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Chapter Text

It was warm, the air was so wet that she could feel the droplets condensing on her scales, and everything was green, a thousand shades of green, interspersed with every color extent- what did they call that shade like the sunshine? An ordinary Icewing would have felt it oppressive- even she had, years ago, when she had first gone to the rain forest on a diplomatic mission to speak to Queen Anaconda. She did not find it so now.

"Diamond? Is that you?"

Of course it was her; what other Icewing would come this far into the rainforest, and what other Icewing knew it so well that she could find her way to their meeting place in secret, despite her glittering scales? She took another step forward, and then suddenly a large shape melted out of the leafy green, snout crinkled in a laugh. "I missed you, Di!"

Had any of her subjects been this informal towards her she would have arranged for him or her to be demoted, but Paradise wasn't exactly her subject, was she?

"Hello Paradise." The name was a mere whisper, as though speaking it any louder would spoil it, or summon one of Queen Anaconda's border patrols.

Paradise wrapped her wings around the Icewing queen, and it was only by dint of long experience (and the charmed diamond imbedded between her scales) that she managed not to flinch. Paradise was so gorgeously, impossibly warm, and her scales were the color of a liquid rainbow. Not to mention that Icewings rarely touched one another unless it was for practical purposes or on their mating flight, not like this.

Although perhaps it could be said that Diamond and Paradise would have been on their mating flight had interpyrric law permitted it.

"So what is it like in the Ice kingdom? I was worried when you didn't come. All the ice storms this time of year..."

"It's the advisors and lobbyists you have to worry about, not the storms. I'm an icewing; storms are nothing. It's the dragons that pop up every time you try to get away that bother me. 'Queen Diamond, what do you think about the new hatchling policy?' Queen Diamond, the roof of the left wing of the secondary palace has a leak!' 'Queen Diamond, the Mudwings sent an embassy without telling us first and the Great Ice Cliff shot them out of the sky and what do we do?'"

Paradise snorted, then abruptly sobered as the rest of what the Queen said came together. "Wait, did that actually happen? Were they ok?"

"Luckily someone found them before they died, so I was able to cure them." Diamond lowered her head. "I...was it wrong to use my powers again?"

"You saved dragons' lives, that's not wrong."

"But it's not just that. I...I shouldn't be using my magic at all, and I've used it for much more frivolous things than healing." She gave a half-smile, soured with worry, as Paradise waved the enchanted ring she had given her (so that the heat-loving Rainwing would never feel the ice of her scales when they embraced).

"But they weren't frivolous at the time, I assume. The orchid you spelled for me still lights my home at night, and I've given cuttings to everyone. It might seem silly but Rainwings had to get up when the sun came up and go to sleep when it set or risk predators and things before you gave me that. I know that maybe it's not worth the risk, but it is not useless either, and it's already done. And weren't you telling me about some Icewing that charmed a pair of amulets so he could talk to his girlfriend and they ended up helping him to win-"

"The Crystal Mutiny, yes. That was Prince Seal, and his dragoness was Frost. But Seal..." she shivered and looked away. What happened next was a state secret, after all, and...would Paradise still stay with her if she knew what she could become? Paradise knew that the animus power was dangerous to use too often, of course, but Diamond had not shared much about the actual effects of overuse.

"Seal what?"

"Seal was the first to go mad. That was back before the Law of Animagic Gifts was in place, and it was his death that prompted the other Icewings to begin doing studies on animus dragons. They found...they found that your magic is directly connected to your soul energy. You truly put your soul into the magic, and that is why it can do things independant of you and exist after you die."

Paradise shuddered. As far as Diamond knew, Rainwings didn't believe in a deity like the Icewings did, but that didn't mean that they didn't regard the soul as inviolate. "You...oh sweet sunshine, you risked your soul to spell a warmth amulet? For me?"

Queen Diamond was not ordinarily inclined to say sappy, romantic things, but the only response that came to her in that moment was "For you? I would risk my kingdom and my soul if you needed a fresh banana."

Blushes of hot pink and worried pale blue flickered along the color changing scales around Paradise's eyes and snout, slowly spreading all over her body. "Di, I'm...are you sure I'm worth it?"

"Always." Diamond hesitated. There was something she wanted to ask her mate, but she was not sure if she should, especially after their earlier conversation. It was only tentative at the moment, just a feeler, but considering that carrying it out (should they both want it) would require the magic she had sworn to use as little as possible...no. She would not say it, especially as it would likely not even work in the first place. "So what's the latest discovery you made?" she asked instead, forcing herself to concentrate on lighter subjects. Paradise was known for going farther than anyone into the rainforest in search of new fruits and flowers; that was why she was the best fruit trader in Pyrrha.

"I found this thing that's in sort of a star shape- I named it 'starfruit'- inspired, huh?" said Paradise, grinning.

Diamond laughed.

"It tastes fabulous- do you want some?"

Diamond glanced up into the slightly-larger dragon's eyes. "Sure. Teach me, oh great master of fruit lore!"

Paradise scrambled up into the branches and returned with a large yellow...thing, which was probably only pretending to be fruit. "You cut it like this," she said, slicing it with her claws, "And then you eat it fresh; it doesn't dry well and it rots really fast in this heat once it's sliced open." She dangled a dripping strip of fruit in front of Diamond's nose, getting fruit juice all over her snout. "Well, try it!"

Despite Icewings being generally carnivorous, Diamond snagged the strip out of her claws and bit into it, eyes widening at the taste. "Ok, that's actually very good!"

"Are you doubting my taste?"

"Paradise, I eat raw meat most of the time; I don't know how to eat fruit or what new varieties are supposed to taste like, since traders haven't come to the Ice Kingdom proper since the...incident."

"We better fix that right now- do you want to try some of these other...um...things? I've already made sure they're not poisonous but some of them aren't named yet; you can help name them, if you want."

"Absolutely. Since you'd probably name them things like 'thorny apple' or 'dragonfruit' if I wasn't there to stop you."

The purply-pink color of embarrassment began to spread on Paradise's face.

"Wait, did you actually name some that?"

"I find about two new species a day! You run out of names after a while. You can't just keep making up names like limbylim berries, however funny it is to see if you can make other dragons say really stupid things..."

"Sure you can!"

And with that, all tension seemed to have disappeared from the exchange, and the rest of Queen Diamond's few precious hours in the rainforest (while her marvelous secretary and sister, Princess Glitter, covered for her) were spent tasting and discussing Paradise's new fruits until it devolved into a fruit fight and then a very satisfying making-out session to clean off all the fruit juice. But however untroubled she was outwardly, Queen Diamond worried. What if someone found out about their relationship? What if someone told her husband, King Trespass? Granted he had his own little relationship on the side (Queen Diamond wasn't an idiot; she knew the marriage was arranged and that he had always cast a few too many glances at that snotty Glister) but if it got out it could be devastating. Why couldn't she just be an ordinary dragon for once? Oh right, her duty. They could take their stupid duty and shove it-

"Why are you frowning? You're not allowed to frown in the rainforest, you'll summon the Gladness Police!" Paradise said it with such a stern, serious look on her face that Diamond burst into ragged laughter. Trust Paradise to try to cheer her up.

"I wish I could move into the rainforest," she said softly, "Or that you could move into the Ice Kingdom with me. We could live in the palace, or in one of your tree-top villas, and eat fruit all day, and not have to worry about guards and dignitaries and rules. And you could teach me to hang by my tail from a tree, and I could meet all the dragons you always tell me about when I visit, and I wouldn't have to worry about being caught by Anaconda's border patrol for invading sovereign territory, and we could snuggle all night on a branch..." her eyes slitted, lost in the dream. "And we would have dragonettes, one of them like ice when the sun is just coming up, and one of them like an armored flower, and we could watch them play and trail our claws in the water. Or maybe we'd go to the Ice Kingdom, and your bracelet would keep you safe and warm so that we could fly at night when you can see every single falling star, and wrestle in the snow, and wander the halls of the palace when everyone else is off hunting, and I can show you all the gifts that the other animi enchanted before me."

Paradise's eyes glowed. "That...that would be amazing. And...did you say dragonettes?"

Diamond flushed blue. "It was only a thought."

"I know. It's impossible, but it would be beautiful. They'd have your dazzle and my venom, or maybe they'd be lime green and pink and breathe ice. Who knows?"

"Whatever they looked like, they'd be wonderful."

There was a momentary silence as they both thought about that sadly. Then Paradise, that wonderful dragoness, broke up the tension with "I want to see the Tree of Light. Does it really grow light apples?"

"Yes, and I've heard it acts like a real tree, too. Frostbite carved it herself, you know. She came before the time when the regulations were very strict, but she knew that her gift was precious and dangerous. She spent years in the rainforest, from what I've heard. Wanted to see how real trees worked."

"Wow, you mean she actually came here? I thought most Icewings hated it here!"

"I don't. You're here. And it's nice to be warm, as long as it isn't too hot."

"And if it gets to be too hot, we can just go swimming," Paradise said. "How long do you have? Can you spare another hour to swim?"

Diamond decided that she could, even if she was actually a few hours behind schedule. She could just say that she had to stop to hunt, couldn't she?

It ended up taking much more than an hour. It was already fading into dusk when Diamond hurriedly pecked Paradise's snout and launched herself heavily into the sky, startling a night bird that flew up with a whirr and a shrill cry. Paradise followed her to the very edge of the rain kingdom and over the mountains aways, only turning back when they reached the line of sand, cactus, and wispy grass that denoted the beginning of the Sand Kingdom. And Diamond flew on alone, magically enhancing her flight to reach the Ice Kingdom as the first rosy blush of dawn tinted the ice, rendering the kingdom the most beautiful it had ever seemed, even though she hated the frozen prison it represented. And then at last she flew in by one of the less-traveled doorways, following a secret passageway to reach her rooms. She was met at the door, however, by her sister. And Princess Glitter was not happy.

"You're late. I almost sent out a search party and to hell with the consequences to your little relationship. I don't want to hurt either of you, but you know who'll catch the flack if you're not there..."

Diamond bowed her head. "I...I'm sorry. We-"

"Lost track of time snogging? For Frostbite's sake, the Nightwing embassy is coming tomorrow, and no preparations were made because King Trespass was off doing whatever he does all day yesterday and Snowflake had the flu. You've got to get everything ready; they'll expect accommodations for their retinue, however many there are since Vigilance didn't bother to mention numbers, and they'll all be cold and they'll all be hungry and the cooks are fretting because they don't have orders. And the fires went out, so unless you enchant something the Nightwings will have to cook their own food or eat raw seal."

Glitter was in an unusually snappish mood, and Diamond reluctantly admitted to herself that she had been in the wrong. She shifted her wings sheepishly. "Fine, I'll get to it. Please tell Master of Ceremonies Fang to get the Summer Fortress cleaned up and ready for an indeterminate number of Nightwings, and I'll go talk to the cook. Maybe we can figure out something. Do Nightwings like sushi? It's not like I can go run over and get a sack of coals from the Sandwings, and I-"

"Just enchant something! You break the rules for everything else..."

"I'd rather not destroy my soul so that the precious Nightwings have hot food. If they don't like fruit or sushi they can cook their own food." It was the first time that Queen Diamond had just straight-out objected to one of Glitter's suggestions for using her magic, as she always figured that it wouldn't be too bad if it was a small thing, and Glitter seemed quite taken aback.

"You believe in those old stories?"

"It doesn't matter what I believe; it's against the law and that's all there is to it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go prepare and get cleaned up."

"Yes, you should get cleaned up." Glitter wrinkled her nose, and Queen Diamond realized for the first time that her feet were still muddy from the rainforest and that she had a dead and rotting flower stuck to her underside, as well as being crusted with fine white sand.

"Right. I'll just...do that then; can you have someone clean that up?" And without waiting for what Princess Glitter might have said back, Diamond retreated into her chambers to clean herself up in preparation for whatever stuffy embassy meetings she would have to suffer through, her thoughts, after a brief pause, winging their way faster than a dragon could fly back to the rainforest and an elegant polychromatic dragoness with mango juice on her nose.

Chapter Text

The Icewing palace was a flurry of activity as the servants and nobles prepared for Queen Vigilance's visit, and Queen Diamond was right in the middle of it, rushing about as she tried to do all the things necessary for the meeting (seeing as no one had actually been doing the work except Glitter, Trespass having been locked up in his rooms with Glister for the past few days and the actual Head of the palace having been sick. No two orders given were the same, and at least half of the servants had all somehow decided (and been allowed to) take vacation for that week, for some reason, so those that remained had to do double shifts or even take on tasks they hadn't been trained for, for lack of others. What servants were there argued about what would be appropriate to do or went to her, until there seemed to be a perpetual bevy of them around her, asking her 'Queen Diamond this' and 'Your Majesty that'. She did not have time for this.

The first thing she had to do was attend to the kitchens. She stormed in at once in a scrape of spikes, snapping at Frigid to send messengers to the Sand kingdom for fire (she was not about to enchant something to cook perfectly good meat) and to trawl the markets for foods that might be acceptable to the Nightwing palette, in case their delicate stomachs couldn't handle sashimi and seal fillets, and call fishmongers to the palace to give them second opinions.

Chapter Text

It was all a pluperfect mess from the start, no matter how spotless the Diplomacy Dome was or how tooth-achingly polite the noble Icewings tried to be. Vigilance had always been a haughty, paranoid and unpolitic queen, and the years had not mellowed her in the slightest. She swept in dripping in tasteless silver and gold, fairly covered in expensive jewelry, including some that were so outdated as to be almost offensive by Icewing tastes. Any Icewing who wore a tailband to a state dinner would probably lose precious status in fact, and would definitely be laughed out of court in disgrace, given that they hadn't been 'in' since the reign of Queen Skua, but that alone would have been forgiven due to the differences in culture.  But who on earth would think it was appropriate to wear sixteen rings, five necklaces, bangles on all four legs, three earrings in each silvering ear and the tailband? (Yes, she had counted; it'd given her something to do besides listening to Vigilance's pointless and long-winded dissertation about how the Nightwings really rather deserved that strip of land that the two kingdoms shared by the Fangs of Darkness Mountains, and that their great great grand-dams had owned it, and how they would like it back and would be glad to concede some of the taxes that they were levying on Icewing traders if they got the land, which the meeting wasn't even about.)

So yes, Vigilance was a pain in both the head and the tail, her courtiers were all slavishly subservient to her in a manner quite disgusting (while yet seeming to believe themselves both the better race and the better dragons compared to her Icewing nobles and officials) and Diamond really didn't like how she eyed the replicas of the various Gifts on display (thank the moons that they were replicas only; Diamond would not dare risk the Gifts of Time and Light falling into enemy claws, much less the more...militaristic gifts, like the Gift of War or the Gift of Compromise. And through it all King Trespass only showed once, at the one time during which he absolutely had to appear, and he was quite drunk and splattered with scalegloss kisses. She was fairly certain Glitter had taken him to task for it, but the damage was already done, as her reputation both internationally and among the tribe had taken quite the blow. She was going to need a very, very long vacation after this (not that she was going to get it what with Arctic's Gifting Ceremony and his subsequent marriage to that boring little dragoness Snowflake coming up, along with the fact that she definitely still had to make her prior absence up to Glitter...).

She ended up only taking a night, a night to fly back to the Rainforest, where she swooped into Paradise and her's private clearing and waited...only to run into another dragon. Another Rainwing, and one whom she had never seen before.

She didn't even know what was happening until he had one of the barbed tribal spears that the Rainwings used (made of some impossibly long thorn, by the looks of it) pressed to her throat. 

"Attack! It's an Icewing! In the Rainforest!"

The hell? She might have suspected that Paradise was cheating, if she had not known the dragoness for as long as she had. Or if the Rainwing had acted less surprised about an unannounced Icewing. And even if Paradise had been with another dragon her tribe considered 'proper' it wouldn't have bothered her as long as the dragoness came home to her at the end of the day, considering how used she was to marriages and matings of convenience and politics. 

"Avocado, what the-- Di? Are you ok? I thought that you wouldn't have time to come to the forest until at least another week?" Paradise shouted, tearing into the clearing at a run with her wings fluttering like mad and claw-woven wicker baskets spilling fruit everywhere. She always had been glorious when she was flustered....

Diamond maneuvered herself as best she could with the thorn still at her throat; who knew what the mad dragon might have coated it with. "Don't worry, I'm fine," she said at the same time that the aforesaid Avocado blurted out "Wait, you know this dragon?"

Paradise sat back on her haunches, starting to reorder the fruit that had been dumped out of her baskets and tossing the mushy ones into the trees. "Yes, I know her, put away the spear," she said for the other dragon's benefit, and then "You don't look fine, Di, you look all worn out. Was Vengeance as awful as you were telling me earlier?"

The spear was thankfully removed from Diamond's tender throat-glands before it could cause any damage and the unknown Rainwing watched with wide eyes as she sat down hard, curling the non-spiky portion of her tail under her. "She was worse. Talked my ear off the whole time, and her entourage were honestly the worst dragons I have ever had the displeasure of knowing. Racist curs, all of them."

"Are we going to ignore the fact that there's an ICEWING in our FOREST?"

"No Avocado, but we're not going to Queen Anaconda either. This is Diamond; she's a friend."

"Diamond? Like Queen Diamond? I thought Icewings didn't allow for multiple names?"

"Exactly."

Avocado looked like he was about three breaths from hyperventilating, scales circling through a complex mixture of purple, royal blue, pink, gold, acid green, low, smoldering red, and firework-colored golds and yellows- guilt, patriotism, friendship, awe, fear, anger, and effervescent excitement, if Diamond was reading him correctly. "I...uh...your majesty...um..."

"Deep breaths, Avocado. She's not going to bite your tail off."

"You don't know that!!" Avocado protested.

Paradise lobbed a fruit at him, one of the one's that she'd creatively named a 'dragonfruit'. "She better not be biting anyone but me..."

"Paradise!!!" Diamond protested. It really was rather undignified for a queen to blush, and it made her cheeks turn a rather unattractive shade of seafoam blue-green, due to her blue Icewing blood.

"What, it's true, isn't it?"

This really had been possibly the most embarrassing introduction she'd ever had, but luckily she knew that Rainwings didn't exactly stand on protocol and social niceties the way the Icewings did. Sure, they had laws and tribal manners, and Anaconda was actually one of the stricter queens, but a dragon wasn't worried that she could lose favor forever if she didn't have enough food for a social function that she had to put on to marry off her dragonettes. As a matter of fact, Rainwings didn't even have 'Frost Balls' and 'Flashthaw Balls' (the former were demure balls for all the young hopefuls to meet their intended, or, if they were of the few whose marriage hadn't been arranged, to find someone to court, and the latter were events where, for one day in the year, Icewing royal manners fell away, and dragon couples-- only the ones married, of course-- could be as passionate and wanton as they liked with one another. Not that Diamond had had the pleasure of experiencing that, beyond the first spring that she and Trespass had been married. Besides, he'd been lacklustre even then.) They also didn't really care about political powerplay; the queen was the queen and the princesses were the princesses and everyone else was just a dragon with a job. Some of the jobs were certainly more important than others, but one's entire life didn't depend on their profession, and they could even change it if they liked. Just yet another reason to prefer the Rainwing tribe.

As it turned out, Avocado was a surprisingly sweet dragon, albeit a little silly, and she wasn't that annoyed by him, more endeared by his bumbling and the constant changes shifting through his scales-- rather like Paradise but different, and so they parted on good terms. Diamond wasn't sure she shouldn't just make him forget, but Paradise wouldn't let her. "He's wanted to meet the queen of another tribe all his life; he'll be in awe but he wouldn't dare endanger you, and it would be likely no one would believe him anyway. Just let him keep them."

"All right," Diamond conceded, and then drew the larger dragoness into a kiss,