Rapacity

Rapacity fluttered from her hammock to the packed dirt floor of her lair, a more difficult move since a malevolent spell turned her wings to tendrils. In the dark behind her, Indolence's snores sputtered and stopped. Hoping he'd go back to sleep, Rapacity padded through the lair's main tunnel to the entrance. A sea breeze rustled through Cherry's crops as it chased wisps of clouds across the stars.

This was a vegetable garden, not the night pollinator garden Rapacity's first family tended. No still and silent fae lay dead among crushed flowers.

A loud yawn announced that she'd been followed. Indolence, a green fae even smaller than Rapacity, flopped down on the landing area's pink sand and curled his tail around Rapacity's waist in a lazy attempt to draw her down with him. "Bad dreams again?"

"You know they were." Although Rapacity let Indolence pull her onto the soft sand, she lay on her back to keep the stars in full sight. He'd chosen his new name well. She wasn't so sure about her own.

"Was it the battle?"

"In a way."

She'd dreamed of another terrifying war in the dark, waged not among fae clanmembers like the night Rapacity left her first clan and lost all chance of Exaltation, but among the many species of Clan Castoff. The dragons fought in the air like they had that night, clawing and spinning through a cavern too impossibly huge for Clan Castoff's newly dug home. The night had still reeked of fear and dragon blood. But when the battle spilled onto the ledge outside, her family's night garden grew in Cherry's vegetable patch.

And... "I dreamed I had to kill Knavery."

Indolence snorted. "Good luck with that. Was she leading the coup this time?"

In Rapacity's nightmares, she frequently did. "She's the one I'd least like to fight."

"Your mind is cruel." Indolence snatched a moth out of the night air and used his tail to pass it to Rapacity. "She protects you every day you go exploring."

Which gave her plenty of opportunities to assassinate Rapacity. If she said that, Indolence would call her paranoid. "It's a nightmare. It doesn't have to make sense."

"Eat." Indolence poked her with a toe claw. "You'll feel better in the morning if you eat and sleep."

Rapacity munched on the moth and watched the stars while Indolence snored beside her. This moth tasted sour compared to the ones her family's garden had attracted.

Only one thing would make her feel better: her cousin, the Firewatch clan usurper, lying broken beneath her. A common solution to a common enough problem, but still, the one her heart called for. And not because of what the usurper did to the matriarch, either.

Even with the beautiful moonlit ocean spread out below her tonight, the most infuriating part was what'd happened to the farming families like Rapacity's. They would've been doing what they did no matter who was in charge, and the usurper still didn't see fit to spare them.

However, her old clan had enough dragons to bury her new clan, despite how many they'd lost in the coup. Rapacity wasn't ready to risk her new family avenging her old one. Not until she had the numbers and skilled fighters to win, anyway. Of all the things Rapacity desired, revenge would be the sweetest.