Wings of Evolution (WoF AU)

Chapter 6

Echo of the sky

After a few days at the base, Uhar was starting to pick up more of the language, enough that he could have a semi understandable conversation with Blaze's two guards. He learned a lot about Desolation and Claw as the days trickled by and Cactus prepared to take him to some other base.

First was that neither was particularly happy about being assigned to this out-of-the-way job with Blaze. Uhar wasn't quite sure what the job was, but he was increasingly sure that it wasn't very important as Claw droned on about his brother who was probably off getting glory in battle and Desolation tried increasingly hard to get transferred.

Des was pretty ticked at Cactus for being the one to find Uhar and therefore the one who got to "leave this cursed dump."

Neither complained within earshot of Blaze though. They constantly remarked upon her beauty. Personally, Uhar didn't really see it, sandwing definition of beauty must be different from Kiaen definition. Either that or they were trying to suck up to the Queen, though after asking Cactus, it was confirmed that apparently the entire kingdom of Sand agreed that Blaze was beautiful.

She knew it too. Which made dealing with Blaze a pain. She was obsessed with all things pretty, she chose her guards based on aesthetic appeal, always two male and one female, and she had it in her head that if she was seen in 'public' with anything less, that she would literally die.

After the first two days, Uhar almost wanted to strangle her as she commented on his blood again. What kind of creature found blood aesthetically pleasing? Blaze apparently, and she was a Queen.

He found a lot of things strange as the sandwings tried to explain them to him. Apparently there were three queens of the sandwings, their mother having been killed quite gruesomely some years earlier. None had been able to quite claim the throne though, since the world was already at a war. So they all called themselves queen and tried to muck up as much support as they could, fighting their respective battles.

At that point, Uhar's brain exploded as they tried to tell him the alliances of every single tribe, the number of which was far too many by his count. As far as he could tell, there was too much happening all at once for him to get it.

Eventually, the day came when finally, Cactus felt ready to go 'off into the world.' Blaze didn't seem to think that Cactus would come back, so she sent with her a request for a new female guard. Uhar had been ready since arriving, so by the time Cactus finally announced her preparedness, he was already halfway out the door.

They flew for hours, passing heaps of sand as Cactus chatted at him. Eventually the land beneath them greened as they neared a river, which shouldn't have seemed odd to Uhar, but it was plenty odd since he'd never seen a river out in the open before. Cactus didn't look twice at it, only modifying her speech a bit to mention how there was a city further upriver where her cousin had met his girlfriend.

Uhar was fine with not going to said city, he still could barely breathe with only knowing four giant dragons. He knew that no matter what he did that number would grow, but really, did they have to be so big?

"Yeah, these days not knowing at least three dragons from a different tribe is weird. I guess the war unites the tribes. Though its sort of weird to know some skywings personally." Cactus went on. When had she started talking about this? Uhar felt a little embarrassed that her talking had become sort of a background noise. "Although rainwings are the weird ones, I heard that just seven years ago they were the most useless tribe ever, but then they got invaded and now no one really knows what to make of them."