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Blue
Blue
Narrates The Lost Continent. A young, empathetic, and idealistic SilkWing, though naïve. He is the heart of the group.
- Actual Pacifist: He HATES violence and death, and prefers a peaceful situation if possible.
- And I Must Scream: Was brought under the control of the Othermind along with Swordtail at the end of The Poison Jungle due to being in near proximity of it. The Dangerous Gift reveals that he is aware of every action he is taking and can't do anything about it.
- Blue Is Heroic: His primary colors are blue and purple, and he's one of the protagonists and a very nice dragon.
- Children Are Innocent: He’s more of a young teenager age, but he's still very ignorant and passive.
- Constantly Curious: One of the traits he shares with Cricket. He is very curious about the world and the dragons that live in it, trying to imagine what their lives and thoughts are like. He even does this to the dragons he’s close to, like Luna.
- The Empath: A non-psychic version. Blue has an incredible empathy for everyone around him and likes to spend time "becoming" other dragons, imagining their lives. Because of this, he doesn't perceive the HiveWings as Always Chaotic Evil like many other SilkWings do.
- Foil: Blue and Clay have a lot in common in terms of personality and using peace rather than violence to solve their problems, the difference is Clay is the huge and muscular Gentle Giant, and Blue is the small Pretty Boy.
- Like Father, Like Son: Like his father Admiral, he's optimistic and ignorant(though not fully) of the prejudice that they face. They're also both flamesilks.
- The Heart: He serves as this, as the nicest, most empathetic member of the group.
- Insists on Paying: A non-royalty/leader example: when he, Cricket, and Sundew have to steal expensive disguises to remain undetected in the Glitter Bazaar, he worries about how the people selling the clothing will be affected by losing so much money and insists on paying with his own silk, even if it risks them being discovered.
- Nice Guy: Blue is compassionate, selfless, kind, moralistic, empathetic, optimistic, courageous, encouraging, and always tries to see the good in others. Now does that remind you of someone in the series???
- Pretty Boy: Cricket describes Blue as the most glorious and beautiful SilkWing she'd ever seen, and is quite handsome. Cricket also thinks his face and wings are handsome.
- The Team Benefactor: The LeafWings are interested in him due to the possibility of him having flamesilk, which would give them the supplies to set anything they wanted on fire.
- Wide-Eyed Idealist: He’s an optimistic and empathetic dragon who lives in a tyranny and is treated as a second-class citizen (though he doesn’t realize it).
Cricket
Cricket
Narrates The Hive Queen. Cricket is bright and curious, and asks a lot of questions. She is one of the few HiveWings who is immune to Queen Wasp's mind control.- Bookworm: Loves to read books.
- Chekhov's Skill: Her ability to find hiding places, which she developed in order to hide form the other HiveWings while they were mind controlled, turns out to be very helpful when the whole tribe is trying to capture her and her friends.
- Constantly Curious: One of the traits she shares with Blue. She is always asking questions and is very interested in science.
- Curiosity Causes Conversion: When she first meets Blue, she is an Innocent Bigot motivated by a mix of genuine compassion and somewhat condescending curiosity about the strange dragon. Actually getting to know Blue and finding out how badly the SilkWings are treated by their society makes her become a genuine convert to their cause.
- Curiosity Killed the Cast: Her curiosity leads her to tread into increasingly dangerous territory trying to discover answers about her mind control immunity, as Katydid points out furiously.
- Determinator: She won't give up on trying to save the HiveWings from their mind control, or on trying to find out the truth.
- Family Relationship Switcheroo: Her parents have always been distant from her, while her elder sister dotes on her. She later finds out that her "older sister" is, in fact, her biological mother, who had an egg while still a dragonet, much to her grandparents' displeasure.
- The Idealist: Believes that at least some of the HiveWings will join them if they can be freed from their mind control, while Sundew believes that freeing them is impossible and they would all be horrible regardless.
- Intrigued by Humanity: She is fascinated by the "reading monkeys" and wants to study them.
- Immune to Mind Control: She is one of the few HiveWings who cannot be mind-controlled by Queen Wasp.
- Innocent Bigot: Though overall a good dragon, she starts out having somewhat bigoted views about SilkWings and never questioning some of the more problematic aspects of her society's treatment of them. She gradually grows out of this.
- Manifesto-Making Malcontent: She writes pamphlets about how everyone is being lied to about the contents of the book of Clearsight and distributes them throughout Jewel hive.
- Science Hero: She is interested in science, and sometimes uses this knowledge to help her friends, like when she uses a drug she was studying on plants in order to cure Swordtail's paralysis.
- Smart Dragons Wear Glasses: She wears glasses and is a very intelligent dragon.
- Token Heroic Orc: Her immunity to mind control makes her this for the HiveWings by default when Wasp is controlling them. She is quick to point out that, while most HiveWings are oppressing the SilkWings even when they are not being controlled, they aren't all bad and she shouldn't be considered the "only good one" in any other context.
- What the Hell, Hero?: She at one point lashes out at Tsunami when she finds out about animus magic, angry that the Pyrrhian dragons could help end the whole Pantalan crisis with a single spell and never told them. Snowfall eventually gives her the Gift of Stealth from the IceWing treasury in order to help on the mission.
- You Are a Credit to Your Race: Sundew considers her the only good HiveWing, and refuses to believe that Cricket's example could show that other HiveWings are like her as well.
- You Can't Go Home Again: Agreeing to help steal the Book Of Clearsight means that she will never be able to return to her home and her normal life again.
Sundew
Sundew
Narrates The Poison Jungle. A fierce dragon who was born and raised to be the savior of the PoisonWings by killing Queen Wasp and getting revenge on the HiveWings.- Adopt the Dog: When burning down Wasp's greenhouse, she stops to make sure a HiveWing guard she's knocked out from is dragged away from the flames and saved. Cricket realizes that Sundew would have never made such an effort to save a HiveWing before they met.
- Better with Non-Human Company: She is great at communing with plants and unfriendly and angry towards other dragons.
- Calling Parents by Their Name: She only respects Belladonna as her commander, and otherwise just calls both of her parents by their birth names rather than "Mother" and "Father".
- Child Hater: She hates dragonets, though Bumblebee ends up growing on her eventually.
- Childhood Friend Romance: She and her girlfriend Willow have been together since they were two years old—or about 8-10 in dragon terms—and they're incredibly devoted to one another.
- The Chosen One: Her strong leafspeak means she is considered this by her faction of the LeafWings, destined to save them from the HiveWings.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Though not really evil, she is fine most of her life with outright genocide of the HiveWings without concern for civilian or SilkWing casualties, but even she is horrified by Nettle's suggestion of how Hawthorn should have just poisoned Queen Wasp during their peace meeting.
- Hair-Trigger Temper: She gets angry very easily (at other dragons, the world, even random frogs). A lot of her Character Development centers around not blindly getting angry at everything but learning to use her anger to her advantage.
- Hidden Depths: She’s a much kinder dragon than she actually seems to be.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: She's fierce, short-tempered, gets angry easily, and outright hates the HiveWings and SilkWings with a few exceptions. However, deep down, she's a good dragon who constantly doubts herself and has a kind, vulnerable side that she very rarely shows.
- Licked by the Dog: Bumblebee absolutely adores her, and attempts to clamber all over her whenever Sundew has to hold her. Initially, Sundew resents this. However, she becomes very fond of her.
- Master Poisoner: She is an expert on poisonous animals and plants and carries various kinds in pouches to use on missions.
- Military Brat: She's the daughter of Belladonna, the first-in-command of the PoisonWings.
- Mundane Utility: Uses her powers for, among many other more practical uses, grow flowers all around the field where she and Willow meet as a romantic gesture.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: First, she gets seen by the whole of Wasp Hive in book 1, leading to Wasp now knowing that the LeafWings are still alive and deciding to launch a genocidal campaign against them. Then she unwittingly uses her powers to grow the Breath of Evil after being tricked into thinking it was a cure to the Breath of Evil, leading to most of the continent getting controlled by it.
- Odd Name Out: Her parents, Belladonna and Hemlock, are named after poisonous plants. Sundew is named after a carnivorous one.
- Secret Relationship: With Willow, due to them being from separate sections of the tribe who hate each other as well as how Sundew is supposed to marry someone else.
- Super-Persistent Predator: She met Willow by incessantly pursuing a frog that annoyed her all the way into the SapWing village, way past where most dragons would just let it go.
- The Team Benefactor: She's the only one of the main group who has an army to back her up if she needs to, plus the resources (like various poisonous insects and plants) to win a fight. Without her, they would just be an ineffectual Ragtag Bunch of Misfits.
- This Is Unforgivable!: She hates the HiveWings for what they did to her tribe, and the SilkWings for agreeing with them. However, she is slowly learning to forgive and realize that it is not the current HiveWings who are at fault.
- Tyke-Bomb: Her parents specifically got together because they had the most powerful leafspeak and so hers would be even greater, and she was born and raised to be the linchpin in the LeafWings' plan to destroy the HiveWings.
- Unwitting Pawn: The Breath of Evil, while controlling Hawthorn tricks her into using her powers to grow it.
Swordtail
Swordtail
A rebellious, outspoken SilkWing with a hatred for HiveWings. He's also Luna's Love Interest.- And I Must Scream: The prologue of The Dangerous Gift has him be aware of the Othermind controlling his body.
- Butt-Monkey: He often gets mocked and singled out as the least important or useful of the group, despite his insistence otherwise. Then in The Poison Jungle he recklessly wanders into a venus dragontrap thinking that it a flower.
- The Champion: For Luna. He's very determined to protect her once she goes missing.
- Fire-Forged Friends: With Sundew. They resent each other at first, but they realize that they aren't so different and become more tolerant of each other. Swordtail is one of the first members of the group that Sundew warms up to.
- His friendship with Blue could certainly also count.
- Large Ham: He's always somewhat like this, but exaggerated temporarily when Cricket uses a stimulant drug to cure his paralysis.
- Odd Friendship: With Blue, considering that they're total opposites.
- Too Dumb to Live: Nearly gets killed by stopping to sniff a carnivorous plant, despite being warned how dangerous most plants in the Poison Jungle are.
Bumblebee
Bumblebee
An orphaned dragonet who Cricket takes pity on. She hatches in The Hive Queen.- Baby Talk: As she's only a few days old, this is all she can speak.
- Big Eater: As a baby dragon, she's constantly hungry.
- Cheerful Child: Unfazed by everything and always happy.
- Cuteness Proximity: Even Swordtail, who hates most HiveWings, can't help but coo over how adorable she is. Even Sundew warms up to her eventually.
- Happily Adopted: Adopted by Cricket before even hatching, and clearly adores her odd surrogate family.
- Maternity Crisis: Of a sort. Bumblebee hatches at the worst possible time, while the protagonists are fugitives on the run.
- Meaningful Name: She is named after her black-and-yellow striped pattern, which resembles a bumblebee.
- No Indoor Voice: Being a baby, she has absolutely no concept of volume, and tends to yell whenever she wants something.
- Parental Abandonment: She was marked for an orphanage when Cricket finds her egg and we have no idea of who her parents are or what happened to them.
- Tag Along Kid: Ends up participating in much of Sundew's adventures, mostly because there's nowhere for her to stay.
- The Unintelligible: Her entire speech is just Baby Talk, as she's only a few days old, though very slowly others are able to pick out what she's trying to say.
- Trademark Favorite Food: She loves mangoes.
Snowfall
Snowfall
Narrates The Dangerous Gift. The newly-crowned Icewing Queen after the death of Queen Glacier due to the plague.- Ambiguously Bi: She has Ship Tease with both the female Lynx and the male Sky. In addition, she ends up comparing a male dragon (Graystripe) and Cricket, and declares that Graystripe is "not her type," but Cricket is closer to being her type than he was.
- Caps Lock: Uses this much more frequently than the other protagonists. This seems to be intentional, as the vast majority of it comes from her thoughts and dialogue. She thankfully tones it down by the end of the book.
- Character Development: At first, she's more concerned with keeping her tribe safe above all else by isolating them from the other tribes. She's paranoid and distrustful of the Pantalan dragons to the point where she brought the entire IceWing army and threatens the exhausted refugees. Over the course of her book, she becomes more open, sympathetic, and understanding of other dragons, realizing that every dragon has their own story and that her tribe would be dead or dying to the plague if they didn't get outside help. She plans on tearing the Great Ice Cliff down and destroys the gift of order, declaring that every dragon has the potential to do something important no matter who they are.
- Clingy MacGuffin: The ring of vision. No matter how hard she tries, she can't destroy it or take it off until she becomes more open-minded towards other dragons. They work by forcing her to live through another relevant character's point of view when it is needed, which leads to her finding out about crucial information that helps the dragons overall, even the cause of animus magic's disappearance.
- Cool Big Sis: Free of the rankings and the fears and pressures of being queen, she becomes this to Mink at the end of The Dangerous Gift, though she was also this to Mink when she was younger.
- Green-Eyed Monster: She's jealous of Winter for getting a higher score than her in the First Circle, so she is gleeful in pointing out that Narwhal just did it to get him killed in the Diamond Trial. She eventually stops holding it against him and unbanishes him near the end of The Dangerous Gift.
- Inadequate Inheritor: This is one of her big fears in The Dangerous Gift. At the Battle of Jade Mountain, she read the thoughts of many IceWings who didn't think she would be a good queen and were worried about the tribe under her rule. She also didn't understand why her mother had picked her over her older sister Crystal, and was paranoid about Crystal coming back to seize the throne with an army or assassinate her. She gets over this by the end when it's revealed that Queen Glacier knew she would be the best choice to be Queen because she would fight to protect the Ice Kingdom and its people and not crack under pressure like Crystal and Mink would.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Even before Character Development set in, she has a few valid points.
- She immediately mobilizes her military upon hearing about hundreds of dragons reaching her northern shores at the start of The Dangerous Gift, a number usually reserved for invasions. Only the readers know that they mean no harm but she has no way of knowing that.
- When she realizes that Moon is trying to read her mind, she is understandably upset and proceeds to mentally tell Moon off for invading her privacy.
- The Paranoiac: After becoming queen, she became very paranoid due to the IceWing plague that killed most of her tribe, as well as her mother. During the clash with the Nightwings, she learns that her own subjects do not think of her as an adequate queen, resulting in massive self-esteem issues. When she was designated as the next queen, her elder sister and supposed favourite Crystal suspiciously disappeared the next day, making Snowfall think that she is raising an army to take the throne for herself. Jerboa mentions how hard it is to work with her because of this. She grows out of it.
- Parental Favoritism: Is on the receiving end of this. She thinks that as the second daughter, she is second fiddle to her elder sister Crystal. While she had to claw her way to the top of the First Circle just earn her mother's favour, Crystal practically never needed to do so for her whole life to achieve the same result. Her final vision as Queen Glacier reveals that Snowfall working her way up to the top combined with her ferocity to protect the kingdom was what factored her into being the next queen. Snowfall realised that she was the favourite the whole time.
- Patriotic Fervor: She does not care for individuals much, but the IceWing kingdom as a whole is the most important thing in the world to her. She never stops believing that her people are better than anyone else's and deserve as good a life as she can make for them.
- Royal Brat: She's Glacier's daughter and is very snotty about her position atop the First Circle. She was excited to become queen after Queen Glacier's death, but it doesn't last long after she sees what she has to do. At the end of The Dangerous Gift, she stops being this almost completely.
- Small Role, Big Impact: Her constant requests to Jerboa II for animus gifts was the final straw that convinced the animus that animus magic is too dangerous for dragons to wield, resulting in it being shattered.
- Smash the Symbol: Realises that the gift of order aka the Circle system has brought more harm than good in the grand scheme of things in The Dangerous Gift, as the IceWings have judged the worth of their entire lives through its numbering rather than their own merit and spent more time focusing on how to rise up its ranks instead of the present. She uses the gift of strength to smash it into powder, much to the cheer of her (younger) subjects. As a bonus, this means Snowfall doesn't have to deal with it on a daily basis anymore.
- Spoiled Brat: She was very spoiled and unkind to other dragons before she became queen. A significant part of her paranoia and anxiety in The Dangerous Gift comes from her hearing the inner thoughts of all of the IceWings around her, many of whom think that she's too spoiled and selfish to be queen.
- My God, What Have I Done?: After one of her final visions, she realizes that it was her paranoid demands to Jerboa that caused her to break animus magic, as her attitude confirmed to Jerboa's mind that she would misuse anything that she gave her. While she's less upset with this than she would have been at the start of the book, Snowfall does at least realize and acknowledge that it was her fault.
- Unexpected Successor: On Queen Glacier's deathbed, she was expecting her older sister Crystal to be the next IceWing queen. After swearing an oath with her sisters to not fight each other for the throne like the SandWings, Snowfall was chosen instead, much to the shock of everyone.
- You Are Better Than You Think You Are: She starts off constantly anxious and full of doubts about becoming queen, scared her older sister will come back to kill her and take the throne while also aware that nearly no other IceWings respect or like her due to her spoiled attitude. The last vision she sees has her go inside her mother's head, hearing her thoughts on how she was just as anxious, scared, and lost as queen and having to make the best decisions she could, while also hearing Glacier think that the reason she chose Snowfall was because while she knew Crystal and Mink would both break under the weight of the responsibility, Snowfall would fight and do whatever she could to protect the tribe, finally giving her closure and the confidence she needs to rule.
- Young and in Charge: She becomes queen at only seven years old after her mother dies from the IceWing plague.
Luna
Luna
Narrates The Flames of Hope. Blue's sister who was the first Pantalan dragon to reach Pyrrhia by accident.- Ascended Extra: Was a side character for the third arc before becoming the protagonist in her own book.
- Big Brother Instinct: Even though they’re vastly different, she cares deeply for her younger brother, Blue, and is constantly worried about him, especially after she’s blown away to Pyrrhia by a storm.
- Broken Pedestal: She's extremely excited to meet Moon, especially when she learns she can see the future like Clearsight. However, her idolization quickly turns to a lot of disappointment when she finds out that while Moon can see the future, she can't do it as much or as well as Clearsight could and doesn't have magic powers that she can use to help fight the HiveWings.
- Damsel in Distress: Thinks of herself as this, as she's always waiting for Swordtail or others to rescue her, but she manages to actually become the hero by the end.
- Early-Bird Cameo: She's the dragon from the lost continent that Moon and Qibli meet in the Darkness of Dragons epilogue.
- I Just Want to Be Special: At the start of the book, she wants any sort of magic powers that she can use to help fight the HiveWings and free the SilkWings and stop Queen Wasp. While she gets this with her flamesilk, she doesn't think that's enough and wants those sorts of powers to make change. Her experiences in The Flames of Hope show her that not only was she approaching similar territory with the Othermind, but that she was also able to stop the Breath of Evil with just her regular silk.
- Innocently Insensitive: She thinks a lot of disparaging thoughts at Moon during their time together, both in the rest of Arc 3 and during The Flames of Hope, which leads her to become ashamed of herself when she learns that Moon can read minds.
- "Not So Different" Remark: At the start of The Flames of Hope she wants magic powers that she can use to force all of the Pantalan tribes to work together and agree that Queen Wasp is the worst. However, she comes to realize through her conversations with Cottonmouth and Lizard that doing that would basically be doing the same thing the Othermind and Queen Wasp were doing.
- Sibling Yin-Yang: With her brother Blue. He's empathetic, kind, naïve, and generally follows the rules. Luna, while still kind, is much more aware of SilkWing prejudice, and is smart and more fierce, and tends to speak out against HiveWings and break the rules more often.
- Stepford Smiler: Luna has "sunny days" and "rainy days" where she's in a good mood or very depressed. Throughout The Flames of Hope she has to constantly put on a positive attitude even when she's feeling hopeless. A big part of her character development is learning that it's okay to talk about those feelings and she doesn't have to put up a front, especially as she talks to Cricket and experiences the memories of the other members of the team and how they feel.
