to do anything else. Of course, if they had she wouldn't have been given the gift of prophecy by the full moon, and she would have had no reason to spend all her time in the library in the first place, and would have had a blissful unaware ten or fifteen years of life before everything ended in blood and darkness. 

At least, she thinks that's what would have happened. She cannot see the past, only the future. In the ones where she successfully runs away everything is worse, (she thinks, so many of those end in a fog that she thinks mean her death), but she knows from looking just by existing she's changing things. The ones she can see more clearly, the ones where she stays and avoids him all end in horror. He already knows about her, and will tear things apart to find her, or feel feel sorrow at the loss of a future that she would be keeping from him. How would things be different if they never even had a chance to meet? Would that change things? 

She cannot know, can never know, and there's little point in dwelling on such things. She has to work with what she's got. She knows of him, and he knows of her, and she has to navigate the path to the right futures. 

But doing so was so very difficult. The librarian had given her a study room of her own, most likely to keep her away from the other patrons rather than out of altruism or encouragement. Half-filed scrolls were unrolled on the five tables arrayed around her, partly complete maps of timelines that she struggled to fill in with more and more details even as they branched and twisted and became impossible to pin down. Step one: meet him, step two: chaos along every potential timeline. 

There is a heavy sigh from the doorway.

"Hello, Father," she says, without looking up. Her attention is elsewhere. This note, when did she write this? 

The SeaWing brings death. The SeaWing brings salvation. Don't let him come. He must come, or all is lost.

Uggggh. Clearsight sighs and thumps her tail on the stone floor in frustration. 

"Clearsight," he tells her, "you are too young to worry this much."

"I should worry more," she says, looking at the note again. Something awful was going to happen with the SeaWings not too long from now, something involving so much death. The SeaWing lands are so far away, too far for her to know the details, but still she knows. She wishes she could do something, warn someone, but there's no path she can see where anyone believes her, and still so many SeaWings die. She can't do anything about them, she has to focus on what she can change. "The whole point of being able to see the future is so I can fix it. I just need to find all the details, map out all the paths, figure out the right way forward."

"All the paths?" he echoes. "Every future that spirals out of every choice you and every other dragon make for the rest of your life? Do you hear what you're saying? That's impossible, dearest, that way lies madness."

"No," she says, still thinking about the SeaWings, trying once again to find one future where she saves them. "I've thought about that one. Madness doesn't help, I've checked." That and so many others. Anything she does to try and avoid him will just make things worse.  

"This gift is not supposed to consume your entire life," he tells her, stepping over the scrolls on the floor and skirting around puddle of ink until he can put a wing between her and the table. She looks up at him, and he continues. "Listen," he says, as gently as he can manage. "I know your power is the strongest the NightWings have had in generations. I know it feels like you see everything ahead of you."

"It's not that simple," she tells him. "I don't see my path laid out straight in front of me, it's not 'this is your life, this is how it will go.' It's every possible thing that could happen to me, or the tribe, and all of it depending on what I do. But there are so many details, so many choices, and it's just so hard to keep track, and the further forward I look... it just gets so random and confusing."

"I understand," he sympathizes, wrapping his wings around his daughter. "But Clearsight, even if you could see everything, that doesn't mean you can control everything. Or anything. Things will happen. Other dragons will change your path, and you won't be able to stop them."

That is far more true than he knows. Darkstalker's face flashes in her mind, and with it a torrent of futures, joy and sadness, love and despair, pain and horror, so mixed together that she can hardly tell one thread from another. "I wish, I wish I could just go away." She can't of course, no matter how much she wishes for a future where only she decides her fate, far away from any other influence. That way lies so much blood and awfulness, and she couldn't do that to her tribe.

A vision of a silver and gold crown, twisted into thorny spikes, flashes in her mind. Timeline three again. She wriggles herself out of her father's grasp, and leans over to make a note. 

"What are you so afraid of, dearest?" he asks, taking her claws in his own to keep them still.