The blue star-shaped sapphire glinted in his talons with a tiny inner spark of its own light.
He’d only ever read about these. There were supposedly three of them in the world, all lost — all created hundreds of years ago by a SandWing animus dragon.
A dreamvisitor.
He closed his claws around it.
With this, he could see his friends again.
“Starflight?” Fatespeaker called.
“Coming,” he said. He couldn’t risk anyone finding the dreamvisitor and taking it from him. Not even Fatespeaker could know about it.
He put it in his mouth, tucked down between his teeth and his scales, and pressed his tongue over it.
On the way back to the dormitory, Fatespeaker asked why he was so quiet, but he just shook his head and mumbled that he was tired. She shrugged and headed off to her own bed once they were back inside.
Starflight pulled out the rough blanket he’d been given and arranged it so he could huddle underneath it. The heavy brown fabric caught on his horns and smelled like smoke, but it would keep him hidden from any eyes that might still be awake. He cupped the dreamvisitor in his talons and stared at it, trying to remember if he’d read anything about how they worked.
Perhaps I just think of the dragon whose dreams I want to visit?
Surely Sunny would be asleep right now, in the middle of the night. If he remembered right, he should be able to step into whatever she was already dreaming about — and if she were in the deepest level of dreamsleep, she’d see him and they could talk to each other. But if her sleep was shallow or uneasy, he might be able to see in, but she wouldn’t know he was really there. And if she were awake, it wouldn’t work at all, of course.
He closed his eyes and pictured Sunny — her laugh that made everyone else laugh, too, her flares of temper that vanished as quickly as they came, her small claws and fierce protective face, her scales like rippled sunshine, the way she looked like no other dragon on Pyrrhia. If she were here, she’d know exactly what to say about his father. She’d tell him what to tell the NightWings about Glory, and how to talk them out of hurting RainWings, forever.
But no matter how hard he concentrated, his mind stayed firmly in the NightWing dormitory instead of finding her dreams.
Maybe she was awake. Maybe she was in the rainforest somewhere, looking at the moons and wondering if he was looking at them, too.
He tried Glory next, then Clay, then Tsunami. Nothing happened. He couldn’t reach any of them.
Starflight squeezed the dreamvisitor between his claws, grinding his teeth. This had to work. Unless it wasn’t really a dreamvisitor, but it certainly looked like one.
Try a RainWing. They’re always asleep.
The first RainWing who came to mind was Kinkajou, the little dragonet Glory had rescued from the NightWings. Starflight focused on her enormous dark eyes and quick-changing scales. He pressed the dreamvisitor to his forehead, praying that this would work.
And suddenly he was perched on a branch in the rainforest.
Starflight took a deep, relieved breath, but he still inhaled the smoke of the dormitory. He could see the rainforest, but he couldn’t smell it, unfortunately for him.
Kinkajou was curled on a giant leaf beside him with her eyes closed. There was a bandage of soft leaves and moss wrapped around one of her wings, and piles of red and yellow and purple fruits all around her, like offerings to a statue. Her scales were a strangely pale shade of blue in the moonlight, and she breathed shallowly, as if even in her sleep she knew a deeper breath would make something hurt.
“What happened to you?” Starflight wondered aloud, but she didn’t wake up.
He turned to find another dragon staring right through him. For a startled, terrifying moment, Starflight thought the dragon could see him, but then he realized she was just watching Kinkajou. She was old, older than any of the guardians or queens he’d met so far, and she had that royal elegance about her that he’d noticed Greatness lacking.
Starflight turned back to Kinkajou. How could he get inside her dreams? He looked down at the dreamvisitor and remembered pressing it to his own forehead. Carefully he leaned over and rested the sapphire between Kinkajou’s eyes.
The first time he tried, he nearly fell right through her; since he wasn’t really there, he couldn’t touch her or anything around her. But when he tried a second time, holding the dreamvisitor where he thought it should go, he felt a thrum of energy radiate from Kinkajou through the jewel to him and back again, and then he saw what she saw.