The blue ink smudges on his talons like blood, the blue blood of IceWings that she's seen in so very many futures. She holds back a shudder. "I shouldn't tell you," she tells him. "I'm sorry." If she tells him his name too early, he dies. She still can't see how, or why, one of a thousand details she can't pin down, but even not knowing how, she can still prevent it. Something she can actually do, here and now, save the life of her sweet and ordinary father, whom she loves dearly. That, at least, is hers.

He sighs. "Clearsight, your mother and I have been talking about this. We think it's time for you to go to school. Dragonets are supposed to start when they're one, and you're nearly two and a half."

"No, wait!" she says, her concern and fear present in her voice. "I don't have everything figured out yet. School is when everything changes, when I can't control things properly." She points at the scroll on table two. "Look what happens when I go to school," she says, with a note of panic in her voice. "There's just too much complexity. If I'm put in a different art group, things change, if make friends with this dragon instead of that one it opens up a whole mess of new possibilities. If I get sick here or share my notes with this dragon there the entire tribe might die!" She stabs too hard at the parchment, tearing a bloody blue gash through the center, stares at it, and collapses, rocking back and forth from the pressure. 

"Oh, Clearsight," he says, uncertain how to comfort her. "It can't be that bad. I promise, the entire fate of the tribe doesn't depend on a two year old dragonet. The worst that could happen is you don't get into the astronomy program and disappoint your mother, but no one is going to die from that." He pats her gently, doing his best to help calm her down. 

"And besides," he adds. "We don't think this is healthy, what you're doing in here. School will should be a welcome distraction, with classes and friends and other things to take your mind off things, to show you we're not so doomed after all." He chuckles a little to himself. 

Clearsight looks ahead, and finds herself suddenly hemmed in. What changed? What had she missed? The futures that were open to her before, the ones not involving school are gone, cut off. Everywhere she looks, everything she does, still leads to the same place. She thought her parents understood how important her work is, she thought the screaming nightmares had convinced them to let her plan everything before committing... but something has changed, and she's trapped. School tomorrow or school next week or school in a few days, and then everything goes off the rails. She needs more time. But time is nowhere to be found, except... 

"Please don't make me go yet," she sobs, and hopes. 

For a moment the future is in flux, and then. 

"All right, dearest. We'll wait until you're three." He tilts her face up to look at his. "But no more delay after that. The queen wants to make sure her seers are trained, and we're pushing our luck with our requests already. So, when you turn three, you're going to school. Agreed?"

The future flickers into place, as solid as a future could be. She can't delay things any further, this will have to do. "Yes, father," she agrees. "Let me get back to work, then." She'll need to start over, but at least this narrows things down. If only she were sure that made things better, not worse. There's no way to know for sure, the past is in the past. 

"Don't hurt yourself, Clearsight," he says, heading for the door. "It's not the end of the world if you let yourself sleep, you know."

If only he knew. 

She busies herself with her work, dipping claws in ink and mapping and remapping out futures, feeling oddly relaxed despite the sudden restriction. She'd always known the other timelines were unlikely, she had the same power as her, she's seen that he'll try to seek her out. She only has to worry about the ones where they're certain to meet, to get together, to fall in love, their visions of the future interacting and interfering until they make everything a tangled weave of threads, spreading out into the distance as far as she can see. 

She can see every single one, if she tries. She just has to find the right one. 

It's shaping up to be a pretty nice day at school, apart from all the ways that school can be terrible.

The scavengers in their cage are pretty active when she gets to school, which means Listener is distracted worrying about them and keeps spacing out and losing track of the book she's reading. When the two little creatures settle in for a nap, she breathes a sigh of relief and settles in herself, refocusing her attention on the history of the NightWing tribe. The book is telling her about how the royal line traces back almost all the way to the Scorching, which is pretty cool, but then someone at the far end of the room starts gazing longingly at the scavenger cage and thinking how they would make a nice snack, which, ew, and Listener wants to spin around and stuff a goose into whoever-it-is's face except she can't quite tell who and even if she could that would not be Appropriate Classroom Behaviour. And she doesn't have a goose. Maybe she'd like to have a goose, though, especially if her currently-unspecified classmate keeps thinking about how hungry they are.

But the classroom is still lovely, and the book still mostly manages to be interesting, and nobody's really going to eat the scavengers, they'd get in so much trouble. So overall, Listener thinks, things are going pretty great.

A new student enters the room, full of anxiety and concerns. She scans the room, matching up the dragons that she sees with what she's seen in her visions. Some are safe, but so many of them end poorly if she talks to them, in anger or resentment or... other far uglier outcomes. 

She's intercepted by the teacher before she can spend too much time dwelling on this, however, and Clearsight starts to feel better as she's shown around. The classroom is beautiful, full of plants and light and little water features, and the teacher is kind and helpful, and all of this provides a calming effect. Maybe this will be ok? 

"These are our pet scavengers," the teacher says, smiling with pride as she taps the top of a glass cage. "Two females. They're quite fierce, so don't stick your talons in the cage, just to be safe. We rotate whose turn it is to feed them, and we're doing a year-long study of their behavior. They're not just adorable; they're also quite fascinating."

They look like they're asleep, which is not very fascinating to Clearsight, but maybe they'll be more interesting later. She wonders what they eat. 

"A lot of fruit," Listener chimes in, "nuts, seeds, and sometimes bits of meat if we roast it for them." She likes taking care of the scavengers. Not just because she's concerned her fellow students might do it wrong and/or eat them. Also because they're neat.

"Oh, Listener," says the teacher. "Would you take care of our new student for the rest of the day?"

"Sure!" she says cheerfully. This new dragonet seems pretty wacky, but in an interesting way. Maybe they can be friends.

Clearsight turns to look at the other student, Listener. She's large for her age, and from looking at her, clearly a very successful hunter. And... she has silver scales beside her eyes, the ones that indicate mind reading. Oh, oh no.  

...or not. Maybe they cannot be friends. Whoops.

"I'm sorry," Clearsight says quickly, seeing Listener respond to her incautious thoughts. "I'm not used to mind readers. I don't know how to shield my thoughts or only think nice things or anything like that. I'm probably going to think a bunch of awful things at you and you'll end up hating me. Or," the more likely outcome, "I'll think a bunch of weird things around you and you'll think I'm a weirdo." 

"Don't worry," she says, cheering up a little, "I already know you're a weirdo. When you walked in, you looked around the classroom and immediately categorized every student into 'safe to be friends with' and 'doomed if I talk to them'. What is that about? And just checking - I'm not in the doomed camp, am I?"

"Not that I can tell," Clearsight says, looking. Actually, now that she's taking a closer look, the timelines with Listener are a lot brighter than the ones without, with a lot more smiling and joy. Befriending Listener is definitely on the right path. 

...that is, as long as she avoids the argument about the timeline scrolls and the one about Darkstalker and also all the fights about Listeners' various crushes and 

"By the Scorching!" she yelps, throwing up her wings and putting her talons over her ears. "Enough! Enough! I'll stay as far out of your brain as I can, I promise. I don't want to know anything about my future."

"Nothing?" Clearsight asks, surprised. "Even if I could keep you from -- "

"Nothing! Don't you dare!"

What. "But why?" Clearsight asks, now thoroughly confused. "If I could see where things go wrong and fix them, if I could fix whatever's wrong in your future, why wouldn't you want that?"

She cautiously lowers her talons. "My family is superstitious about seers," she explains. "We'd rather be surprised by life than know too much."

Clearsight isn't entirely sure what to do with that. She stares off into the distance, trying to wrap her mind around the strange concept, until a movement catches her eye. One of the scavengers is waking up, sitting up and stretching as she rubs her eyes and runs her fingers through the hair on her head. 

The scavenger is thinking small sleepy scavenger thoughts and it's just so cute and tragic and suddenly Listener is bursting at the seams to tell someone and, hey, if she makes friends with a seer, it's not like Clearsight won't find out, right? In fact maybe she's already found out.

"I have a secret plan," she whispers. "Maybe you know that already." Hopefully she knows that already because if she doesn't then Listener is going to feel dumb about telling her.

Clearsight shakes her head. There are several potential Listener plans in her future, and she's not one for thinking small or simple. But she doesn't have a good indication of which one Listener is referring to at the moment.