Starflight had been terrified plenty of times since leaving the caves where he grew up. He’d thought nothing could ever be worse than the moment Queen Scarlet walked in with her guards, killed Dune, and took all the dragonets prisoner. But then there was the moment he stood in her arena, knowing that she intended for him to be violently dead by the end of the day. That was followed by the moment Queen Coral had them thrown in her prison, Tsunami’s plunge through the electric eels, the SkyWing attack on the Summer Palace, their frantic escape right through the middle of a battle, and perhaps the actual worst, when Sunny had disappeared right in front of him in the rainforest. Not to mention all the scary things he’d faced since being abducted by the NightWings. In fact, he’d spent most of the last few weeks in a state of near-constant terror.

This was a whole other level. A level of that’s not scientifically possible and has it been under the lava this whole time? and THAT’S NOT POSSIBLE and now this is really it and there’s no one to protect me and I’m definitely absolutely one hundred percent going to die because THAT IS A DRAGON WHO LIVES IN LAVA.

Its head and wings came first, in a fountain of golden molten lava, and then a set of claws shot out and clutched the side of the cauldron. The dragon shook itself, sending splatters of lava flying. Slowly the lava poured off her head, revealing a thickset neck, a battle-scarred snout, and black scales that gleamed like polished ebony against the orange-yellow pool around her.

“Starflight, Starflight, Starflight,” Fatespeaker whispered in a panicked rush, shaking his arm violently. “Do something!”

“Like what?” he whispered back. The tunnel was on the far side of the cauldron. They’d have to get past the dragon and the lava she was dripping everywhere if they wanted to run away, which was what he really, really wanted to do.

Hissssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

The dragon in the lava leaned forward and glared at them. Buzzing white steam seemed to be rising from her scales. Her tongue flicked in and out as she studied the two dragonets, and Starflight realized there was a glint of icy blue in the depths of her dark eyes. When she opened her mouth, he spotted two teeth that were the same shade of blue, looking more like icicles than regular teeth.

“Who?” she rasped suddenly. Her voice was hard to hear — creaky and quiet and rough and eerie, like claws scraping on ice several caves away.

“N-n-n-no one,” Starflight stammered.

“Please don’t kill us,” Fatespeaker squeaked.

“Don’t make me,” said the lava dragon. She hissed again, her claws flexing around the edge of the cauldron. “How?”

“How … did we find you?” Starflight filled in. “We were looking for the queen — Queen Battlewinner.”

“I,” said the dragon. Her eyes narrowed. “You?”

“We’re — we’re the dragonets of the prophecy,” Fatespeaker said. “I’m Fatespeaker and this is Starflight.”

“Ahhh.” The queen sank lower in the lava. “Hmm. Unimpressive.”

“How is this happening?” Starflight burst out. “Why aren’t you dead? The temperature you’re immersed in — the boiling point — the physical reaction of lava and scales — I saw what happened to Vengeance. You can’t be swimming in lava. It just isn’t possible. Even dragons born from blood-red eggs, like Clay, could probably only withstand that kind of heat for a minute or two, and as far as I know NightWings don’t have eggs like that anyway, so — this can’t be happening, scientifically speaking.”

The queen let out a small, possibly amused snort, blowing bubbles across the surface of the lava. “Mastermind’s son,” she rasped. She studied him for a moment, then leaned forward, opening her jaws as wide as they would go.

For a moment, Starflight thought she was about to lunge out of the cauldron and bite their heads off. But then he realized from her odd position that she was actually holding herself so he could look inside her mouth. His fear slowly started to fade as curiosity took over, and he stepped closer.

“Starflight,” Fatespeaker whispered anxiously. “This wasn’t in any of my visions! I’m really not sure about this!”

“Three moons,” he said, his eyes widening. “Fatespeaker, look! You can see right down her throat … and it’s blue.” The walls of Battlewinner’s throat were lined with what looked like pale blue frost, small swirling patterns that were feathery or sharp and all glinted oddly.

“What is it?” Starflight met Battlewinner’s eyes again.

She snapped her mouth shut. “Ice.” The creak of her voice seemed to rattle her to her wingtips; she took a deep breath, dipped her whole head in the lava, and emerged again.

“Ice?” Starflight echoed. His mind whirled into gear, trying to solve this mystery. Was this connected to the NightWing bacteria that killed their prey? Or had she just swallowed a lot of ice to combat the lava? That made no sense. Where would the dragons even get ice out here on the island, where it was perpetually too warm?

Queen Battlewinner was watching him, as if this was a test and she had decided to save her breath and see if he could figure it out.

Her breath …

“IceWings!” Starflight burst out. “Their weapon — the frostbreath!”

Battlewinner nodded, her heavy shoulders sliding up out of the lava and back down again. Her black tongue flicked in and out again, and this time he saw that it also had a layer of thin shimmering frost on it.

“You got blasted by an IceWing,” he said slowly. “You must have been on the continent when you … ran into one, is that it? And you fought, and it hit you, but not on the outside … maybe your mouth was open and it went right in and down your throat to freeze your insides. Which means you should have been dead within a day.”

The queen flicked her wings back, scattering sizzling orange droplets around. “Not so easy,” she growled.

“To kill you,” Starflight finished. “You made it back here. And the lava — the lava stops the effects of the freezing? Is that it?”

“Indeed.” The queen hissed again. “A balance.”

“But how —” Fatespeaker said. “I mean, how did you know the lava wouldn’t just kill you right away?”

Starflight could imagine it clearly — Battlewinner on the continent, perhaps looking for a new home for the NightWings, running into an IceWing and nearly dying in battle. But she staggered back through that long, awful flight to the island, feeling colder and colder and closer to death by the minute. The fire that burned inside fire-breathing dragons like NightWings and SkyWings would have been working against the ice to keep her alive for a while, but it wouldn’t be enough to save her.

By the time she’d made it to the island, she would have been shivering violently and feeling terribly sick as her stomach and intestines began to freeze and fuse together, spreading the icy plague out from her organs toward her scales. At that point, he could imagine she felt so cold that diving into lava sounded better than anything. Even if it killed her — and maybe she expected it to — it couldn’t be worse than what she was already feeling.

And instead it saved her life. Queen Battlewinner was alive now, but the frostbreath was still inside her. She could never leave the lava, or else it would finish its work.

The rest was details, although he was still curious about all of it — like who knew her secret besides Greatness, how this room had been built and the screens put in, how the cauldron had been filled with lava and prepared for her. He wondered if she could still eat, or if she existed in kind of a suspended state, right on the edge of death.

The queen was watching him closely, perhaps reading his mind as he put all the pieces together. He guessed that speaking was painful, scraping and cracking the ice in her throat and mouth, and that was why she did as little of it as she possibly could.

“I’m sorry,” he said to her finally. “It seems like an awful thing, what’s happened to you.”

Battlewinner’s head spikes flattened and her snout lifted. “No pity,” she snarled. “Revenge. Soon.”

That sounded ominous, but worrying about IceWings would have to wait. Starflight reached out and took one of Fatespeaker’s talons in his.

“We wanted to talk to you about the prophecy,” he said hesitantly. “We’re afraid Morrowseer is being too cruel and interfering too much.”

The queen cut him off with a barking laugh and then doubled over in pain, clutching her neck. After a moment, she recovered enough to glare at him.

“Do as he says,” she hissed. “The prophecy is everything.”

“But he sent Squid away to die today,” Fatespeaker pleaded. “And he says he’s going to kill me or Starflight. And the RainWing prisoners are being treated so terribly. Please, it doesn’t have to be like this, does it?”

“Anything to … save the tribe,” said the queen. She began to sink down into the lava. “Leave now.”

“Wait, please,” cried Fatespeaker.

But lava was already closing over the dark dragon’s head.

She was gone. They had failed.