The drake with tarnished scales wanders idly along the river’s edge, her strong, scaled tail swaying behind her with every step, brushing across the longer tufts of grass along the way. An ethereal cat sticks close behind her, making a game of sorts of staying out of the sturdy appendage’s path… not that Agate can understand why; her tail is far higher off the ground than the feline is tall. Still, she learned long ago that there’s little point in questioning the motives of a cat; especially one as peculiar as this.

A Stalker wyvern with plumage like a cloudy, sunlit sky soars ahead of both Agate and the celestial feline; Cirrus had unilaterally decided that she should take the lead on this adventure, so that she can be the first to find out if the ground suddenly stops existing. The Ridgewalker has to admit, it’s probably one of the better ideas the ditzy wyvern has had in her time. The Floating Isles do float, after all, which means lots of sudden cliffs; and following the flow of a floating island’s river is an excellent way to find said sudden cliffs. The area may be known for allowing the flightless to drift through the air with ease, but Agate would rather not find out the hard way that this particular rule does not apply to her for one reason or another.

With the pale gold, wispy orbs surrounding her head spinning faster, Cirrus comes to an abrupt halt, shifting to an upright position with her feathered wings fanned out as she lets out a warning hiss; Agate stops dead in her tracks, with the cat that’s taken to following her arching its back and bristling its tail with alarm at the sudden display.

“Found the edge!” the wyvern calls over her shoulder, taking care not to stab herself in the back with her long, curved horns.

Agate bows her head appreciatively at the feathered dragon, closing her dark brown eyes as she does so; the ethereal cat settles down upon seeing this, and instead takes to rubbing against the drake’s grey pointed leg. “Thank you, Cirrus.”

The blue wyvern lets out a small, happy trill, and flips her head back around to look ahead again. “You’ll definitely have to be careful if we get much closer than this… but wow, what a view!”

She sounds genuinely awestruck, and Agate has to admit, she’s curious as to what Cirrus could possibly be seeing right now; the sky is her domain, but the Floating Isles aren’t her typical environment in the slightest.

“Let me take a look, then,” the brown-grey drake says excitedly as she continues walking ahead, with the starry pelted feline hot on her heels.

“Alright, but I mean it, be careful!” Cirrus warns as Agate overtakes her. “I don’t think I can catch you if you fall!”

“I’m not going to fall,” the masked drake rumbles, irritation and sarcasm making its way into her voice. “I’m flightless, not incapable of looking down to watch where I step.”
The cloud patterned wyvern goes silent, and Agate whips her head around to glare at her friend, finding a sheepish expression plastered across the smaller dragon’s face. “...Did you actually think I was incapable of-”
“What? No!” Cirrus cuts her off, a little too defensively for Agate to fully believe her. “Shut up!”

Rolling her brown eyes, the drake continues on her way to the cliff’s edge, with both Cirrus and the celestial feline hastily following her; the airborne dragon easily outpaces her again, although she stops again at a certain point, which Agate assumes to be the point where solid ground gives way for nothingness. Even so, she makes sure to keep a careful eye on the ground for herself; it would be foolish for a landbound dragon like herself to assume a flying one has stopped to hover exactly where she’s able to stand.

Finally, Agate sees the island come to an end, and immediately, the drake comes to a complete standstill; subconsciously, the Ridgewalker digs her long claws into the now far more sparse grass for good measure, and the mysterious cat takes a seat by her hindlegs, apparently unwilling to go much closer to the cliff’s edge itself. When Agate raises her spiked snout to look at the open sky beyond, the normally rather stoic dragon can’t help but let out a small gasp of shock; suddenly, Cirrus’ awe in spite of her familiarity with the skies makes complete sense.

Beyond and below the cliff’s edge, a vast ocean of fluffy white clouds sprawls out as far as the tarnished drake can see, so dense that she can’t see what’s underneath even through the occasional holes in the cloud cover; and she certainly can’t see where the roaring waterfall beside her leads. The pristine water almost seems to disappear into the clouds themselves, and Agate can’t help but wonder if the rivers are helping to create them; the more likely explanation may be that they’re falling to the ocean below, but since islands don’t typically float, she supposes anything’s possible. She can clearly see more floating isles of varying shapes and sizes in the distance, and she swears she finds more every single time she takes a closer look at the horizon.

Her moment of wonder is brought to an abrupt end when Cirrus speaks up, her voice coming as an anxious half whisper.

“...I don’t like the look of that storm over there, Agate,” she murmurs, lightly brushing against the drake’s shoulder with her feather shrouded tail.

“Nobody’s forcing you to go to it,” Agate answers, following the wyvern’s golden gaze. Sure enough, a storm rages on the most distant edge of the horizon; from here, she can barely make out any details beyond it definitely being a storm, and a particularly violent one at that, but something about the grey clouds fill her with an odd sense of dread. “...Might just be inclined to force you not to go there, though…”

“I’m not stupid, you wouldn’t have to force me not to,” Cirrus huffs indignantly, perching by Agate’s side; the ethereal cat startles, and the small creature weaves through the drake’s legs to avoid being squashed, despite the wyvern having landed nowhere near close enough to it for that to be a real concern. “One of the first things you learn about flying is to never mess around with storms!”

“Hrm, checks out,” the Ridgewalker muses out loud. “But… something about that storm feels… well…”

“Different?” The sky coloured Stalker offers, with an almost frantic tone that makes her think she’s trying and failing to keep herself calm. “Worse?”

Agate gives a nervous nod; so, Cirrus can’t put her finger on what’s wrong either, just that something isn’t right. “Something like that.”

“I think,” Cirrus ponders, but something in her voice says she’s not making a mere suggestion. “It’d be better if we didn’t go to any islands anywhere near that storm, at least for now.”

“I can agree to that,” Agate replies; no need to tell her twice.