And that’s how we’ll always be, he thought.
Starflight woke up to find a claw poking his snout. “Mmmmf?” he mumbled. Everything was still and dark in the dormitory. The coals smoldered in the wall niches like the half-closed eyes of slumbering dragons. The skylight looked out onto a night with no stars.
The warmth from his dream faded instantly. Sunny was far away, and he had no idea when he’d ever see her again.
“I can’t sleep,” Fatespeaker whispered in the dark. Her wings rustled as she edged closer to him and poked his shoulder again. “What are you doing?”
“Um,” said Starflight. “Sleeping?”
“Let’s go explore,” she said. “I want to know more about our tribe, don’t you? We can go look around the whole fortress while they’re asleep.”
He rubbed his eyes and blinked at her. “Won’t we get in trouble?”
“Why?” she said. “Nobody’s told us not to. We’re NightWings, aren’t we? Isn’t this our fortress, too? Let’s explore it before someone tells us we can’t.”
There was a kind of logic to that, although Starflight wasn’t sure Morrowseer would agree with it. But really, she was right. Why should they get in trouble for acting like they belonged here?
Besides, it was what Tsunami would do. And wasn’t he always thinking he wanted to be more like her?
He rolled off the bed onto the floor next to Fatespeaker, and they padded softly out into the tunnels. She picked a direction apparently at random and they started to walk the empty halls. The only sound was the tapping of their own claws and the slithering of their tails on the stone.
Don’t be scared, Starflight told himself. And then told himself again, a few more times. You’re not doing anything wrong. There aren’t any dangers lying in wait for you. You’re not being treated like a prisoner. You’re a NightWing dragonet. This is your tribe. This is where you could have grown up. He glanced at the bare walls, not so very different from the cave where he had grown up. This is where you’re supposed to be.
No. I’m supposed to be where Sunny is. I’m supposed to be helping my friends stop the war. He stopped walking for a minute to take a deep breath, then hurried after Fatespeaker.
All the torches had been extinguished, so the only light came from the glowing red coals in the walls. Starflight couldn’t even see any of the moons when he looked out the windows. The sky was too hidden by clouds and smoke from the volcano.
He knew they wouldn’t find much that might be useful unless he was brave enough to open a door sometime, but he was terrified of waking up any sleeping NightWings. He kept imagining walking straight into Morrowseer’s room and stepping on his tail by accident, and the death or dismemberment or both that would no doubt inevitably follow.
He was glad to see that Fatespeaker wasn’t going in the direction of his father’s lab. Mastermind was surely sleeping like the rest of the tribe, but Starflight didn’t want to risk encountering him — or get any closer to the things he’d seen in there.
Every once in a while, as they walked, they heard a quiet snore from the rooms they were passing. But they saw no one awake. No guards anywhere.
“I guess they’re used to not needing guards,” Starflight whispered. “Since no other tribe could find this place, they were always safe from attack.” He thought for a minute. “And even now that they might be attacked, they only need to post guards at the tunnel.”
“I’m surprised everyone is asleep, though,” Fatespeaker whispered back. “I always thought being a NightWing meant you wanted to be awake all night. I mean, that’s true of me. I can never wake up in the morning, but once it’s dark, I’m full of energy. Does that happen to you? I really thought that was a NightWing thing. But maybe my friends are right and I’m just weird.” She kicked a rock sticking out of a crack in the floor.
“Or maybe it is a NightWing thing and they’re all muddled here because they can’t really see the night sky anymore,” Starflight said. “Maybe you’re more of a NightWing than any of them.”
She fluttered her wings, looking skeptical.
“As for me, I lived in a cave with no sky most of my life, so I was on whatever schedule our guardians told us to be. But once we were free … well, it’s been a strange few weeks, so it’s hard to say. But I do feel more alive when the stars are out. Does that make sense?”
“It does,” she said, smiling at him. She paused at an intersection, thinking, and then purposefully turned right.
“Are we going somewhere?” he asked her.
“Did you see the part of the fortress that collapsed?” she asked. “I want to see what it looks like from inside.”