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NOCTURNE

"It's complete rubbish."

"It is not. Our powers have to come from somewhere. What, you think it's just an inexplicable ability that we gained from being hatched under the magical moonrays?"

"No, but I think what's going on isn't analogous to 'time snakes interweaving themselves' or whatever it is you're trying to say."

Timeleaper let out a half sigh, half growl. He cast a snide scowl to Serenity, the dragon he'd been arguing with, and circled to the other side of the chalkboard. The poor dragon had been trying to explain himself to the three other dragons for the past half hour now, and if the futures were any indication, he'd end up leaving this meeting thoroughly disappointed.

Nocturne lowered her head to the floor, starting to feel the slightest twinge of impatience grow inside of her. Why couldn't she have grown up in the middle of a war? Her powers could have been useful, then. She could have led armies, won battles, protected villages. But instead, her powers were completely wasted in virtue of fact that the future was pretty much guaranteed to be boring and peaceful and simple no matter what she did. The most exciting thing she foresaw happening in her lifetime was the RainWings inventing a rich, brown, butter-like substance made from the cocoa bean.

Good times create weak dragons, she mused pessimistically. All the Queen's seers, bereft of anything productive that they could do, were tasked by Queen Nebula herself with "progressing our understanding of the art of clairvoyance." Or, as Nocturne liked to put it, "becoming insufferable pseudo-intellectuals." They spent their entire postmidnights in a lecture hall filled with potted trees and chalkboards, contemplating questions surrounding the philosophy of the future: What exactly do seer powers mean? Where do they come from? How fated are the prophecies, and what meaning do they actually have if they're not destined to come true? It was all nebulous pedantry, hidden under the guise of productivity because the conversations were being had by scholars.

But as much as Nocturne hated to admit it, she was one of them. She woke up every evening with the begrudging acceptance that while she found nothing in these conversations that would actually prove to be useful in the long run, she did at least find them entertaining.

Timeleaper was illustrating his fourth-dimension theory. He believed that time was a dimension, just like the three dimensions of space, and that seers had their power primarily because the path of their future bent through "spacetime" and "intersected itself." The points of intersection were points in the seer's life where they caught glimpses of the future. That was why he had drawn his interweaving time snakes on the chalkboard. They represented dragon lives. Lives, according to him, traced a path, with each point on the path being a point in their life: the points near the beginning of the path represented their life as a dragonet, and the points near the end of the path represented their life as an old dragon. For most dragons, this path was straight and smooth, like a line. Seer dragons, however, were a big jumbled knot. Many of the threads bent and twisted, causing the path to cross itself. When a seer dragon came across an intersection in her path through spacetime, she would see the future that was intersecting her life at the present moment.

It had been clear by the faces of her coworkers that this theory was going right over their heads.

"Nocturne, help me out," Timeleaper requested, taking a seat on one of the cushions and sulking. "You see what I'm trying to say here, don't you?"

"Yeah, I think I do," Nocturne answered. "You're interpreting dragons as four-dimensional: our lives are stretched out along the axis of time."

"Right, exactly!" he answered. "We're time snakes slithering through the universe along the temporal axis. Why can't all you other eggheads understand that?"

"Probably because it doesn't work," Nocturne quickly replied.

"What? Why not?" Timeleaper suddenly grew concernedly interested. That might have been one of the reasons Nocturne both enjoyed and despised these silly conversations: the other seers had a great amount of respect for her. They listened to her. They knew that she was smarter than them, and a better seer than them, and that if she had an objection to something they said then it was going to be a good objection worth considering. It made her feel appreciated. But it also reminded her that she was surrounded by lesser minds.

"First," she began, "even if we grant that time is another dimension, it's still a matter of fact that it's only one dimension. There are some mathematicians at this university who study knots. As it turns out, they've found that one-dimensional knots like the ones you show here don't actually exist. Which makes sense if you think about it: don't you need all three spatial dimensions to tie a string?"

Timeleaper glanced back at his drawing and pondered for a second. "Okay, so maybe it's not a perfect metaphor, but still —"

"Second," Nocturne went on, "all of us are currently existing at the same time. But this theory of yours suggests that each of our times are distinct from one another. It's almost as if we live in different realities, each one moving and weaving on its own."

"Well, that's — uh …." Timeleaper froze for a second, his mouth clamped shut in thought. Then, he sputtered, "You see, there's time, and then there's time."

"Third," Nocturne said, completely disinterested in whatever justification he had to give to keep his hypothesis afloat, "and this is the most problematic of my objections: your theory suggests that there's only one future: the one traced out ahead of us, exactly as you drew it."

"Wait, what's the problem with that?" Timeleaper asked, this time much more confidently. "There only is one future."

Nocturne was flabbergasted into a thoughtful stillness. She never thought that the notion that there were multiple futures was something that she would ever have to explain. Remarkably enough, the two other NightWings with them — Serenity and Deepseeker — gave her perplexed looks as well, as if she were the one who had said something unusual.

"Oh, come on," Nocturne said, her frills along her spine standing straight. "We seers should be more aware of this fact than anyone."

"I am," Serenity said hesitantly in that small voice that acutely matched her size. "As a seer, I feel quite aware of the fact that there's only one future."

"Our visions show us a world that is destined to happen," Deepseeker argued, his voice frail and deep and elderly. "Is this not proof enough of a fixed future? The only thing that seems to have the potential to change it is our awareness of it."

"Poppycock," Nocturne quickly said, her nose upturned. "Perhaps your lesser powers blind you from the truth more than they help lead you to it. I'll have you know with certainty that there are multiple futures. I've seen them. I can see them now."

"And do tell, Nocturne, what you make of those futures that never happened." Deepseeker shifted in his cushion. He was a large, old dragon: laying on his pillow, he looked as if he might have been hiding a small hoard of ancient gold beneath him. He was wise in his old age, and one of the only dragons that found poignant moments where he could gracefully dismantle Nocturne's occasional misguided argument. He went on, saying, "If your powers pointed you to a future that never saw the light of day or the dark of night, was that not a false future? Was it not a future that never happened?"

"Of course it was a future that never happened," Nocturne answered, impatience beginning to ebb into her tone. "But that doesn't mean it was a future that couldn't have happened."

"Yes, you're right," Deepseeker said. "That future could have happened. But it didn't. I could tell you a million false stories about The Scorching, all of which could have happened, but that doesn't make those false stories any more meaningful. And it certainly doesn't mean that there are multiple pasts."

Nocturne's eye twitched. "The future hasn't happened yet," she said. "That's something the past doesn't have going for it. The past is fixed: I can't control it. But the future is dynamic: I can control it. I can choose to leave this discussion early, for example, and fly off to the library. Or, I can stay here and continue arguing with you. Right now, the library choice is winning."

Deepseeker chuckled a bit. "It surprises me that a seer as strong as you still adheres to such a folly," he said. "Yes, in some sense, the choice is yours. But the choice you make is inevitable. If you choose to stay, then you must have chosen to stay. If you choose to leave, then you must have chosen to leave. The choice you will make is just as true now as it will be in the future, after you've made it. This is what makes clairvoyance possible: if the choices that our fellow dragons make aren't fated to happen, then the visions we have of their choices would have no grounded meaning in reality."

If Nocturne's choice wasn't fated from the beginning, it was fated now. She rose to her feet and exited the lecture hall without another word. The others stayed silent until she was out of ear's reach.

The topic stuck to her mind like a bloodthirsty leech as she flew away. She felt like it took her entire body to disagree with the other seers as strongly as she did. Were they just misguided? That had to have been it. It wasn't that they were complete idiots; it was that they were weak seers. Their minds didn't have the same level of omniscience towards the future that hers did. They only saw glimpses of certain threads when their powers blessed them with access to it. They couldn't compare two diverging paths the way she could. They couldn't see how unstable some of the futures were due to the slightest variations. They didn't realize just how many futures there were — how many choices weren't yet predetermined.

Granted, there was a hint of truth that even she had to admit existed in Deepseeker's words. Not in any direct sense, but in an indirect, tangible, meaningful way. When she looked far enough ahead, some futures actually were pretty close to fated. This was something that baffled her. If none of the choices of dragons were predetermined, then pretty much every path would have millions of branches. But some threads hardly ever branched. And some threads were completely cut clean from the equation of the future.

Like how there would never be a war with the SandWings in her lifetime. Queen Nebula would never provoke the SandWings into war, nor would she declare it herself. Ever. She explored the futures extensively in the secret, sadistic hope of finding a war that she could herd the Kingdom towards if she ended up getting too bored, but no such future existed.

But there was another curious thing that seemed fated to happen. It was an anomalous point of stability in the far, far future, as if the moons and their associated spirits aligned in just the right way to spark an irrevocable destiny and bestow it to the world.

She was thinking, of course, about the hatching of the next great seer.

It wouldn't happen for another 306 years. But it would happen, more or less, in 306 years, shortly after the brightest night, when all three moons were full.

The name wasn't fixed. It changed from thread to thread. In some futures it was Clearsight. In others it was Fatewatcher. In others it was Eon. But Nocturne liked the name 'Clearsight' the most out of all the ones she'd seen, so that was what she tended to call the dragon in her mind. She wouldn't have minded if her own parents had come up with that name on their own.

But Clearsight's name was the only thing Nocturne liked about her. It was the only thing about her that didn't send flares of jealousy through her heart. Clearsight was destined to fall in love with a brilliant, powerful dragon with thrice-moonborn powers; and he was destined to fall in love with her. Clearsight was destined to stop at least a couple of Very Bad Things from happening. Maybe even a genocide. Maybe even two.

Clearsight was destined to live an interesting life. She was destined to be remembered.

Unlike Nocturne.

It was disappointing. The overwhelming swell of boring NightWing diplomacy would last another three hundred years, until an incredible conflict would come along. Sometimes it was between the NightWings and SeaWings, other times it was between the NightWings and IceWings, and other times it was a continent-wide war between every tribe, sparked by an angry Queen who was just as bored as Nocturne was with the state of the world and wanted to set it on fire for a bit. No matter what the conflict was, Clearsight — or whoever this special seer ended up being — would have something to say about it. And Nocturne wouldn't …

… or would she?

A little part of her mind nagged the words 'Not so fast' to her. It was an optimistic, eager part of her mind that she never knew existed in virtue of her never having to listen to it. Could she make a difference, even if she tried? Maybe she could. After all, with the future being as dull as it was, it might just be possible that if she did the right thing, it could carry through all those hundreds of years and touch the dragons of the future.

That was a nice thought, one she was surprised she hadn't had sooner. Maybe the living dragons around her would die without any tremendous appreciation of her talents, but she just might be able to make a difference for the endangered dragons so many years in the future.

She liked the idea enough to entertain it further. Maybe she could speak to Clearsight, even if their conversation ended up being one-sided. Maybe she could give Clearsight advice, or have an impact on her that would through proxy help her change the world. She explored the far futures for any potential differences she could make. As she touched down at the foot of the library entrance, her head remained in her mind, unraveling the threads that she had yet to explore. If there was a difference in the tangled mess of futures during that time, it was hard to see. Maybe she had to do something clever — something that was much more likely to last three hundred years. Maybe her powers just weren't strong enough to see that far ahead at a sufficiently fine resolution.

Or maybe she just needed to study the timelines more carefully.

She stepped inside and reserved a study room for herself. She had some notes to take. This was going to be a fun new hobby of hers, she could tell. She was a seer, after all.

A/N: Once upon a time, I found author's notes hokey and silly, but I've since had a change of heart. Fanfiction is dynamic, and a lot of the fun in writing and reading it comes from the fact that it's more personal. It's not just one person making a whole book before sending it off to an editor and a publisher. It's an artist making something one chapter at a time and getting feedback from readers, one chapter at a time. The interaction I have with you guys is much more connected, and including these author's notes helps make the interpersonal nature of fanfiction even stronger.

This is the first installment of a story I've had on my mind for nearly a year now. This story is all about those other futures — the ones that Clearsight sought after but failed to reach. What were they like? How could she have reached them while avoiding the even worse futures that she saw? I'm going to have a lot of fun offering my own answers, and I hope you have fun reading them as they come out.

Since all of the prologues of the second arc of Wings of Fire took place in the past, I figured I'd follow the pattern and write from the perspective of a seer dragon who was from three hundred years before Clearsight's time. This story will ultimately be about Darkstalker and Clearsight, but you'll soon see the small ways in which Nocturne ends up fulfilling her goal in having an influence over their lives.

Please let me know what you think!