The air in the barracks was tense and worried as the dragons inside sat, shivering.

They were scattered almost haphazardly around the room, each of them with similar expressions of worry and paranoia etched on their faces. Almost every one of them, too, wore their armor, and the few who didn't were the ones pressing bandages to the scratches they'd obtained in fights with petty thieves and burglars. Every dragon had tried to put on a mask of indifference or boredom, but not one had succeeded, their clear body language wiping away any illusion of security they'd tried to create.

Their tails were curled, their wings furled and their horns dipped in that almost imperceptible angle as thy realized that they might actually have to fight. They, the Tribe of Scorching Sands, the tribe with no fire or ice or anything of that sort. Just claws and teeth, that was all that they could use to fight.

In the corner sat a young, small dragoness, her tail curled almost five times around itself and her head shaking as she tried to remove her helmet. She finally succeeded, and it landed with a loud clang onto the ground, the metallic ring sounding strangely loud in the uneasy silence that had fellen across the room.

She winced and hurriedly picked it up, then stared at it for a long moment, her sea-blue eyes widening slightly as she stared at the huge dent it had received when it landed on the sand-covered stone floor.

The dragoness, by the name of Cobra, ran her claw along her armor in a nervous tic that she'd developed long ago. She looked at it critically, wondering if she should even bother wearing it at all. It would melt, surely, with the fire that the Igneous Tribe would blast at it, and no dragon really wanted molten metal on their scales. Even their scales, which were resistant to an extreme amount of heat, could not handle molten metal for more than a few seconds before they were burned through, and the wings would be fried instantly if it landed there.

The off-white dragoness flapped her wings experimentally, as if testing her flight capacity with the armor on her scales. They clanked slightly, and she silently added another reason to ditch the armor-- the lack of stealth.

She decided that she should turn in the armor as soon as possible, a fact she was certain that the king would love-- it meant armor for another dragon. She paused a moment, then, tilting her head ever so slightly, and wondered if she should keep it, if only to prevent some poor other dragon from being forced to fight in a war that was primarily one of greed.

Of course, if the diplomat we sent succeeds, maybe we won't need to...

But Cobra had a feeling that the Igneous Tribe wouldn't be particularly welcoming to a dragon of the tribe that had supposedly forced one of their nobles to hatch an egg.

The previous diplomat...yes, this was really his fault. Her talons clicked on the floor angrily as she remembered the cowering form of the diplomat who'd supposedly fallen in love with said noble, and promptly blamed it on his "love". Something about that claim seemed off to her, but she existed only to act, not to think. She was just a soldier.

And she might die.

For some reason, this was the first time that simple statement had crossed her mind. She hadn't even considered dying a possibility until this moment, until the reality of what war would mean hit her. She could tumble to the ground, wings limp and not functioning, with a simple blast of fire from an igneous tribe dragon's wings.

What on earth is King Ibex thinking? Has he gone mad?

Of course he has, she muttered internally. He went mad long ago, when he decided to build himself seven palaces with our pitiful amount of riches.

They would lose, Cobra now saw that clearly. They would lose, and die, and nothing would come of it. All the while, their mad king would sit in his throne room and laugh as they all flew towards their doom on his orders.

The door of the barracks suddenly opened, and Cobra turned to see a dragon standing the his posture slumped and worried. He seemed to carry the weight of a thousand deaths on his shoulders already, and Cobra already knew exactly what news he would bring.

"King Ibex..." he paused, his wings drooping still farther, so far that they brushed the sandy ground. "King Ibex has declared war." He paused, then added belatedly, "On the Igneous Tribe."

Cobra's wings were over her head before she could stop herself, in a futile attempt to pretend that the messenger had said nothing, that she'd live another day, and that she wasn't going to have to fly across a sea to fight a dragon simply because their diplomat had done something stupid.

If she lived through this, she was going to find that diplomat and whack him on the head.

The other assembled soldiers reacted similarly, their heads dropping, their muscles tensing and their talons crossing, as if praying to the spirits that they wouldn't be one of the inevitable casualties. The commanders looked still worse, their tails had wrapped around themselves many times and they clutched their small spears tightly, as if preparing to die at any moment. Because they would die as the most defenseless tribe, one that couldn't breathe fire because their home was already hot enough and one that couldn't breath ice because it would melt the second it left their jaws. They were defenseless, and their only chance would be if every dragon in their entire tribe rose up to fight. but that wasn't going to happen, even the king wasn't mad enough to think that the dragons wouldn't rebel against him if he did that.

They were going to die.

Cobra suddenly pushed past the messenger in the doorway and took flight, feeling the desert wind scorch her scales as she did so. No one questioned it, and no one tried to stop her. It was understandable that the youngest soldier in their army, one that was barely more than a hatchling, had panicked so.

The sky seemed impossibly blue as Cobra flew through it, her wings beating so hard she was certain that the sand behind her shifted in her wake. She wanted so desperately to leave, to run away, but she knew then that another would take her place instead.

The armor clanked noisily as she flew over sand and more sand, an endless sea of yellow and tan that seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see, broken only by tiny islands of cacti and an occasional oasis. She felt the urge to land at a small pool of water that she saw pass below her, but she resisted it, knowing that other dragons would be there that would ask why a small dragon wearing armor was doing all alone, so far from the barracks or anything she might be guarding.

Instead, she flew towards the sea, not thinking much about why or where the sea was. She just knew that she needed to get there, and her wings beat furiously, trying to combat the weight of the armor that wished to drag her back down to earth, to the sand, to reality.

Here in the sky, she could pretend that there was no war, that there were no other dragons, that she was alone and wasn't about to be killed by some Igneous Tribe dragon the instant she reached their home. She could pretend that she was safe, that her family was down below her, watching her fly for the first time.

But the armor on her wings and body reminded her that it was a lie, that her family was long dead, killed by the king, and that she was soon to follow them into the afterlife.

I'm going to die, she thought again, the wind whistling through her scales.

The sea was suddenly in her sights, and she finally let the armor drag her down, down, down toward the waters, to the place where she'd always found peace. She was down faster than usual, not only the armor but her exhaustion hurrying her descent.

She landed, perched on the cliff on the edge of the island, and stared out at the blue, blue waters, a calming sight that made her think of family, of love, and of not being alone. She forgot about the armor on her body, forgot about her impending death, and forgot about the nightmares she'd surely have of Igneous Tribe dragons coming to melt the armor off her scales.

She was at peace, happy with the feeling of the sea breeze on her skin, and filled with the familiar feeling of home.