Light Me Up

ok ok I know I said this would be a oneshot but it turned into an eight chapter fic so here I am
* Avalanche and Flame-centric
* giving the villains backstories? dragons who love them? eternal relationships that will last no matter what the aforementioned villain does? sign me up
never fear, I am writing this in Google Docs
== Blurb ==
tba
== Compassion ==
Ever since her hatching, Avalanche has known that the only kind of love is to her tribe.
She learns to fly without any assistance, tossing herself into a wind-buffeted sky and figuring out how to catch the currents. Avalanche’s first memory is flapping her wings furiously as she tried to stay aloft, a tiny dragonet etched against the billowing sunset clouds, her fathers watching impassively from the rock cliff behind her. They didn’t help. They couldn’t help. That isn’t the SkyWing way.
She grows up without friends. It is not a lonely life, but perhaps an isolated one. Throughout her school years at a military camp, Avalanche always trains alone, whirling and jabbing her spear at invisible enemies conjured up by her fervent mind. She likes this way of life, she tells herself, between slashes of her talons at the practice dummy bleeding feathers all over the dusty floor. She likes it. She likes it. She can’t dislike it. Her loneliness is weakness. Her fearlessness is strength.
The dragonets that get hurt are the weak ones. Their wings get torn or their legs twist, and then they’re sobbing in pain as they’re thrown out of the camp. Avalanche watches them go, her helmet slipping down in front of her eyes.
The leaders teach them to harness their powers, to blast fire as they soar through the air. Try as she might, Avalanche never truly manages to master that skill. Her breath weapon is powerful, almost too powerful, sparking with energy and almost painfully warm. The fire she produces burns ferociously. It almost scares her.
She makes a friend, a young orange dragonet with big eyes and bigger dreams. For a few days, they sit in clearings together after practices, and he talks about a world without war where the tribes live side by side. His talon gestures are quick and energetic, the same way he runs or flies or fights (even though he hates fights). Avalanche’s first friend. Maybe even more than that.
One day, he breaks down in the middle of the bunkhouse. An anxiety attack, triggered by the cadets’ loud voices as they squabbled over the last rabbit. The lieutenant takes him away. Avalanche doesn’t see him again.
She never even learned his name. She hadn’t bothered asking.
The whirlwinds that tear through the air of the Sky Kingdom mirror the speed of the next few years of Avalanche’s life. She graduates from the military academy at the exact middle of her class. Her fathers nod to her, tell her how much potential she has. And then she is stationed at the SkyWing palace, guarding the heart of her kingdom. 
It’s a good, calm job. Solid pay. Not much happens while Avalanche works there. She has never been a particularly bloodthirsty dragon (despite her prickly personality), preferring to support the war from behind the scenes instead, so the role of palace guard suits her well. Her life rolls along steadily.
Until, one day, it careens out of control.
Avalanche is standing guard outside Queen Scarlet’s palace, her spear planted in the dirt. It’s a clear, blue, cloudless day, perfect for flying. Like any self-respecting SkyWing, she itches to soar through the air, feel the wind brush her wings, but no. She has to stay still. She has to stay strong.
And then a rust-colored dragon blasts out of the palace doors and sweeps off into the sky, two tiny shapes trailing after her.
“Follow her!” howls a wild voice from behind Avalanche. The queen herself, dripping with gold, flares her wings and shoots off in exhilarated pursuit of the first dragon. Avalanche exchanges a confused look with her fellow guard, then beats her wings and swoops in their wake.
They climb higher, higher, twisting through the clouds. The wind whistles like an otherworldly being in Avalanche’s ears. Occasionally Queen Scarlet yells taunting jibes at the first dragon: “You have to land at some point, Kestrel!” “The dragonets won’t be able to fly for much longer, Kestrel!”
Finally, after a few minutes of heated pursuit, the paler dragonet goes limp and drops like a stone. Kestrel lets out a sort of primal cry and darts after it. Everyone else follows.
They land with solid thumps on the ground, their wings sounding like thunderclaps over the sound of the burbling river. Kestrel has her wing tented over the paler dragonet, which is shaking weakly, and whispering something in its ear. The brighter dragonet shuffles its feet nervously, standing about a tail-length away.
The Queen laughs, a cruel sound, a knife being dragged across a whetstone and sending sparks flying. “You thought you could get away, Kestrel?”
The two tiny dragonets shudder in unison as their mother bares her teeth.
“You’ve been… disobedient, Kestrel,” Queen Scarlet tells her, saccharine honey coating her voice. She steps forward, closer and closer, until she is face to face with the traitor. “You ran from me, you tried to hide from me. You know disobedience is the worst crime in the Sky Kingdom, Kestrel. This deserves punishment, does it not?”
Avalanche is frozen for a moment. When Queen Scarlet’s lantern-yellow eyes cut toward her, she realizes what to do and nods fervently. The other guard, Osprey, does the same.
Queen Scarlet flexes her claws, sliding them into the bright green grass. For the first time, Avalanche is struck with just how sharp they were. 
“Kill one of them,” she hisses at Kestrel, her words shattering the silence. “Kill one of your dragonets, and I will clear you of your disobedience. If not, well…” She raises her claws and observes them absent-mindedly, turning them this way and that. The light glints off the curves. Beautiful. Deadly.
Kestrel remains motionless. The water roars hungrily behind her.
Then she lunges for the paler dragonet, snaps its neck, and throws it into the river.
It was fast, so fast that if Avalanche had blinked for just a second too long, she would have missed it. Missed this life-altering event. Her eyes are stuck on the place where an innocent dragonet had been shivering two moments ago. And now it wasn’t.
Would never again.
Kestrel watches the peach-colored wing sink beneath the waves like the sun at the end of the day, then turns back to Scarlet. Her jaw is set in determination, but her eyes hold boundless pain.
“He’s gone,” Kestrel says, her voice brittle. “Now, let me and my other dragonet go.”
Queen Scarlet clicks her tongue and shakes her head. “Giving orders to the queen? I’m afraid I won’t stand for that. In fact… I don’t think I’ll stand for you anymore, either.”
Her face goes as cold and hard as a marble statue, her eyes two jeweled slits. A horrible smile slices across her face as she turns to Avalanche and Osprey and speaks three words.
“Kill them both.”
The guards’ hesitation could have cost them their lives too. Avalanche is frozen in horror, watching the scene play out before her eyes. She stays in place for just a moment too long. Then Queen Scarlet’s order washes through her like icy water, and she darts at Kestrel and the dragonet.
Kestrel lunges for her dragonet and wraps her talons around her torso. She leaps off the ground and twists into the air. Avalanche races after her.
A terrifying sizzling sound rises from the traitor’s scales, and Kestrel cries out. Smoke wreathes her head. And then the dragonet is tumbling through the sky, flapping her wings furiously but only falling.
Avalanche dives toward the dragonet, an instinct telling her to catch her, but a furious roar shakes the sky and stops her in her tracks. Above her, Kestrel roars in pain again, and Avalanche spots a fresh burn on her face. In the shape of a talon-print. Does that mean-
The dragonet hits the ground with a yelp and curls up, shaking with pain. Around her, the grass shrivels up and wilts. Queen Scarlet looms over her like a menacing shadow in red, the cruel smile still slashed across her face. “How… thrilling,” she croons, watching the dragonet’s copper-burnished scales emit weak puffs of smoke.
Avalanche looks back toward the sky just in time to see Kestrel fleeing. The traitor shoots a look full of miserable despair back at them. And then she’s gone, a flicker over the mountains, fading quickly into the clouds.
“Your name is Peril, little scrap,” Queen Scarlet says to the dragonet. The hollow look in the little SkyWing’s bright blue eyes is far too intense for her age. “Your mother abandoned you. She is not worth pursuing. You, my champion, belong to me now.”
Peril looks, frankly, completely terrified. Shivering on the ground, her wings splayed out at odd angles, she comes off as hopelessly pathetic. But Avalanche doesn’t miss the way Queen Scarlet steps back when Peril tries to get up, or the way the rushing river itself seems to have slowed.
Avalanche lifts her head and traces Kestrel’s fading figure, feeling something she’s never felt before, odd and angry and melancholy all at the same time.
== Hope ==
== Trust ==
== Warmth ==
== Faith ==
== Devotion ==
== Justice ==
== Love ==
Category:Fanfictions
Category:Fanfictions (Incomplete)
Category:Fanfictions (Canon)
Category:Content (Stardust the IceWing-RainWing)