In the egg, he hears something. Something not heard by any dragon for hundreds of years. He doesn’t know how special that is until later, but he is very special. He follows the call, and he finds that he can crack the walls around him. As he does, he finds a beautiful face, looking at him with ultimate affection. This must be his mother. Her scales are a deep black, with purples and greens hidden underneath.

A father-like figure is standing next to her. His scales are a vibrant pink, with waves of bold yellow, specks of purple flickered all over. He knows immediately that he is not his father, due to his own scales matching that of his mothers’. He will love him anyway.

The mother picks him up and strokes his head. “My little baby…” even without changing scales, he knows she is proud. He hears it in her head. The baby is silent. It is clear he just wants to be loved, as most babies do.

“Your name is Wish, OK?” She says to him. He doesn’t understand all too well, but he repeats the sounds.

“Wiss!” He squeaks. “Iss me Wiss!”

The colorful dragon smiles, and his scales turn almost pure purple. “He’s so smart. He’ll be wonderful.”

The mother smacks him with her tail. “Don’t be too proud. He’s not yours.”

“Just stating facts, that’s all.” He defends.

“Wiss iss vewy smawt!” The baby proudly claims.

 

* * *

Wish walks slowly in the corner of the vine- woven room, and when his target comes close, he pounces! “AHA!” he shouts. “I found you, spy!” he says, a tiny bit monotone.

“Toads! Now how will I get this SUPER SECRET MESSAGE to the queen?” Willpower speaks, holding out a scroll. He’s even worse at acting than Wish.

“Oh, secret message?” says Wish. He snaps it out of Willpower’s hand. This is where his acting meets its peak. He reads it and says, “You spy, you must have delivered the wrong message!”

“What do you mean?” says Willpower in his super not-acting voice.

“This scroll reads of making peace between the MudWing and RainWing tribes! Your tribe would never want to have peace!”

“Why, I don’t see why you don’t want peace, being a lazy RainWing.” says Willpower.

“Of course I want peace! My teachers made me study SO MUCH MORE!”

“Then we should have peace.” Willpower says. Then suddenly his acting gets kicked up twenty billion notches. “You deliver this to your queen, and I’ll say to mine that the subjects will convince her to agree!”

“I do agree!”

The two friends take off their costumes and bow to the audience. They just finished a play describing the very very very old RainWing-MudWing war.

“Man, this broken wing is KILLING me.” Willpower says out loud. “If I could just have it sit comfortably on my back, but nooooo, the doctors tell me to constantly move and exercise it! How is that supposed to make it better!” He looks over his shoulder at the very small and disformed appendage.

“Dude, they’re professionals. They know how things heal.” Wish assures him. “Besides, I’d like it if your wing just suddenly starts healing until it grows to a completely normal size. Probably not gonna happen.”

A silent moment passes, and suddenly, Willpower starts screaming. His wing starts throbbing and flowing, and it slowly turns into a larger wing. All the while making Willpower suffer. “It hurts!! MAKE IT STOP, IT’S TOO MUCH PAIN!!” He groans and whines and rolls on the floor.

The play directors head behind the curtain to see what the noise is all about. They see him on the floor and look at Wish with fearful eyes.

Wish looks back with even more fear. “I have no idea how this has happened. I was just talking to him, and he started screaming.” They took him away in a mobile bed. Even though the wing stopped moving, he was still screaming.

It was like a haze, life moving a mile a minute. Before I knew it, I was sitting before the queen.

“So…” She starts slowly. Queen Pansy isn’t that old, she’s only three years older than Wish. Her scales are not bristling, not changing, she is keeping them  a cool, dark purple. “You did… something. Something that should have never happened.”

Wish was shaking really hard, which he did NOT like, because it was VERY RUDE to be SHIVERING in front of the QUEEN of TWO TRIBES. “I- I don’t know what I did.” He says truthfully. “I was just t-talking to my friend, then his wing started acting weird.”

“Don’t worry, he’s going to be fine.” The queen says. “His wing has stopped acting up, and it looks like you actually healed it.” Queen Pansy stepped down from her throne and headed over to the study. “Our scrolls only have ancient records of behavior like that. It’s called animus magic.” She starts picking out scrolls and putting them back. “Oh, here’s the story of Kinkajou, and her defeat of Darkstalker. Very famous scroll.” She nods at him. He doesn’t know what to do, so he just follows her. “Aha, here. Jerboa, she was the one who decided that animus magic was too dangerous to have. She destroyed it like it was a candle holder.” Then she spun to face him. “You have picked it up somehow.”

Wish was stunned. “Me?” Wish squeaks. “I’m not special. Not me, just your average everyday NightWing, no. No. I can’t be THAT special. I’m only five!”

“Kinkajou was five when she ended Darkstalker’s reign.” Queen Pansy said calmly. “And she wasn’t magic. DARKSTALKER was magic, if anything, he made himself invulnerable to any other spells that weren’t his. You. Are. Magic.”

He couldn’t believe it. He’d been waiting for something like this for his entire life. This wasn’t a cruel joke, that he could tell by the fact that the queen was also kinda freaking out, at least in her head.

“If you are an animus, then you should be able to cast virtually any spell. Try this.” She tosses him a scroll. “Tell it to turn into a frog.”

“WHAT?” Wish exclaims.

“How about a mango? Just tell it to change.”

Wish gave her a look with wide disbelieving eyes. “Um, hey scroll. Could you maybe turn into a flower?” He watched as the scroll stayed a scroll. And then proceeded to stay a scroll for longer. And it never changed.

The queen looked at him. “You have to have more confidence, and be more specific. Try a large yellow flower.”

Wish gulped, and began to speak a command. “Scroll. Turn into a large yellow flower this instant.” And a second after he stopped, it started flowing and growing until it split petals, and soon he was holding a beautiful flower, with tendrils and vines flowing off the side of his hand.

“Woah.” Wish turned it and examined it. “It’s… IT’S JUST A WASTED VALUABLE PIECE OF HISTORY!!”

Immediately, Queen Pansy burst out into laughter. “Oh, no. That one was a fictional story. It was in terrible condition anyway, and we have much better copies of it at Jade Mountain Academy.”

“Oh.” Wish said. “Oooooooh.” He began to look around. Wondering, what else can I do?

“Now, we know for sure. Come with me.” She started off into a different room, then flew down from the Queen room. Down, down, down into the forest’s branches. She stopped at a house a while from the ground, and hopped inside. “We must be sure that you aren’t going to lose your soul.”

“Excuse me, what?!” Wish said. “THAT SEEMS IRRELEVANT.”

Queen Pansy turned to him. “It is entirely relevant. How do you think Darkstalker became evil? He kept making up his own rules about what counted as evil, and what was justified evil. Why do you think Jerboa decided to destroy magic? Her mother had forgotten what it was to feel empathy for other dragons, she only ever cared for her daughter, and even then it wasn’t real love.”

Wish didn’t know what to say. His mouth just started flopping around like a seal had just appeared out of thin air and asked him for a swim. After a while, he finally found words that made sense. “So, what do I do to save myself?” He asks.

Queen Pansy throws an earring at him. “Repeat after me. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I enchant this earring to protect my soul, that I cannot cast any spells that will be selfish or greedy. Or that I could kill or injure any living creature. That my soul will be preserved as long as I wear this earring.”

Wish repeated those words, and the earring twinkled at him. It was rather plain, it was simply a golden circle with a little sphere at the bottom.

“Now put it on.” commanded the queen. Wish took the earring and clipped it to his ear. He felt a little different. Like a metal band had been wrapped around his claws. It wasn’t heavy, more like a little annoyance. “You look splendid.” Said the queen. “Now to see if it worked.”

Queen Pansy handed him a small talonful of gold. “Enchant it to be doubled.”

“Hey coins! I want more!” Wish yelled at them. They proceeded to do nothing. Then they had a good time doing some more nothing, followed by even more nothing.

“Okay, greed is doing fine… How about selfishness? Think of a dragon you hate.” Queen Pansy said.

Wish thought for a bit. Then he kept thinking. Then he thought some more. Then he followed up with some more thinking. “I don’t know if I hate anyone. I mean, everyone does good and bad things, right?”

The queen stopped walking so that they were side-to-side with each other. THE QUEEN. QUEEN PANSY. AND WISH. LIKE THEY WERE EQUALS OR SOMETHING. He felt little butterflies in his chest when she did, then those butterflies started feeling like fireworks as she put her wing around him.

“That is very wise, Wish. But for now think of someone who does the MOST mistakes. Even if they also make a lot of good choices, the most bad things.”

That took a lot less thinking. “That would be Pine.”

“Now, I want you to say out loud to summon him here.” Queen Pansy said.

“Bring me Pine the RainWing. To this room.” There was a flash, followed by a pop, and a very bored looking RainWing was sitting in front of him. Apparently at that moment he was doing nothing, thank goodness.

He looked around, confused, saw the queen, and bowed. “Your majesty, who- how-”

“Now, say that all his mistakes shall be washed away like mud in a river.” Wish said as commanded, and nothing seemed to change. Pine was even more confused, and the queen told Wish to send him back. “All right, you cannot do selfish things.”

Then it hit him. “Wait, I don’t even want to try to kill!” Wish exclaimed.

“I know, just don’t think about it. Just let the words come out.” Queen Pansy said. “Now, kill this ant. It’s rather obnoxious and it won’t come off.” the queen pointed to a little speck on her neck, wiggling a little. “Also, don’t think of it as innocent. It’s hurting your queen!”

“Oh! I want that ant to die!” Wish spilled out quickly. After a minute, he peered at the queen’s neck. It was still moving, trying to reach under her scales.

“Great! The earring is working, so,” Queen Pansy pinched the ant and yanked, only succeeding in making the little devil try harder. She sighed. “You can go home now and do normal dragon stuff.”

OH NO! He had entirely forgotten! “That ant shall fall off your neck now!” Wish said in a hurry. “Ack! I forgot I’m supposed to be at my Human Studies now! Goodbye your majesty!”

Wish hurried out the door and looked around, trying to find his way to his class from where he was right now. Not seeing ANYTHING useful, he decided it would be best to fly above the canopy and get a good look from up there.

Using what he learned in flight class last year,  he spiraled up, up, up, and up out of the leaves. Looking around frantically, he saw the cliff where he studies. Brown soil lined the bottom, with sharp, gray rocks jutting out of the ground, and going up quite a while before toning back into a casual plateau.

He roams the dirt for a bit before finding the cavern where the classes are held. He ran down the halls as fast as his dangly little legs would take him, and upon finding his class, the teacher had just begun teaching. “You’re late” He says monotone.

“Uh, yeah. Sorry.”

“Is Willpower with you?” The teacher asks.

Wish suddenly goes pale. “No. He isn’t.” He says truthfully without giving out what happened to him. If the Jade Mountain Academy staff found out about his condition, SURELY Wish would be expelled. Maybe even from the Sky Kingdom ENTIRELY!!

Some dragons would do that, right? Because Wish is pretty sure the Sky Queen is evil, and even if she wasn’t she would banish him out of fear of what he could do.

With that, Wish knew what he was going to use for his next spell.

And then, a gasp from the dragon next to him. Oh no. Marmoset. DON’T YOU DARE. Wish thought ferociously at the underweight NightWing. THIS SECRET IS NOT YOURS TO SHARE. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?

But- BUT- She thought, looking like she understood the topic that the teacher was teaching. That magic shouldn’t EXIST! Dragons should KNOW! Right now Wish wanted to collapse the cave on her. A twinkle from the earring hinted that the spell was canceled because that was violent. You COULD though! You COULD COLLAPSE THIS CAVE ON ALL OF US!

Didn’t you hear my other thoughts? Wish said, simultaneously raising his hand. He answered the question in human, even though he always got the “L”s wrong. Dragons would HATE me! YOU already hate me! NOW you also FEAR me! That’s not what I want! Then Marmoset faced Wish.

Do you think I want to hate you? She thought. I don’t! You just are super weird sometimes! Then all the moments that Wish had made her uncomfortable flashed through both their heads. Something stood out though.

I- haven’t chewed on leaves since I was two. He thought at her. I haven’t made a single potty joke since I was three. And I don’t even remember licking my own hind talons! I must’ve been not even one! He gagged at the thought of it. I’ve had to be more mature in order to stay in school! Dragonethood immaturity is behind me! He turned back to the teacher. Mostly to avoid eye contact with Marmoset.

Why haven’t you seen my change? I’ve seen you change! You change every day! He sent her images of her when she was immature, and then the next day when she was more mature. A loud noise scared them out of their conversation.

“Class dismissed! Have a good day!”

They talked a lot on the way back to their houses. Nearly forgetting the fact that Wish has a SUPER BIG SECRET. Turns out that they had a lot in common.

“Goodbye,” Wish said to her as they split ways. He pushed her with his wing. She pushed him back. Then they headed home. Wish was trying to keep his mind on the good parts of the day. But every time he did, the pressure of being an animus settled on him. He can’t do this, he can’t think of that, gotta be careful of what I think around which dragons. Rules, restrictions, more rules, and more.

He almost didn’t notice when a guest appeared at his home.