Literature / Wings of Fire

"Here there be dragons" might be an understatement.

"Five eggs to hatch on Brightest Night. Five Dragons born to end the fight. Darkness will rise to bring the light. The Dragonets are coming..."

—Last lines of The Dragonet Prophecy

Wings of Fire is a series of dragon-centric children's fantasy books by Tui T. Sutherland, a member of the Erin Hunter team. The books take place on the Constructed World of Pyrrhia, a continent on a planet only known as "the dragon planet". Pyrrhia is inhabited by seven different tribes: the IceWings, SandWings, SkyWings, MudWings, RainWings, NightWings, and SeaWings.

Twenty years ago, Queen Oasis of the SandWings was killed by a group of humans who sought her treasure. Without a clear heir, her three daughters began to fight over the SandWing throne, which led to an all-out war that has torn Pyrrhia apart. Fourteen years later, the NightWings foresaw a prophecy that a group of dragons born on the brightest night (a rare time in Pyrrhia when all three of its moons are full), the Dragonets of Destiny, would choose a queen, stop the war, and bring peace. Now six years old and trapped under a cave for all their lives, the Dragonets of Destiny decide to escape, meet their families, and somehow save the world in the process. Each book is from the point of view of one of the five dragonets.

First arc:

1. The Dragonet Prophecy (2012): Details the dragonets' training and as they escape out into the world, focusing on Clay.
2. The Lost Heir (2013): Chronicles the dragonets' ongoing search for their parents, focusing on Tsunami.
3. The Hidden Kingdom (2013): Follows their attempt to escape the war by retreating into neutral RainWing territory, and is told from Glory's point of view.
4. The Dark Secret (2013): Focuses on Starflight.
5. The Brightest Night (2014): Focuses on Sunny's efforts to put an end to the war once and for all.

The second arc takes place after the first one. Pyrrhia has entered a time of peace, and the Dragonets of Destiny have opened up a school, the Jade Mountain Academy. Moonwatcher, a NightWing dragonet, enrolls in the school, but as strange things begin to happen around her, it's up to her and her new friends to find out what's going on and get to the bottom of it.

Second arc:

1. Moon Rising (2015): Centers on a young NightWing called Moonwatcher.
2. Winter Turning (2015): Led by Winter.
3. Escaping Peril (2016): Follows Peril.
4. Talons of Power (2016): From the perspective of Turtle.
5. Darkness of Dragons (2017): Focuses on Qibli.

The third arc introduced a new continent, Pantala, and three new tribes: HiveWings, SilkWings, and LeafWings. Blue has lived a relative happiness as a second-class citizen in Cicida Hive with his stepsister Luna. However, when Luna begins displaying a strange and rare ability, Blue realizes that something very sinister is going on, and along with some unlikely allies, finds secrets that are far more dangerous than he could've ever imagined.

Third arc:

1. The Lost Continent (2018): Led by Blue.
2. The Hive Queen (2018): Focuses on Cricket.
3. The Poison Jungle (2019): Focuses on Sundew.
4. The Dangerous Gift (2021): From the perspective of Queen Snowfall.
5. The Flames of Hope (2022): Focuses on Luna.

There is also a series of E-Books called Winglets, exploring the backstories of some of the side characters.

1. Prisoners: From Fierceteeth's perspective.
2. Assassin Follows Deathbringer.
3. Deserter: Follows Six-Claws.
4. Runaway: Follows Arctic and Foeslayer.

The series has also been adapted into graphic novels.

There is also a series of extra-length prequel books, Wings of Fire: Legends. Only two have been released as of yet — Darkstalker, released in 2016, is from the points of view of Darkstalker, Fathom, and Clearsight. The second one, Dragonslayer, was released in 2020, and is shown through the point of view of three scavengers named Ivy, Leaf, and Wren.

On March 5, 2020, it was announced that an animated television series adaptation was in development at Netflix and would have been made by Warner Bros. Animation and Ava DuVernay. However, on May 17, 2022, Netflix suddenly announced its cancellation mid-development, alongside a bunch of animated projects. On February 22, 2024, Amazon MGM Studios announced acquisition of the rights to develop the series, but with an entirely different creative team. Marc Resteghini of Jack Tar Productions will serve as executive producer.

Please add all new character tropes to the character sheet.

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This series provides examples of:

• Accidental Murder: Queen Coral killing her first daughter Orca by stabbing her with a narwhal horn after being challenged for the throne was completely accidental.
• A Day in the Limelight: The winglet e-books are this for its protagonists (Fierceteeth, Deathbringer, Six-Claws, and Snowflake). All of them are written in the point-of-view of supporting characters and focus on their perspectives on certain events or their backstories.
• Animal Motifs: SilkWings are based off of butterflies, being four-winged dragons who come in a variety of bright colors and go through a metamorphosis where they gain wings when they've reached a certain age.
• After-Action Healing Drama: After Moon, Winter, Qibli, and Kinkajou's fight with Chameleon and The Reveal that Pyrite is actually Hailstorm, the dragonets then have to fly to Possibility to get medical treatment for the gravely injured Kinkajou.
• Alas, Poor Villain: While Arctic was a terrible husband and father who tried to kidnap his daughter, his death (being forced by his own son to rip out his tongue and disembowel himself in front of a crowd) is so gruesome that it's hard not to feel bad for him.
• Alien Blood: IceWing blood is blue.
• Alien Sky: The planet both Pyrrhia and Pantala are on has three moons.
• Aliens Never Invented the Wheel:
  • The NightWings are the most technologically and scientifically advanced tribe and know about things like desalinization, genetics and germ theory, but they apparently never invented glass, considering the impractical device Mastermind makes to shield the eyes from RainWing venom.
  • HiveWings, however, do have glass, as well as things like bound books (the Pyrrhian tribes use scrolls), sugar, and currency, and are more technologically and architecturally advanced than the Pyrrhian dragons in general. However, while they have indoor plumbing, greenhouses, hydroponics, megacities and ''remote controlled tranquilizers'', they don't seem to have figured out concrete, candles or coal.
• All Deaths Final: Animus magic is incapable of resurrecting the dead.
• All Love Is Unrequited: In the first arc, Fatespeaker is in love with Starflight, who is in love with Sunny. In the second series, Umber is suggested to have a crush on Qibli, who is suggested to have a crush on Moonwatcher. Winter also has a crush on Moonwatcher, and Kinkajou has a crush on Winter, and Turtle has an implied crush on Kinkajou.
• Alliterative Family: The three SandWing sisters are Burn, Blister, and Blaze.
• All of Them:
  • Willow is horrified when she finds out that Sundew was seen by HiveWings during her mission and asks Sundew how many have seen her, thinking it was a very small number or even just one. Sundew responds that ''all'' of them did.
  • Darkstalker doesn't just want to kill the IceWing queen...
• An Aesop:
  • Sometimes, things aren't as perfect you thought it would be and you'll end up disappointed and unsatisfied with it. However, just because something isn't what you expected, that doesn't mean you can't find some sort of beauty or value in it.
  • Your upbringing, abilities, or skill set does not make you a bad person. It's your actions that make you a bad person, and everyone, no matter who they are, has the potential to be a good person.
  • It's not healthy to be angry all the time and lash out whenever something's going wrong for you, nor is it healthy to suppress that anger deep down. The key is to control your anger and use it to your advantage when needed.
  • Relating to the first point: the group that you were and raised in is not perfect, and some of its members have done horrible things, as Winter and Sundew learn. Stereotyping other groups and thinking your group as superior to theirs is also not good. Once you go out into the world, you'll realize that your group's views aren't necessarily correct and that other groups and people aren't what you thought they were.
• The Anti-Nihilist: In book 6, when Sora is fussing over how everyone probably suspected from the start she planted the bomb that killed two dragons and injured Tamarin, Moon is the first to voice that's not true: dragons are self-centered by nature, and thus were thinking more about themselves at the time. On paper, this is a rather demoralizing testament that the dragons of Phyrria are selfish through and through. But for Moon, this is an oddly comforting thought. Because it lets her know that everyone has worries and insecurities about how others will view them. If anything, this lets Moon know that her imaginary audience was just that and nothing more.
• An Arm and a Leg: Dune lost his leg due to IceWing soldiers. He also has a shredded wing, courtesy of Burn, making him unable to fly. He gets killed by Scarlet for this exact reason.
• Ancient Artifact: Animus-touched objects.
• And I Must Scream:
  • After Darkstalker loses the bracelet, he is trapped underground without his animus powers, fully conscious but unable to escape.
  • Foeslayer is trapped in an ice tunnel for nearly 2,000 years, where she is killed repeatedly during a practice known as the Diamond Trial as "revenge" for supposedly stealing Prince Arctic, the last animus IceWing. Luckily, she gets freed by Winter and Hailstorm, and now lives a happy life in the rainforest.
  • Indigo, who Darkstalker fears is becoming a rift in his and Fathom's friendship, as well as her being suspicious of him, is trapped inside of an octopus carving Fathom made for her for months without anyone noticing.
  • Mastermind is punished by the RainWings by being thrown in quicksand and being pulled back out when he's about to die, as the RainWings don't have a prison where they can keep him in.
• An Ice Person: The IceWing dragons breathe a freezing mist instead of fire.
• Animal Assassin: In The Brightest Night, Blister tries to use venomous dragonbite vipers, which she had given Burn as a gift, to kill her. Burn never takes them, but in the peace meeting that the dragonets of destiny organize, she tries to give the snakes to Burn instead. Burn tries to kill Blister with one of the snakes, but ends up dead instead because she doesn't realize that there are two.
• Ancient Evil:
  • Darkstalker is the oldest dragon in the series, having been trapped under a mountain for 2,000 years.
  • The Othermind has been alive for thousands of years, even before the first BeetleWings and LeafWings flew to Pantala.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: Turtle apparently has these. When Peril and Cliff get in an argument about who really saved the day, Turtle declares that he has brothers, so he knows Peril will never win.
• Anti-Climax: A justified example with Darkstalker, as the main antagonist in question is both invincible and immortal. The book sets up a confrontation between Clearsight, Darkstalker, Indigo, and Fathom, with the latter two rushing to meet the former before Darkstalker does anything to harm Clearsight. The "confrontation" is nothing more than Clearsight baiting Darkstalker into tackling her so she can slip an enchanted braclet onto his arm, which makes him fall asleep immediately and indefinitely. She then very quickly hides his body in a cave behind boulders. By the time Indigo and Fathom arrive, Darkstalker has already been dealt with and Clearsight is nowhere to be found.
• Anyone Can Die: Not to the extent of most series under this trope, but it's never a good idea to assume someone's safe for structural reasons. Notable examples include:
  • Book 1 kills off Hvitur, the SkyWing dragonet, Dune, and Kestrel.
  • Book 2 kills off Crocodile and Whirlpool.
  • Book 4 kills off Viper, Battlewinner, and Morrowseer.
  • Book 5 kills off Burn and Blister.
  • Book 6 kills off Carnelian.
  • Book 8 kills off Queen Scarlet.
  • Book 10 erases Darkstalker from existence. It's confirmed via Word of God that he will stay as Peacemaker forever, will never remember his past self, and will vaporize into nothing if the transformation is undone since his immortality spells were nullified.
  • Book 13 kills off Hawthorn.
• Arc Villain: The five main heroes of the second story arc have to deal with their own villian in their own book (in order) Sora (for Moonwatcher), Icicle (for Winter), Scarlet (for Peril), Anemone (for Turtle) and Darkstalker (for Qibil).
• Aristocrats Are Evil: Just look at the character sheet. Nearly every single queen is The Caligula.
• Arranged Marriage:
  • Queen Diamond intended for her son Arctic and Snowflake to be married. However, both of them dislike each other, and Arctic ends up running away and marying Foeslayer, while Snowflake was in love with Arctic's cousin Snowfox.
  • Sundew and Mandrake were going to be in one, since the two both had leafspeak and could therefore reproduce and have more leafspeak dragons (Sundew's parents also married because of this). The two have no romantic feelings for each other due to Sundew being a lesbian, and they end up breaking off their engagement and remain as acquaintances.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • The dragonets dislike Blister because she killed Kestrel, she's creepy and manipulative and, in Sunny's case, because she called her sweet.
  • When Ruby is trying to figure out where Tourmaline went:
  "There were no splatters of blood. No sign of a struggle. No note saying "Oh, I've popped off to one of the outposts for a few days, see you soon."
• Artifact Title: The title Wings of Fire, which references a line in the original prophecy, isn't relevant for the second and third arc.
• Attack the Tail: All dragons have a weak point on their tail. Dragons often attack it in battle.
• Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Invoked by the NightWings, who are neutral in the war but whose influence would strongly turn the war in whichever side they choose's favor. And it turns out that this was their plan all along, and they have just now decided on supporting Blister.
• Axes at School: The plot of Moon Rising involves a dragon flame cactus being set off in Jade Mountain Academy's history cave, and Moon trying to find out who did it. This later escalates to the same dragon who set the bomb trying to throw a stalactite on her intended target, and said target trying to kill all of the founders and battling Moon and Qibli, who try to stop her.
• Babies Ever After:
  • Darkstalker sends Moon a vision of the future that invokes this trope for the original Dragonets of Destiny (Except possibly Sunny.)
  • Also Clearsight and Darkstalker's happiest visions about the future, where they have six dragonets and live happily together, and even get to maybe save the tribe.
  • The epilogue of Darkstalker features Fathom and Indigo's dragonets.
  • Clearsight flies to Pantala and ends up having dragonets with multiple BeetleWings, who would later evolve to become modern SilkWings and HiveWings.
• The Bad Guy Wins: The Poison Jungle ends with the Othermind's goal being achieved after Sundew accidentally grows the Breath of Evil and infects hundreds of dragons, including several of the protagonists.
• Bad Powers, Bad People: Some NightWings can infect prey with bacteria by biting them, slowly killing them, but it's almost entirely antagonistic NightWings who have that power. Justified because the reason the NightWings can do this is that they adjusted to eating rotten food in the volcano, and the whole reason they are behind some reprehensible acts is to escape from the volcano. Starflight and other NightWings on the dragonets' side were either raised outside the NightWing island or they have been away for long enough both to lose that ability and develop rebellious opinions.
• Bad Powers, Good People: Peril's character arc in Escaping Peril involves realizing that her powers don't make her evil, her actions do. In the same book, Winter balks at releasing Darkstalker due to his "horrible powers", only to be reminded that those powers are the same as Moonwatcher's and Turtle's powers.
• Battle in the Rain: The battle between Scarlet and Ruby/Tourmaline.
• Beastly Bloodsports: Queen Scarlet forces other dragons (and occasionally humans) to fight each other in a pit, gladiator-style.
• Betty and Veronica: Genderflipped. Moon must choose between the kind, lighthearted Qibli, and the moodier, more mysterious Winter. She ends up with Qibli.
• Beware My Stinger Tail: Several tribes have these.
  • SandWings have a poisonous barb in their tail.
  • IceWings have whip-thin tails with spikes at the tip.
  • Some HiveWings have stingers in their tail.
• Bigot with a Crush: Winter is very prejudiced against NightWings even more than the average IceWing is (because of an It's Personal backstory in addition to the general hared the two tribes have for each other). He also has a crush on Moonwatcher, a NightWing, which he feels guilty about. The bigotry part gets better after a lot of Character Development, though.
• Blank White Eyes: The HiveWings have this when being mind-controlled.
• Blessed with Suck:
  • Becoming the Librarian is considered a great honor for the HiveWings, but it actually involves having to stay in the temple your whole life and having the HiveWing queen controlling your mind for your whole life.
  • Being an animus could qualify as well, as each use of your powers does further damage to your soul until you eventually go insane. It's later heavily implied that this only happens when animus magic is used for evil, however.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: When Peril is describing how her life was before the series started.
  "Do you know anything about my life? Here's how it went: Wake up, eat breakfast, Queen Scarlet tells me to kill one of her prisoners, I kill that prisoner, eat dinner, go back to sleep".
• Brick Joke: Prudence is berating Foeslayer when she suddenly freezes in place courtesy of Arctic. Several pages later Arctic unfreezes her to get her out of the kingdom, and she finally finishes her insult that reader had probably forgotten about by that point.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family:
  • The SeaWing royal family. Queen Coral neglects her many sons and is overprotective of her daughters, she killed her oldest daughter in a challenge, (and said eldest daughter made a Living Statue to kill her sisters in the egg). Her oldest surviving daughter, Tsunami, killed her father without knowing it was him, one of her daughters may or may not be going insane due to her animus powers, the dragon she wants her daughter to marry wants to kill the oldest for being annoyingly rebellious, and wants to marry her newborn daughter instead, and her niece is so loyal to her that she literally cleans up the brains of dragons she tortured to death for letting one of her daughters die. Turtle is an secret animus who enchanted Anemone to have powers. Anemone was nearly driven insane, and seemed okay with murdering her family. Yeah.
  • Also the case for the Sea Wing royal family back in Darkstalker's day: There's Lagoon, a classist, vain, cruel Queen who abuses her brother for his magic; Albatross, who is slowly being driven insane to the point of murdering his entire family because of Lagoon's abuse and the guilt of almost killing his other sister; Sapphire, the said sister who was almost killed, who is now insane and lives alone on an island suffering forever for her brother's mistake; Fathom, who is permanently traumatized from the Massacre, unable to marry the person he loves, and terrified of his own magic; and Pearl, the only survivor who has to pick up the pieces and become queen at age six.
  • The SandWing royal family, consisting of three warring sisters who all hate each other's guts and want to see the other two dead so they can get the throne. One is a bloodthirsty Nightmare Fetishist, one is a Manipulative Bitch who frequently backstabs and kills her allies when they're no longer useful to her, and the other is extremely incompetent and vain.
• Boarding School: Jade Mountain Academy.
• Body Horror:
  • The extremely graphic descriptions of what RainWing venom does to Dragons. Especially Queen Scarlet, who survived a venom strike and is described as having her face almost entirely melted off, to the point were part of her skull was exposed.
  • The physical condition of Queen Battlewinner of the NightWings in Book 4. During a battle with an IceWing, the freezing breath of the IceWing went down her throat and began to freeze her from the inside out. She has to stay in a cauldron of lava in order to balance out her body temperature, and the very act of talking causes the ice inside her to shatter and puncture her throat.
  • How Prince Arctic dies in Darkstalker is especially horrifying.
• Bodyguard Crush: Deathbringer to Glory, once he actually becomes her bodyguard.
• Book Ends: The Dark Secret begins and ends with Starflight being unconscious.
  • In "The Dragonet Prophecy" arc, Book 1 has Sunny in danger of being sent to Burn's oddity museum. Book 5 has her go there of her own free will.
• Botanical Abomination: While not terrifying in appearance, the Othermind is a sapient plant who can speak and displays disturbingly human-like behaviors. It also wants to turn all of dragonkind into a mindless hivemind as revenge for "stealing" Pantala from it.
• Cain and Abel: The three SandWing sisters, Winter and Icicle, Orca and all of her siblings, posthumously...
• Call-Forward: Darkstalker notes that he isn't as good at telling the future as Clearsight, and the only way he'd have time for that is if he was trapped underground for months on end with nothing to do. Guess what happens to him?
• CamelCase: Each of the tribes names are written in this way, consisting of some substance followed by "Wing".
• Career-Ending Injury: Averted. Starflight is blinded in Book 4, making it seem like his days of reading scrolls are over, but Book 6 shows him reading by touch from carved stone slabs instead, and he becomes Jade Mountain's librarian. Book 10 shows that he's working with Tamarin to make scrolls for blind people. Played straight with Osprey, who can't guard his Dragon Hoard and has to move into the main SkyWing kingdom after a scavenger paralyzes his tail and makes him unable to fly.
• Cataclysm Backstory: Scavengers used to rule the continent of Pyrrhia until a great cataclysm known as "the Scorching" befell them.
• Catch a Falling Star: Clay catches Tsunami after she falls from an Inevitable Waterfall while unable to fly due to a dislocated shoulder. Later on, Tsunami catches Webs when he falls from the canopy of the Summer Palace.
• Cave Behind the Falls: The cave that the dragonets originally live in turns out to be one.
• Challenging the Chief: All dragon tribes' queens ( Except for the RainWings') are decided when one of her daughters, sisters, or nieces challenges her for the throne, and kills her in combat. The series' first arc's plot kicks off when the SandWing queen is killed by a human, leaving her three daughters to go at war over which of them most deserves the throne.
  • Averted in the case of Queen Glacier. While on her deathbed, she names Snowfall as her new heir after her three daughters promise not to fight for the throne.
• Character Development: Each dragonet goes through it in their particular books.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Within the list of the SandWing's lost treasures given in The Dragonet Prophecy is the Eye of Onyx. It later plays a central role in The Brightest Night, where Sunny spends half the book looking for it, and it ultimately allows Sunny to crown Thorn queen and stop Blister.
  • Among the various decorations in the Sea Kingdom is a statue of Orca, which turns out to be enchanted, and the real murderer of Tsunami's sisters.
  • When the SkyWings bomb the Summer Palace in The Lost Heir, the drop flaming logs that are surprisingly effective. This plays a large role in Moon Rising, where it turns out that the logs had explosive dragonflame cactuses in them, which a dragon uses to blow up the history cave, setting off the main conflict of the book.
  • The RainWings' tranquilizer darts turn out to be important later on in The Dark Secret when they use them to infiltrate the Night kingdom without having to kill any of the guards.
  • Near the beginning of The Dark Secret, Starflight gets to observe Mastermind's various inventions, one of which is a strange looking suit of armor. Turns out that it is for containing lava inside it, hinting at just what happened to Queen Battlewinner.
  • In The Brightest Night, Thorn goes to burn out a dangerous Dragonbite Viper, describes as the only snake able to kill a dragon. This turns out to be important later on when Blister releases two of them, killing Burn and almost killing Clay.
  • Pyrite's necklace in Winter Turning is later revealed to be the enchantment that gives her her identity as Pyrite instead of Hailstorm.
  • Turtle carries around a rock from the river all of the time, which he enchanted to have healing powers. When he uses it, it saves Winter's life and reveals that he's an animus.
  • Queen Ruby is mentioned in the Winter Turning prologue to wear an earring, which like Pyrite, is enchanting her to give her her identity, and she is actually Tourmaline.
  • In Assassin, Deathbringer notices several weapons strewn around in the area where Blister and her allies are meeting, like a MudWing spear which he uses to kill Tempest and make the SeaWings think the MudWings betrayed them.
  • Foeslayer's earring in Darkstalker. We know it's enchanted and what it is enchanted to do from the start, but it ends up becoming important when she throws it off angrily in a fight with Arctic, allowing Queen Diamond to capture her.
  • The bracelet that protects dragons from mind readers in Darkstalker. Clearsight uses the protection to allow her to put Darkstalker to sleep without him realizing her planned betrayal.
  • Remember that "Kinkajou is unimportant to Darkstalker" spell that Turtle gives Kinkajou in book 9? Kinkajou uses this knowledge to defeat Darkstalker in book 10.
  • Shapeshifter / Chameleon was the first to discover Darkstalker's scroll, and still has some pieces of that scroll. Torns out that it can still be written on using the back, and Darkstalker is immune to every dragons animus magic except his own.
  • The Breath of Evil plays a minor role in The Hive Queen, being introduced as an unnamed plant that Queen Wasp uses to mind-control HiveWings. Come the next book, it's revealed that Hawthorn has been studying it for fifty years, and that the Othermind can use it to have telepathic control over creatures, just as long as they get in contact with the Breath of Evil. Sundew being tricked into growing it is what causes thousands of dragons to get infected.
  • In the third arc, Blue and Cricket find a deep hole in the middle of the savannah to hide from the Hivewings. It turns out that the cave has a pit that the Pantalan humans dub the "abyss." It is unknown exactly what it contains, but it's related to the Othermind in some way, possibly being a cure for it. Likewise, Vole tells Raven that it's time to bring a dragon to the pit.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • Gill is just some random prisoner that Tsunami kills, right? He's actually Tsunami's father and the king of the SeaWings.
  • A very short-term one, but when Clay is touring the Mud Kingdom, he sees the head of a small dragon pop out briefly, who turns out to be one of his brothers.
  • Cirrus has only one appearance in the whole first arc, threatening Webs in the prologue of The Lost Heir. Then he reappears in Winter Turning, and by Escaping Peril he's revealed to be an alternate identity of Chameleon, the Enigmatic Minion who the main characters spend the first half of the second arc fighting, as well as Peril's father.
  • Tsunami's brothers as well - she clearly has them, since they're not being killed like her sisters, but they're never really talked about. Then we get introduced to Turtle in Moon Rising, and he is the protagonist of Talons of Power, which also introduces Octopus, Cerulean, and Fin.
  • The Lost Heir introduces two Posthumous Characters, Orca and Albatross. Orca turns out to have been killing her sisters after she died via Living Statues, and Albatross figures heavily in Fathom and Darkstalker's backstory in Moon Rising.
  • Smolder is briefly mentioned in The Hidden Kingdom, where there is a picture of him and Palm in Blaze's headquarters. In his actual first appearance of more than a chapter in The Brightest Night, he spends a lot of time with Sunny, reveals the nature of the Eye of Onyx, and along with Flower, ends up finding said treasure.
  • Grandeur is briefly mentioned as one of the six RainWing queens, but not the one who is currently queen and thus not the one that Glory interacts with. But within the last few chapter of The Hidden Kingdom, she beats Kinkajou in the final round of the competition to become queen turns out to be related to Glory and the last full-time queen of the original RainWing royal line, and the last competent queen, and abdicates to allow Glory to be queen.
  • Kinkajou mentions her friend Tamarin offhand, leading Glory to choose her as a participant in the contest to be queen, where she wins a crucial round. She is also injured in the history cave explosion in Moon Rising.
  • Fierceteeth gets a minor role in The Dark Secret, where we find out that she's Starflight's sister and doesn't particularly like him, but not much else. But in The Brightest Night, she ends up kidnapping Sunny to set off the whole plot, she gets to star in Prisoners and is currently at the head of a revolt that's clearly going to be important in the next few books.
  • Sunny sees a random scavenger while she is chasing after Fierceteeth, Strongwings and Preyhunter. Said scavenger has a dreamvisitor which she uses to contact Sunny, leading to Sunny returning to the scavenger den and finding both most of the lost SandWing treasure and said dreamvisitor, which she and Clay use to prevent a genocide and convince Burn and her allies to go to their peace meeting.
  • Jambu and Bullfrog discuss a RainWing who couldn't sleep due to a snout deformity in Winter Turning. That RainWing is actually Chameleon, the true identity of the scribe who is one of the main antagonists of Winter Turning and the next book, Escaping Peril.
  • The humans in general after The Dangerous Gift. Not only are the dragons now aware of their sentience, the humans on Pantala also hold the key to stopping the Othermind with something that they call "the abyss."
• Chekhov's Volcano: The NightWings live in a volcano, which they resident Mad Scientist Mastermind says will erupt in a few years. However, it ends up erupting at the end of The Dark Secret.
• The Chessmaster: Blister, Morrowseer and Queen Battlewinner.
• Child Soldiers: The SkyWings, MudWings, and IceWings all use them.
• The Chosen Many: The Dragonets and they aren't very enthusiastic about it. Subverted once it turns out the prophecy was made up by the NightWings as part of a complicated plan to secure a new home in the RainWings' jungle, due to their island being slowly destroyed by an erupting volcano.
• Class Trip: The dragonets talk about having class trips to the various kingdoms for Jade Mountain Academy students.
• Climactic Volcano Backdrop: The climax of The Dark Secret.
• Clingy MacGuffin: The ring of vision that Snowfall puts on can't be taken off or broken until it decides the wearer is "ready".
• Colour-Coded Emotions: In addition to camouflage, RainWings change color according to their emotions. Red is anger, white is fear, yellow is happiness/amusement, gray is sadness, pink is happiness or love, purple is guilt and white is pain.
• Comet of Doom:
  • Inverted. The appearance of a comet when there are two full moons makes it look like another Brightest Night, which dragons consider a good omen for the peace meeting at the end of "The Brightest Night".
  • Played straight in the second series, as Darkstalker reveals the comet passed close enough that its gravity caused a slight tremor under Agate Mountain which broke the ancient enchanted bracelet keeping Darkstalker asleep, and since Talons of Power seems to set him up as the obvious Big Bad of the next series...
• Coming of Age Story: Each book follows dragons who would be considered teenagers in human years maturing and finding their purpose in life.
• Constructed World: The series is set in the continents of Pyrrhia and Pantala on a planet that clearly isn't our, even having three moons.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: The Dragonets of Destiny were The Chosen Many and were raised from birth to fulfill the prophecy; by contrast, the Jade Winglet are a group of random dragonets, some of whom happen to have special powers, and the protagonists in the third arc are a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits on the run.
  • The SeaWing protagonist of the first arc, Tsunami, was headstrong, bold, and a good fighter who was the de facto leader of the Dragonets of Destiny. Her younger brother and the SeaWing protagonist of the second arc, Turtle, is a quiet Squishy Wizard with a large amount of self-doubt who prefers to stay in the background and acts as The Smart Guy of the Jade Winglet.
  • The NightWing protagonist of the first arc, Starflight, was a nerdy bookworm with an Inferiority Superiority Complex, and had no special powers to speak of. The NightWing protagonist of the second arc, Moon, is a painfully shy Shrinking Violet with a Friendless Background who has telepathy and precognition.
  • Unlike the other protagonists of the second arc, Qibli has no special powers and is not a member of royalty, and instead is a Guile Hero who relies on his wits and skill at reading others to make up for it.
• Convection, Schmonvection: No dragons are actually injured by lava or Peril's fire without being touched by it. However, dragons are noted to have a resistance to fire in general, and don't die as quickly as humans would even when they actually touch lava.
• Cool Big Sis: Tsunami towards Anemone and Auklet, whom she is very protective of. Katydid is this to Cricket as well, in contrast to their mother, though this is subverted when it turns out that Katydid is in fact Cricket's mother.
• Cool Gate: Stonemover created portals that connect the Rain, Sand, and Night kingdoms.
• Cruel Twist Ending: Almost every novel but the last in an arc seems to feature one.
  • The Dragonet Prophecy ends with Clay being hopeful for the future. We then cut to the brutal murder of Kestrel.
  • The Lost Heir suddenly has Webs be attacked by Blister out of nowhere, resulting in a poisonous wound which will almost certainly kill him. Arguably the whole sequence after the statue fight is one big Cruel Twist Ending. Then there’s the alternates...
  • The Hidden Kingdom ends with Glory becoming queen... then it’s revealed that Starflight has seemingly backstabbed them.
  • The Dark Secret has 2. That the prophecy is fake and to end the book Starflight loses his sight.
  • Moon Rising reveals that a hithero unseen ally of Scarlet has obtained the Darkstalker scroll.
  • Inverted in Winter Turning. Instead of Foeslayer being the historical monster Winter assumed she was, she's actually fairly nice, just put in a bad position by her husband's family.
  • Escaping Peril ends with Peril doing the right thing... or not, as Darkstalker is released.
  • On a completely related note, Darkstalker ends all well and good, with the immortal nigh-unstoppable Darkstalker being put to sleep forever at the hands of the only dragons capable. Oh, but then the epilogue mentions that he wakes up 2000 years later...
  • Talons of Power ends with Turtle losing his animus power. Though this is somewhat of a bittersweet ending as him allowing himself to be discovered saved both Kinkajou and Anemone, while giving Anemone the same disguising power to use against Darkstalker that he had.
  • The Hive Queen ends with Bloodworm Hive being bombed as the protagonists are hopeless to stop it, signifying that the LeafWing rebellion has begun.
  • The Poison Jungle ends with Sundew inadvertently poisoning most of the LeafWing tribe with the Breath of Evil just when it looked like she was going to cure the HiveWings and end the war and the scattered survivors evacuating to Pyrrhia, while most of the SilkWings are still in the line of fire and it would be very risky to try to save them.
    • There's also the epilogue, where Jerboa (the daughter, not the mother) is implied to have removed animus magic from Pyrrhia. This is confirmed in The Dangerous Gift.
• Curtains Match the Window: Most dragon tribes often have eyes that match their scale color (MudWings have orange or brown eyes, SkyWings can have orange eyes, SeaWings have green or blue eyes, IceWings have blue eyes, NightWings often have black eyes). Averted with SandWings, who have white or pale gold scales but black, pupil less eyes.
• Cryptic Background Reference: From the first book in the series, it's revealed that scavengers, not dragons, used to be the dominant power on Pyrrhia, until an event known as "the Scorching" happened. To the main characters, however, it's all boringly obvious history, so they never elaborate on it for the benefit of the audience. It takes until the final book of the third arc—Book 15 of the main series—for its events to finally be revealed to the audience: Dragons used to be largely solitary creatures without any real coherent civilization of their own, existing mostly as scattered individuals across Pyrrhia. Humans, meanwhile, had several massive empires that sprawled the entire continent, and which were embroiled in war. Cottonmouth, a human general from the Diamond Empire, decided to try training dragons to be weapons of war, so he began stealing dragon eggs and trying to train hatchlings for combat in his lab. He ended up stealing eggs from one of the biggest, baddest females around—implied to be the progenitor of several different tribes, including MudWings, RainWings, and LeafWings—and she was so incensed that she organized several nearby dragons to get revenge on the humans, (heavily implied to be) becoming the first Queen in the process. This turned into a continent-wide genocide against the human race, which destroyed their civilization, leaving the now-united dragons to spread across the continent. And yet, Cottonmouth escaped and became the driving force of the Overmind.
• Darkhorse Victory: At the end of the first arc, it's not any of the three sisters that ends up getting the throne, instead it goes to Thorn, the leader of the Outclaws and Sunny's mother.
• Dawn Attack: One potential future that Clearsight sees involves the IceWings attacking the NightWings at dawn.
• The Dead Guy Did It: The dragon killing Queen Coral's daughters before they hatch turns out to be Orca, Coral's oldest daughter who died challenging her for the throne years before the story starts. She had used her secret animus powers to enchant a statue in the hatchery to kill any female relatives of hers, intending to kill potential competitors when she took power, but due to her death it ended up killing Coral's future children instead
• Death from Above: SkyWings tend to use this in war, dropping dragonflame cactus bombs from above.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: Actually thought word-for-word by Turtle after Anemone tries to cut him up with a bunch of seashells.
• Declaration of Personal Independence: In the first book, the Dragonets of Destiny decide to go against their guardians' wishes by going to the outside world and forging their own path.
• Disappeared Dad: Most of the main characters have dead or unknown parents. Clay's father is unknown, Tsunami unwittingly killed her father, Glory's parents are unknown, Starflight's mother is dead, Moon's father is dead, Winter's father dies in Book 10, Peril's mother is dead, Turtle's father is dead, and Qibli's father is unknown. The only exceptions to this are Sunny, Blue, Cricket and Sundew.
• Disappointing Heritage Reveal: As the main characters in the first series were all separated from their tribe and family, most of them experience it when they get to meet that tribe and family again. Clay is disappointed to find that MudWings don't take care of their children after spending his whole book hoping to find parents who love him. Tsunami ultimately has an ambivalent relationship with her family and respects her mother in some ways, but is disappointed that she isn't exactly The High Queen that Written by the Winners history made her out to be. Glory ends up disappointed by the RainWings because most of them fit the stereotypes that she's spent her life being stereotyped as herself. Starflight ends up especially disappointed when he finds out that his tribe, which he was told was made up of wise and powerful dragons, is actually planning the genocide of another tribe and spreading propaganda to make themselves look infallible.
• Disappointing Promotion: Snowfall always thought that her coronation would be some glorious, ego-stroking affair, earned by the culturally-mandated battle to the death with her mother. Then, while Snowfall was still a child, a messy and unexpected plague kills her mother, and a lot of their subjects, so that Snowfall ascends the throne during the most weak, hopeless period of IceWing history shown. (She makes it work.)
• Dissimile: Sundew thinks to herself how entering the Poison Jungle is just like diving into an ocean. Except for the poisonous plants, and it being a jungle, and everything.
• Distant Prologue: All of the prologues so far of the second arc - the one for Moon Rising takes place four years ago, Winter Turning is two years ago, and Escaping Peril is seven years ago. In the first arc, the prologue for The Dragonet Prophecy takes place six years ago, which due to a Time Skip is just days after the Escaping Peril prologue, and the prologue of The Brightest Night and Dragonslayer takes place twenty years ago. In The Lost Continent, the prologue takes place 2,000 years ago.
• Do Wrong, Right: After hearing how Hawthorn snuck the Breath of Evil into Queen Wasp's drink during a peace meeting to try to control her and inadvertently gave her its powers instead, Nettle suggests he should have just poisoned her.
• Dragon Variety Pack: The dragon tribes of Pyrrhia all follow the "four legs, two bat-like wings" body plan, but that's where the similarities end because they're each adapted to different environments. For example, most of them can breathe fire, but the IceWings breathe ice instead, the RainWings are venomous, and the SeaWings don't have a breath weapon at all. The dragons of Plantala are even weirder, being based on insects.
• Dramatic Irony: Since the events of Dragonslayer are from the humans' points of view and they have a tendency to get caught up in the events of the first arc, there's a lot of extra information we know that they don't (and often they assume the opposite of what's actually happening is happening).
• Dub Name Change: Has its own page.
• Dye or Die: Blue gets painted a different color to hide from the HiveWings that are trying to capture him for being a potential flamesilk.
• Dysfunction Junction: Let's face it. The main cast of the second arc has some rather... extensive self-worth issues.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The prologue of the first book calls Hvitur an "ice dragon" instead of an IceWing at one point. It also switches to a different perspective halfway through, but in the rest of the series, each chapter is only from one perspective.
• The End... Or Is It?: At the end of Darkstalker, the other main characters, unable to kill the titular Darkstalker because he is immortal and invincible, have enchanted a bracelet to put Darkstalker to sleep and buried him underground. After the epilogue of the book ends, there is a very short post-epilogue that shows the bracelet being broken by and earthquake and Darkstalker awakening.
• Either/Or Prophecy: The Jade Mountain prophecy. Either Jade Mountain will be destroyed or the Lost City of Night will be found.
• Egg Macguffin:
  • The prologue of the first book features the guardians trying to steal the five prophecy eggs in time for the Brightest Night.
  • In The Hive Queen, the main cast carries around an egg that they took from a nest to save it from being poisoned by Queen Wasp.
• Elemental Dragon: Dragon tribes are categorized by the element they represent, and their names usually indicate what element they're related to. Sea Wings are water-attuned dragons that live under the sea, and one of the few tribes that can't breathe fire. Night Wings are attuned to the moon, and their powers rely on the moons themselves. Mud Wings are attuned to mud, Ice Wings are ice-attuned and have frost-breath, etc.
• Emergency Transformation: When Queen Ruby is about to be killed by Queen Scarlet, Peril intervenes upon realizing that Chameleon has somehow limited Ruby's power. It ends up transforming her into an entirely different dragon, though, healing her injuries and allowing her to win the battle.
• Epunymous Title: The first three books of the second arc are this. "Talons of Power" breaks the pattern, probably because it's hard to make "Turtle" work with anything this way.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • Tsunami is first introduced as biting Kestrel's tail to protect Clay. She's fierce, stubborn, and not a stickler for the rules, but is protective of her friends and cares about doing what's right. She's later seen giving orders to everyone and assigning them roles for their play, showing her bossiness and position as the leader of the group.
  • Glory is seen interrupting one of Starflight's lectures with snarky comments and not being particularily enthused about the play the others are doing, but still willingly participates in it. She's grumpy, snarky, and has little patience for her friends' shenanigans but will still participate in them nonetheless.
• Eternal English: Dragons from across the continent are capable of understanding each other, while Darkstalker and Foeslayer can talk perfectly fine with the main cast despite being sealed in a can 2000 years ago. Justified with Darkstalker, who is a mind reader and had six months with nothing better to do than piece together modern dragons' thoughts, but Foeslayer would have only heard brief snippets of modern dragons' speech.
  • Double Subverted with the Pantalan dragons, who are initially shown in the prologue to have been separated long enough from the dragons of Pyrrhia that their language is very hard for Pyrrhian dragons to understand. As of the present years later, however, they have switched their language to the same one from Pyrrhia to honor Clearsight, and neither their language nor Pyrrhia's have diverged long enough over 2000 years for anyone to have any trouble understanding each other (perhaps understandable on the Pantalan side given how this is the language of their sacred text and may have been known to dragons like with Latin and Hebrew in real life, but not so much on the Pyrrhian side).
  • Lampshaded by Cricket in The Poison Jungle. Upon meeting Turtle and Tsunami, among her many questions is how they are speaking the same language as Pantalan dragons.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • For all his faults, Darkstalker loved his mother Foeslayer and was fiercely protective of his sister Whiteout. He was in love with Clearsight, even forgiving her for betraying him, and he also seemed to genuinely view Moon as a friend.
  • While not completely "evil", Sundew does have others whom she cares about, most notably her girlfriend Willow and her friends, as well as her ex-fiance Mandrake, who's noted to be one of the few dragons she likes.
• Even Evil Has Standards: For all her faults, Queen Diamond was not willing to commit genocide on an entire tribe, something that her niece Snowfox would not hesitate to do. It's due to this that Darkstalker can't just kill Diamond.
• Everybody Has Standards: In "The Hidden Kingdom", the Rainwings are such a peaceful tribe that the idea of using their venom to hurt other dragons is beyond their comprehension. This pacifism even extends to the callous and uncaring Queen Magnificent, who finds the idea of dueling to the death for the throne "barbaric".
• Evil Librarians: The Librarian is a villain who tries to kill the protagonists — except only because she is being permanently mind-controlled by Queen Wasp. She turns out to be willing to help the protagonists when she is temporarily freed.
• Evil Mentor: It's clear from the beginning that Morrowseer is not a nice guy, but how bad he is never really sinks in until much later.
• Evil Versus Evil: All three SandWing heirs (minus Blaze, who is nice but ditzy and extremely incompetent) are equally despicable, and even the leaders of the Talons of Peace are jerks. (In fact, the Big Good is an unapologetic racist.) The Talons get even worse when they decide to replace Glory and a few of the original dragonets with Flame and some false dragonets because they felt the originals are inadequate.
• Expositing the Masquerade:
  • The Hive Queen ends with the main cast trying to figure out the identity of the mysterious plant that Queen Wasp is using for her mind control. In The Poison Jungle, they are directed to Hawthorn, who turns out to have been researching the properties and cure for that plant for fifty years.
  • The main goal of the protagonists in Dragonslayer in the third act.
• Eye Scream: A frequent injury in the series. Fjord and Crocodile are both killed by RainWing venom striking their eyes, Flame is blinded in one eye during a skirmish, and Starflight is blinded completely after being hit by a fireball.
• Extremely Short Timespan: The first three books combined only span two weeks. Some of the other books are a bit better on this, like The Brightest Night and Winter Turning, which last longer than a week, and the Winglets books, despite being shorter, tend to take up far larger amounts of time.
• Fairy Dragons: SilkWings, although the same size as other dragon types, are colorful, have butterfly wings, and for the most part have no Breath Weapon or offensive powers.
• Family Theme Naming: Downplayed, with two examples, both SandWings:
  • With only one exception (Vulture), all the named family members of Qibli’s family stick to a trend: The females are named after venomous snakes (Cobra and Rattlesnake), the males are named foreign words roughly meaning “desert wind” (Qibli and Sirocco).
  • Queen Oasis named all her children after words relating to heat or fire, beginning with ‘B’ for the girls (Burn, Blister, and Blaze) and ‘S’ for the boys (Smolder, Scald, and Singe).
• Family Portrait of Characterization: Clearsight sees a portrait drawn by Whiteout of her family - her parents, Arctic and Foeslayer, and her brother Darkstalker, where they all look happy, showing her overly idealistic views of her family (given how messed-up it is and how cruel Arctic is). It also has them all drawn in shades of blue that make them look more related than they look in real life, downplaying how her parents are from different tribes and all of the conflict that has caused.
• Family Relationship Switcheroo: Cricket was raised believing that her mother Katydid was her older sister, to cover up how her father is a political prisoner of the queen.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • All over the place. All other tribes hate the RainWings, seeing them as lazy and useless. SeaWings hate MudWings and try to kill them on sight, IceWings and NightWings completely hate each other due to events that happened 2000 years ago, after the events of the first series SeaWings hate SkyWings and NightWings are hated by all of the tribes, besides having a mutually very tense relationship with the RainWings. And that's just the most prominent examples. MudWings are stereotyped as idiots, SkyWings are stereotyped as perpetually grumpy, IceWings are stereotyped as arrogant, SandWings are stereotyped as treasure-obsessed backstabbers, etc. Jade Mountain Academy is dedicated to subverting this, putting dragons of different tribes in the same group to show that dragons from different tribes can still be friends.
  • In Pantala, SilkWings are commonly stereotyped as submissive weaklings who are unable to stand up for themselves, and the LeafWings (well, the PoisonWings at least) despise the HiveWings for what they did during the Tree Wars.
• Fantasy World Map: There's one of Pyrrhia at the beginning of every book. The third arc adds one for Pantala.
• Fate Worse than Death:
  • Foeslayer is chained in a cave and killed over and over by a spear that is enchanted to freeze her and not kill her permanently. She is trapped there for thousands of years and, even while being unconscious most of the time, has time pass for her enough that she would eventually rather be killed again than stay alive in her current weak and starving state.
  • The fate of anyone who becomes the Librarian is to be never allowed to leave Clearsight's temple and to be permanently mind controlled by the HiveWing queen.
  • The fate of anyone infected by the Breath of Evil. Their mind is completely taken over by the Othermind as they lose any sense of free will and their mental state slowly decays, and there is absolutely no way of stopping it.
• Feminist Fantasy: Many of the main characters are female, and are very competent. (That said, many of female rulers, at least initially don't seem to have their people's best interests at heart.)
• Fighting for a Homeland: The Night Wings' actions are motivated by looking for a new home, since their old one is about to be destroyed by the volcano and is already miserable to live in. They are still the villains, because finding a new home for them involves killing all of the RainWings.
  • This becomes the goal for everybody in Pantala not affected by the breath of evil after the events of book 13.
• First Time in the Sun: The dragonets get this after escaping the cave and seeing the outside world for the first time.
• Foil:
  • In Book 2, there's a considerable dichotomy between Riptide and Whirlpool. Riptide is distrusted and shunned by Queen Coral for being the son of Webs (aka Tsunami's kidnapper) and even has his secrets. Nonetheless, he's the most tustworthy and reliable Seawing Tsunami's ever met, always trying to be helpful and honest as often as he can. Meanwhile, you have Whirlpool who is favored by Queen Coral for flattering her and being her "trusted" advisor. But he's a murderous slimeball of a dragon who Tsunami dislikes, and a opportunistic social-climber who is vying to marry off one of Coral's daughters, even the infant Aucklet.
  • In Book 6, Moonwatcher couldn't be anymore different from her father, Morrowseer. While Morrowseer lacks the NightWing abilities to see the future or read minds (and has to pretend he possesses such powers), his daughter possesses both abilities and has to has to hide them. What's more, Morrowseer is cruel, arrogant, and deliberately makes Sunny feel she'll fail to end the war because the prophecy's not real. By comparison, Moon is a relatively kinder dragon who lets Sunny know she and the Dragonets of Destiny are fit to usher in peace to Phyrria.
• Foreign Queasine: The NightWings eat prey that is already rotted before it dies, thanks to the bacteria in their fangs. It is deadly to dragons who aren't used to it, even other NightWings, and most other dragons are unsurprisingly disgusted.
• Foregone Conclusion:
  • Anybody who reads Darkstalker at any point after finishing Escaping Peril^note Darkstalker was chronologically released in between Escaping Peril and Talons of Power knows that it has to end with Darkstalker being enchanted to be put to sleep. Then, as the post-epilogue shows, he will wake up after 2000 years.
  • The epilogue of Darkness of Dragons reveals that a dragon from Pantala has arrived in Pyrrhia for the first time. While the dragon's description is kept vague, the next book is set in Pantala, so readers know that they will manage to get to Pyrrhia in some way. Sure enough, it's revealed that Luna got there after she got swept up in the wind during a storm.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In "Winter Turning", Pyrite remarks that simply by sleeping near Winter, she dreamt about [[spoilers: snow]], which also happens whenever she slept near Cirrus.
  • In "Moon Rising", Darkstalker tells Moon that when writing spells in his animus-touched scroll, one must be as specific as possible, or something will go horribly wrong. Sure enough, in "Winter Rising", one such consequence arises when Hailstorm (thanks to a necklace enchanted by the scroll) is stuck with remnants of memories as Pyrite, even after said-necklace has been removed.
• Four-Philosophy Ensemble:
  • The Cynic: Glory
  • The Optimist: Sunny
  • The Realist: Tsunami
  • The Apathetic: Starflight
  • The Conflicted: Clay
• Free the Frogs: Clearsight and Listener go on a mission to free the scavengers being used in their school research projects.
• Fugitive Arc: The first series has the protagonists on the run from Burn's army after the events of book 1. The third series has the protagonists as wanted criminals throughout the whole continent until the end of book 13.
• Genius Cripple: Starflight, after being blinded.
• Genius Ditz: The RainWing healers are described as giving completely useless advice for most healing, but being total experts in injuries that happen often in the rainforest.
• Genocide Backfire: The HiveWings supposedly killed all of the LeafWings, but there are rumors that this is the case and that some are alive and trying to kill the HiveWings. They are indeed alive and are willing to go extreme lengths to overthrow the HiveWings.
• Gladiator Games: Queen Scarlet loves them. In Book 8 she is stated to have a gladiator fetish.
• Glamour: Darkstalker uses his animus powers to this effect, subtly influencing everyone around him to see him as likable and trustworthy.
• God Guise: Clearsight is remembered as a godlike figure by the Pantalan dragons. This allows Queen Wasp to hide how she never really had the power to tell the future as far ahead as is claimed.
• Gory Discretion Shot:
  • Despite the usual amount of violence in the series, The Lost Heir has the narrator Tsunami being too horrified at Coral killing Tortoise to look.
  • Similarly, in Darkstalker, the narration mostly skips over the gory details of Arctic's death, just saying that it was messy and took a long time, even though the character narrating the chapter was watching the scene. Justified as Artic's death (ripping his own guts out and disembowelling himself) is super graphic even by the standards of this series.
  • Averted multiple times in the graphic novel, which depicts, in full detail, Vengeance being thrown into a pit of lava, Morrowseer being submerged in a wave of lava, Fjord being killed by Glory's acid, and Blister impaling Kestrel through her back, to name a few.
• Great Offscreen War:
  • We never get to see the Scorching, when the Dragons took over the continent from the scavengers.
  • Same with what conflict the RainWings were fighting in during Grandeur's early rule.
  • The war between the HiveWings and the SilkWings and LeafWings aka the Tree Wars.
• Gruesome Grandparent: Fathom's grandfather Albatross kills most of their family and tries to kill Fathom himself before Fathom kills him in self-defense.
• Handy Helper: After being blinded in book four, Starflight receives assistance from Tamarin - a blind dragoness who teaches him how to get around and fly without sight - and Fatespeaker, who promises to stay with him and read to him until they can find a way he can read on his own.
• He Knows Too Much: Wren. She was sacrificed after she read a book about the illegal acts of the dragonmancers.
  • Whenever someone questions Heath's story, gets too close to his treasure, or has even the slightest chance to expose him as a fraud, he would banish them from Valor. Pine learns this the hard way.
• Hero of Another Story: A dark variation happens with the replacement dragonets. They consider themselves the heroes of the story, and when they find out they're not, and the "main" dragonets find out that they were expendable and easily replaceable all along, it leads to a lot of arguments and confusion.
  • Dragonslayer focuses on the humans, particularly Wren, Leaf, and Ivy, during the events of the first arc. When the three of them finally meet, their goal is to expose Heath and the dragonmancers, and to work for peace with the dragons. They succeed in both counts, although it took around six months for Wren to (inadvertently) come across the IceWings queen and make humanity's sentience known.
• Hidden Depths: Each of the dragonets possesses them, and each dragonet's book is dedicated to exploring the depths of their character. While the other books show them as their friends perceive them, their book shows them as they are. Snowfall's character arc has her understanding that many dragons have their own stories and there's more to them that meets the eye.
• Hidden Elf Village: The RainWings' village, which is isolated from all other dragon tribes.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: 'Three moons', and ‘moons’ is a common exclamation of frustration.
• How Do I Shot Web?: Luna initially struggles with using her silk after metamorphosis, and her bad aim leads to her getting swept off by a storm.
• Hufflepuff House: The MudWings. They're mainly Out of Focus for the entire series, with Clay being the only major character who's part of the tribe(Umber and Sora might count, depending on who you ask). Their society and culture is the least expanded on, with it only being briefly touched upon in the last couple chapters of the first book. Overall, they're overlooked and more focus is put on the "cooler" tribes, like the NightWings and RainWings.
• Humanity's Wake: Takes place more than 5,000 years after humans were replaced by dragons as the dominant species of Pyrrhia. Downplayed because humans aren't actually extinct here, but they no longer rule the planet like they did 5,000 years ago and are treated as just another prey animal by most dragons. Well, up until The Dangerous Gift for the latter part, anyways.
• Human Pet: Some of the SandWings keep human pets, as does Winter. Those who do actually tend to think of "scavengers" as rather adorable.
• Human Popsicle: The fate of the IceWings who lose the Diamond Trial, as well as Foeslayer when she isn't being killed over and over again by the dragons in the trial, until she is freed by Winter.
• Humans Are Not the Dominant Species: Humans, or "scavengers" as dragons call them, are considered an endangered species and only live in a few select areas. Originally, humans were more dominant, however that changed when dragons began creating kingdoms and living under queens. Dragons look down upon humans and see them as weird, dumb, and mostly good for food or blood sports. That last part changes after The Dangerous Gift.
• Humans Are White: Averted. Flower is white but some other scavengers are described with skin the color of MudWing scales. Notably, the protagonists of Dragonslayer, Ivy, Leaf, and Wren are all shown with tan skin.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters:
  • Even when regulated to the role of pests, scavengers still manage to cause the events of the first arc. Dragonslayer reveals that the death of Queen Oasis was accidental and the whole incident was actually an attempt to steal her treasures out of greed. Blissfully unaware of the continent-wide war that happened afterwards, the mastermind of the burglary steals the credit of slaying Queen Oasis while rewriting it as a heroic venture, turns the village of Valor into his personal estate while exiling anyone who would reveal him as a fraud and later attempting to have them executed. When there are requests from other villages asking for his help, he would reply that he would come with clearly no intention to fulfill it, effectively giving false hope. Not only that, due to the idea of a dragon being slain by a scavenger being inconceivable until then, the dragons in turn razed scavenger villages throughout the continent to the ground in an attempt to find the missing Eye of Onyx, forcing the survivors to either live underground or in walled cities. In another village, a smaller case is still happening, with another group of thieves who routinely steal from the Skywing Palace posing themselves as "dragonmancers" to seize power over the village while having anyone who is standing in their way be "sacrificed" to the Skywings. Note that the Skywings themselves are completely ignorant of this whole affair.
    • By the end of Dragonslayer, it's shown that while genuinely evil people do exist, they tend to be good more often than not, as can be seen when every single person in Valor turns against Heath when he confesses to not being the real dragonslayer. Wren, Ivy, Leaf, Cranberry, and Rhyme make plans to build a town that would welcome refugees from the burned down villages and attempt to make peace with the dragons. Come The Dangerous Gift, Wren succeeds in the latter part.
  • It is revealed in the finale of the 3rd arc that the Scorching began when a human thought that it would be a wise idea to steal dragon eggs to attain beasts of war, earning the wrath of their mothers. Not learning from history when the refugees fled to Pantala, the same human tried to weaponise a local parasitic plant, creating the Othermind as a result which would lead to the current events of the arc. However much like Dragonslayer, the dragons are made even more aware of the sapience of scavengers and would attempt to help those who are good.
• Humans by Any Other Name: Humans are called "Scavengers". Blue and Cricket, having never seen them before, call them "reading monkeys". Downplayed after the dragons become aware of their sentience. While they are still called scavengers for the most part, they now know that said scavengers refer to themselves as humans.
• Hybrid All Along: Sunny is assumed to be a deformed SandWing dragon at first; she's missing her kind's venomous tail barb, and her scales are golden instead of pale yellow. It's only at the end of the first arc that she learns that her father was a NightWing.
• Ice Palace: The IceWings have one, enchanted by an animus dragon to never melt.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The second arc's pattern is "(protagonist) (x)ing", sometimes "(x)ing (protagonist)". This is changed in Talons of Power.
• I Know You Know I Know: In The Brightest Night, Burn receives a gift from Blister, which she easily guesses contains a deadly Dragonbite Viper, and so she quickly dispatches the Viper inside. Turns out that Blister anticipated this and put two Vipers in the box so the second would kill Burn.
• Ignored Epiphany: In "The Dark Secret", Flame visits Deathbringer with the intent to know how to best be an assassin. At one point, Deathbringer advises it doesn't hurt to question your orders and to think for yourself. To this, Flame shrugs it off, as Deathbringer is imprisoned for turning on the Nightwings after all.
• Immortality Hurts: Darkstalker, who made himself immortal with animus magic, is trapped underground, starving but unable to die. While he is unconscious most of this time, he ends up waking up after 2000 years and remains conscious in this state for six months before being freed.
• Inadequate Inheritor:
  • Queen Grandeur completely changes the line of RainWing succession because her children are all lazy and would make horrible rulers.
  • Oasis mentions that while Blaze is a good daughter to her, she'd make a terrible queen.
• Inevitable Waterfall: In The Dragonet Prophecy, when Clay and Tsunami are travelling through the underground river, Tsunami goes over a very small waterfall and pranks Clay into thinking it is much larger. But then it turns out that there really is a large waterfall beyond that one.
• Infraction Distraction: In The Hive Queen, the fugitive main characters are having a secret meeting with three members of The Chrysalis in a library when some HiveWing guards discover them and decide to search for them. Queen Wasp, while controlling one of the guards, threatens to burn down the library if they don't reveal themselves, at which point the Chrysalis members come out of hiding and claim they were only servants who were secretly reading after hours, accepting the relatively lesser punishment for this "crime" so they won't get caught for their true actions and the fugitives they were harboring will be safe.
• In Medias Res: The Brightest Night starts right before the eruption of the NightWings' volcano, replaying the last bits of The Dark Secret and then having Sunny kidnapped by Fierceteeth, Strongwings and Preyhunter.
  • In the second arc, Darkness of Dragons starts right after Turtle flies to the rainforest with Darkstalker in Talons of Power. It would later catch up at the end of Part 1 after Turtle writes in his slate pleading for Qibli's help.
• Innocent Means Naïve: Sunny is very innocent and optimistic and tends to assume the best in other dragons. Her friends treat her as though she's very simple-minded because of it. In her book, we find out that she's actually very observant and has a go-getter attitude, but being treated as though she's stupid for being "sweet" has left her with an inferiority complex.
• Intro-Only Point of View: Every book has a prologue from the perspective of one character and an epilogue from the perspective of another, separate from the one (in the main series) or three (in the Legends prequels) focus character(s) for that book.
• In Love with the Mark: Deathbringer, towards Glory, who tries to hide the fact that she likes him back.
• Insult Friendly Fire: Winter objects to freeing Darkstalker because of his weird, scary powers. Moon and Turtle are quick to point out that said weird, scary powers are the same Psychic Powers that Moon has plus the same animus powers that Turtle has.
• Invisible Writing: Darkstalker outsources all of his magical powers onto a scroll that lets him write whatever he wants to use his powers to do. He writes spells that do kind favors to other dragons in normal ink, but when he wants to write a spell he knows his friends will reproach him for for its cruelty (like killing an IceWing dragon every month), he writes it in invisible ink.
• Involuntary Battle to the Death: Scarlet forces dragons to fight in the arena. Not always this trope, considering some of them are dragons who were originally on opposite sides of the war. But it culminates in making Clay and Peril fight, which is definitely this trope. Anyone who tries to talk their opponents out of it ends up getting a nasty fate, like in Gill's case, being dehydrated into insanity.
• Ironic Name:
  • Queen Scarlet, which is a shade of red, is orange. Tui has said that it was an oversight on her part, and that she regrets it.
  • Coconut hates coconuts, which is lampshaded by Kinkajou.
  • Chameleon is named after an animal that can change colors. However, Chameleon cannot change the colors of his scales unlike other RainWings due to a snout deformity that affects his suntime.
  • Mindreader cannot read minds, though she gains the ability after Darkstalker grants it to her.
• Irony: According to Book 2, Tsunami always dreamt her reunion with her mother would be just like in the story of "The Missing Princess", with a joyful mother declaring she never stopped looking for her daughter, being reunited with both parents, and having a glorious feast thrown in her honor. Although Tsunami did get the joyous reunion, the rest of her expectations are subverted by a father killed (unwittingly by her own hands) and the feast part being delayed by circumstances. Sunny, on the other hand, got the mom, feast, and reunion with her dad.
  • In Book 2, Queen Coral makes it a point to openly distrust and shun Riptide for the rather petty reason of being Webs son. On the other hand, she openly trusting towards Whirlpool and even ships him with Tsunami over the bias that he's her most loyal advisor. And she doesn't know (or worse, doesn't care) that he's such a slimy and conniving worm.
    • Unto itself, Queen Coral is highly protective of her daughters, to the point she killed Tortoise for neglecting to watch over the egg that was destroyed. Meanwhile, she sings praises to Whirlpool for being her "trustworthy" advisor (really her most sycophantic) and to her late daughter Orca. The thing is, they each either attempted to kill one of her daughters (like Whirlpool) or suceeded to some degree (like Orca with her animus statue).
  • In "The Hidden Kingdom", neither members of the remaining Rainwing Royal family ever win the competition.
  • In "Winter Turning", Qibli remarks on how the Nightwings plan to steal away Prince Arctic, have his babies and then do away with him feels convoluted and devious, to which Winter affirms is Nightwings in a nutshell. But towards the end, not only do Winter's parents create such a plan that sets him up for failure, but he learns the Nightwing Foeslayer wasn't the devious temptress legends make her out to be.
• It Sucks to Be the Chosen One: All of the dragonets go through this in various ways. Glory, the one dragon who isn't The Chosen One, even outright states it to Deathbringer, who notes that he's never thought about it that way.
• I Will Fight Some More Forever: The LeafWings never gave up on the Tree Wars, even fifty years later. Well, half of them, at least.
• Just a Kid: Adults often tell the Dragonets of Destiny that they are just dragonets, so they can't possibly have any impact or make their own choices. In Winter Turning, Glory gets in on it herself, snarking that it makes her very relieved that some five year olds are skipping school to chase after two dragons who want her dead.
• Keeping the Handicap: Darkstalker offers to use his animus powers to cure Starflight and Tamarin's blindness, but they refuse, feeling that they don't want to make a habit of solving their problems the easy way out with magic.
• Kid Hero: All of the protagonists of the main series books so far are dragonets rather than full grown dragons. Peril is the oldest of them, between 7.5 and 8.5 years old, which would make her full grown by standards of IceWing culture but not by NightWing culture, and it's unknown what her own tribe (SkyWings) would consider full-grown^note  Though it should be noted that dragonets age and mature quickly until they're nine years old, where they're considered to be full-grown adults.
• Knockout Ambush: At the beginning of "The Hidden Kingdom", the dragonets and Webs are ambushed by RainWings who knock all of them out with tranquilizer darts except Starflight and Glory.
• La Résistance:
  • The Talons of Peace have brought the five dragonets together to help end the war. Needless to say, it doesn't end well.
  • The Chrysalis in the third arc is a secret group of SilkWings dedicated to resisting the HiveWings.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler:
  • The revelation that Tsunami is a long-lost princess and that RainWings can shoot venom out of their fangs. If you go onto any Wings of Fire-related forum or website (hell, even this wiki's page for the series), it's extremely easy for you to get spoiled on those.
  • Glory becoming queen of the RainWings in The Hidden Kingdom. Considering that it made Glory an even more polarizing figure, you can find many arguments on her that bring this up.
• Lesser of Three Evils: The dragonets are supposed to choose between the three royal SandWing sisters for queen, but none of them are very good choices. Burn is Ax-Crazy and does things For the Evulz, Blister is a completely pitiless and emotionless Manipulative Bastard who engineered the war to become queen over the physically stronger Burn, and Blaze is Lethally Stupid and would clearly be a very incompetent queen. Initially, after meeting Burn for the first time, they decide that they definitely don't want her. But by The Brightest Night, they differ in their opinions as to who's the better one. Tsunami prefers Burn because she's more powerful than Blaze and won't try to betray them like Blister was, Glory prefers Blister because she's the most intelligent and not pointlessly evil, while Clay prefers Blaze because she's the kindest of the three. In the end, none of them would become queen. Instead, Thorn becomes the SandWing queen.
• Like Brother and Sister: The five dragonets tend to view each other this way. Except for Starflight over Sunny. And it's part of why Sunny ultimately turns him down: Their relationship is just too familial.
• Living Statue: Unbeknownst to Queen Coral, her eldest daughter Orca possessed animus magic as well as a talent for sculpting and had "programmed" the statue she made in the Royal Hatchery to kill all female heirs before they hatched. This was done to eliminate the competition to Orca's reign, but also worked as a way to spite her mother from beyond the grave when Orca lost the duel for the crown.
• Love Dodecahedron: Qibli and Winter both have a crush on Moon, and Moon doesn't know who she likes back. Umber has an unrequited crush on Qibli, and Kinkajou has an unrequited crush on Winter. Turtle has a crush on Kinkajou, and Kinkajou may like him back. Moon ends up choosing Qibli, Kinkajou is struggling with her feelings, and Umber is out of the picture by the end of the second arc.
• Love Ruins the Realm: Arctic and Foeslayer's love affair led to their respective tribes being at war for thousands of years.
• Love Triangle:
  • With Starflight, Sunny and Fatespeaker. Starflight loves Sunny, while Fatespeaker loves Starflight. In the fifth book, Sunny ultimately turns Starflight down because she loves him like a brother, and pushes him towards Fatespeaker, who he's been growing closer to.
  • In the second arc, Qibli and Winter both have crushes on Moon, who feels conflicted over it. She ends up choosing Qibli in book 10.
• Loyal Phlebotinum: The Eye of Onyx only lets the dragon it chooses to be the rightful queen wear it, and explodes any other dragons.
• Low Fantasy: While it stars sapient dragons instead of human(oid)s, there are no other fantastical creatures in their world, the ability to use magic is a rare genetic trait, and most of the conflicts are caused by the monarchs' politics.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Tsunami, upon entering the Kingdom of the SeaWings, learns that her father was Gill, the crazed, dehydrated SeaWing she was forced to kill in Queen Scarlet's arena. Sunny also gets this twice in The Brightest Night, with Thorn revealing both that she is her mother and later on that Stonemover is her father. Later Soar/Chameleon tells Peril that he is her father. Peril is not particularly excited.
• MacGuffin Title: Part three of "The Brightest Night" is called "The Eye of Onyx", referring to the piece of SandWing treasure that has the power to end the war, which Sunny looks for throughout the book.
• Machiavelli Was Wrong: Kestrel believes that dragons don't have empathy for each other, which leads to Sunny and Starflight combining their fire to free Tsunami when she is tied up, which Kestrel had discounted as a possibility.
• The Magic Goes Away: Animus dragons, who have the ability to enchant objects, have disappeared thousands of years ago in all tribes except the SeaWings and NightWings.
  • Happens for real in the third arc - no animus magic is working anymore. While preexisting enchantments still work, no new spells can be cast. It's revealed in The Dangerous Gift that Jeroba II irreversably erased animus magic for the current generation. She decided that dragons can't be trusted with that kind of power after her experiences with her mother, Darkstalker, and Snowfall.
• Maternity Crisis: A variation with an egg: Bumblebee hatches early and at the worst possible time when Cricket, Blue, Sundew and Swordtail are all fugitives and trying to complete an important task.
• Matriarchy: The dragon tribes are all ruled by queens.
• Matricide: How queens usually come into power. Most of the dragons who challenge for the throne are the current queen's daughter, and are forced to kill their mothers in a fight to win the throne, though sisters and cousins can challenge as well. The RainWings are the only tribe to not do it this way and averted in the case of Queen Glacier, who would have abdicated to whatever daughter challenged her without fighting.
• Mama Bear: When she first appears, Queen Coral is violently protective of her eggs and had any guard that failed to protect them (whether they were at fault or not) painfully executed. This is also how the Scorching happened, as humans stealing dragon eggs caused the dragons to unite and completely annihilate human civilization, leaving humanity as little more than isolated villages and small cities that do their best to avoid being seen by dragons.
• Meaningful Name: plenty of examples:
  • On the continental level, Pyrrhia's name has three meanings: from Pyrrhic Victory, which is believed by many fans to be about the Scorching or the War of Sandwing Succession; from the Pyrrhia genus of moths, which implies flight (as in wings); and from the Greek prefix ''pyro''-, meaning "of or relating to fire".
  • Pantala is the name of a genus of dragonflies, referencing the insect-inspired dragons who inhabit the continent, and matching Pyrrhia being a genus of moths.
  • The different dragon cultures each have their own naming schemes, usually revolving around things in each culture's environment, such as animals (Cricket, Peregrine, Fruit Bat, Shark, Camel), plants (Kelp, Liana, Cereus, Sequoia), weather (Qibli, Tempest, Sandstorm, Typhoon, Sirocco), minerals (Clay, Onyx, Vermilion, Ruby), geographical features (Glacier, Cliff, Reef), biomes (Tundra, Marsh), or natural phenomena (Tsunami, Eclipse, Avalanche).
  • The exceptions to the above naming schemes are Nightwing dragons. While the still somewhat using the previous environment-based naming schemes, most Night Wings have compound names which are either designed to evoke mystery or fear, (Darkstalker, Deathbringer, Fierceteeth, Mastermind, or Battlewinner) or reference their psychic abilities (Clearsight, Morrowseer, Mindreader).
• Mental Story: The Flames of Hope, mostly centers around the visions protagonist Luna gets from Cottonmouth and Lizard about their backstory and later her use of the two's mind-sharing to show Lizard the empathy and kindness of dragons.
• Mind over Matter: A basic enchantment for an animus dragon.
• A Minor Kidroduction: All of the prologues for the second series are this, except for Darkness of Dragons - Moon Rising's prologue features Moon's hatching, Winter Turning's prologue features a three-year-old Winter, we get to see one-year old Peril in Escaping Peril's prologue, and Talons of Power shows two-year-old Turtle.
• Monster and the Maiden: One of the perspective characters Dragonslayer, Wren, is a young girl who befriends an abandoned dragon. They travel the continent together for years, and learn each others' languages.
• More than Mind Control:
  • In "Winter Turning", the concept it explored. Hailstorm and Winter have their belief in the Icewing way of life shaken after each has worn the animus-touched necklace that makes them Pyrite. Hailstorm can at least stake claim that brainwashing is the reason he's unsure of his pride as an Icewing. Winter, on the other hand, realizes there are other factors for his crumbling faith in the Icewings' meritocracy, namely the friends he made who taught him teamwork and empathy.
  • In the case of Darkstalker, it's "More than Corruption". Usually, when an animus goes bad, the culprit is that their magic stole too much of their soul. But as Qibli points out in Book 10, Darkstalker's corruption may have less to do with his animus magic and more to do with the fact he's not a good person.
• Mouse World: Scavenger aka human society as a whole when they are no longer the dominant species on Pyrrhia. Deconstructed as not only the general populace are ignorant of the dragons' sapience and civilizations, they also think that their world works like a classic Dragon Rider work as a result, which can't be more further from the truth.
• Multi-Volume Work: There are 15 planned books, plus Winglets, an extra-length book about Darkstalker, Clearsight, and Fathom, and 3 graphic novels. Another extra-length book, titled Dragonslayer, was released in early 2020.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
  • The NightWings are particular experts at this. Vengeance, Slaughter, Deathbringer, Darkstalker, Foeslayer, etc. The other tribes also have dragons with names like Tsunami, Crocodile, Shark and Viper. Not all of them are evil, though.
  • The LeafWings rival even the NightWings, with many of them named after poisonous or carnivorous plants. They didn't have names like this before the war, and even then only the PoisonWings do it.
  • The Breath of Evil. Take a wild guess at who would want to use this. Also, the Othermind,
• Nasty Party: The Royal SeaWing Massacre happens at a party with two SkyWing guests, killing most of the SeaWing royal family, a SkyWing princess, and a musician. Fathom and Indigo are noted to be unnerved whenever they're at a party after going to that one.
• Neck Snap: Several dragons kill other dragons this way.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In Darkstalker, his placing all his animus powers into the scroll is initially what helps win Clearsight's heart. It's also what ultimately drives her away. Convinced his soul is now in no danger of corruption, Darkstalker uses the scroll not only to do kind, compassionate things for his friends, mother, and sister, but to do an increasing amount of cruel, petty, angry, vicious things to any and every dragon that makes him feel unsafe or insecure. Including his best friends, if they question his motives.
• North Is Cold, South Is Hot: The northern part of Pyrrhia consists of the freezing Ice Kingdom as well as much of the Sky Kingdom (which seems to be rather cold but considerably warmer than the Ice Kingdom despite its tall mountains), while the southern part has a hot desert, a hot rainforest, and a wetland inhabited by a type of dragon who clearly don't function well in the cold.
• No Man Should Have This Power: Peril decides to resolve Winter and Qibli's argument over how they should use Darkstalker's scroll, which has his animus powers stored in it and allows you to enchant objects to do basically anything, by burning the scroll so no one has it. Unfortunately, this backfires because the scroll was enchanted to give Darkstalker back his powers, allowing him to free himself, if it is burned.
• Not Quite the Right Thing:
  • After Winter and Qibli get in a huge fight about using Darkstalker's scroll, Peril decides to burn it to stop the fighting and prevent anyone from having that power. Instead, she ends up releasing Darkstalker, who will use his newly regained animus power for far worse than Winter or Qibli ever would have.
  • Hawthorn and Queen Sequoia decide to trick Queen Wasp into consuming the Breath of Evil at a peace summit, believing this is the only way to stop their tribe's destruction after she has refused all attempts to be reasoned with. Instead of using the plant's mind control on her, they give Wasp the power instead, and now she can control her whole tribe, easily mobilize whole armies, persecute any enemy and crush any rebellion, and it is now far more difficult to rise up against her without having to kill even sympathetic HiveWings.
• No True Scotsman: Each of the two LeafWings villages gives the other a new tribe(the PoisonWings and SapWings, respectively) name because they don't see their counterparts as real LeafWings.
• "Not So Different" Remark: In Darkness of Dragons. In order to stop the renewed war between the NightWings and IceWings, Anemone and Turtle cast a spell to let the combatants on both sides hear the thoughts of the dragons they're fighting, showing that they're all just scared people who have grown up hearing horror stories and are just trying to protect their loved ones. This (and a subsequent part of the spell that teleports both armies back where they came from) plays a vital role in stopping the war and ending the millennia-old feud between both tribes.
• Not So Similar: In "The Brightest Night", shortly after departing from her father, we have Sunny narrate how she's met both parents: her SandWing mother who takes action and her NightWing father who waits for the worst outcome. Considering she's currently being spurred to stop the war despite learning the prophecy isn't true, she lampshades she's nothing like her father.
• Oddly Small Organization: The Chrysalis turns out to have just seven members within Jewel Hive, and four of them couldn't even come to the meeting that the main characters attend. We later find out that there're hundreds within other areas like Bloodworm Hive, and that particular branch was so small because Jewel Hive as an actually kind leader and the SilkWings there are not as aggrieved as the ones in other hives.
• Odd Name Out:
  • The six queens of the RainWings are called Splendor, Magnificent, Dazzling, Exquisite, Grandeur...and Fruit Bat. Lampshaded in story.
  • The first LeafWings we hear of or see are all named after poisonous plants, except for Willow and the old queen Sequoia. It turns out only the PoisonWings have this name convention, while the other half of the LeafWings are still following the old tree name convention.
• Once per Episode: The protagonist sees one or more scavengers and decides to rescue them rather than kill them {except in The Dark Secret). However, this stopped after the first arc.
• One Cast Member per Cover: Each book depicts a different dragon on the cover. With the exception of Dragonslayer, that dragon is the point-of-view character for that particular book.
• One-Word Title: Prisoners, Assassin, Darkstalker, and Dragonslayer.
• Our Dragons Are Different: And how! There are seven species of dragons, each with their own unique attributes and abilities. Now it is up to ten species as of The Lost Continent, with three new tribes revealed.
• Our Founder: Pantala is full of statues of Clearsight, the dragon who wrote the future-predicting book of Clearsight, was responsible for the language that Pantalan dragons currently speak, and is generally regarded as something like a Deity of Dragon Origin to the Pantalan tribes.
• Outrunning the Fireball: After the NightWings' volcano erupts. Justified due to the dragons' natural resistance to fire and the fact that they're going through a portal, so the fireball is only coming through a very narrow passageway. And Starflight still gets blinded and nearly killed, as well as Morrowseer dying.
• Outside Man, Inside Man: In The Lost Continent, the protagonist and his friends end up getting involved in a revolution aiming to overthrow the HiveWings. Blue then encounters his father, Admiral, who is happy with his life being farmed for silk because it puts him in the position to petition the queen for reforms. After seeing how comically little Admiral still managed to accomplish despite decades of work, Blue decides to oppose him and still try to escape and fight back, but Admiral is terrified that Blue's actions will undo everything Admiral has done and get the HiveWings to put them back in chains like it was when Admiral first arrived.
• The Outside World: The first arc stars five dragonets who were raised secluded in a cave and never allowed to go outside so that when they grow up, they could fulfill a prophecy and stop a war, without being killed by one of the sides of said war. After escaping a bit ahead of schedule, they spend the rest of the series encountering both the wonders of the outside world and dealing with the many dragons who want them dead there.
• The Paranoiac: Snowfall is this. She grows out of it.
  • Heath is always paranoid in general, but it reaches new heights when Leaf gives him a message from the Invincible Lord, not realizing that it's a threat. Heath soon announces to Valor that the Invincible Lord set a price on his head, orders the Wingwatchers arrested for plotting against him, and calls Leaf an assassin. He plans on capturing Leaf so that he can execute him and the Wingwatchers altogether.
• Pattern-Coded Eggs: Each kind of dragon has a differently-coloured egg. A minor plot point is that MudWings occasionally lay blood-red eggs, which hatch into fireproof dragons. NightWings can avert this, however. While their eggs are normally black, when exposed to moonlight they turn silver.
• Perception Filter: Turtle uses an enchanted stick to not be perceived or thought about by Darkstalker.
• Perfect Pacifist People: The RainWings before Glory's rule.
• The Plague: The IceWing plague in Talons of Power.
• Planet England: The world is called "Pyrrhia" at first, until the third arc reveals that it's just one continent on the planet.
• Polar Bears and Penguins: All of the kingdoms contain animals from their respective biomes regardless of what part of the real world they are found in. This means there are both polar bears and penguins in the Ice Kingdom.
• Poisonous Person:
  • The RainWings have a deadly, corrosive venom that they can spit from their fangs. It takes quite a bit of time to aim it well.
  • The BeetleWings supposedly had the same ability, suggesting that they might be distantly related to the RainWings.
  • The SandWings have a poisonous barb in their tail which they can use to poison their enemies with, similar to scorpions. They are taught from a young age how to keep their tails in a specific position to not accidentally stab others with it.
  • Among the various HiveWing abilities, some of them can have venom in their claws or teeth, as well as a nerve toxin that can paralyze their enemies.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: Blister's "secret weapon" is Anemone, Coral's one year old animus dragonet. She plans to use her animus powers to win the war, even though it will make her lose her soul.
• Powers in the First Episode: Fathom finds out that he is an animus dragon in the first chapter of Darkstalker.
• Prophecies Are Always Right: The first series revolves around the five dragonets who are prophesied to end the war. Subverted, since Morrowseer actually made up the prophecy as part of his plan to have the NightWings take over the rainforest to escape their home.
• Prophecies Rhyme All the Time: The prophecies about the dragonets, Moonwatcher's prophecy, and The Lost Continent prophecy.
• Prophecy Twist: In book four Morrowseer reveals that he made up the prophecy about the dragonets. However in the following book (The Brightest Night) the third part of the prophecy comes true. "Of three queens who blister^note Princess Blister and blaze^note Princess Blaze and burn^note Princess Burn. two shall die^note Burn dies from being bitten by a dragonbite viper and then Blister dies from trying to take the "Eye Of Onyx" from Thorn and one shall learn^note Blaze is left as the Sole Survivor of the three Sand Wing Sisters. If she bows to a fate that is stronger and higher^note Queen Thorn, she'll have the power of Wings Of Fire.
• Puberty Superpower: SilkWings gain the ability to fly and spin silk after going through their metamorphosis, which takes place at the equivalent of puberty in dragon age terms.
• Protagonist Title: "Darkstalker", though there is an alternating POV with him, Fathom and Clearsight.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: As Darkstalker tells the story of Pyrrhia's most feared dragon, it was only natural it would end up like this.
• Psychic Block Defense: The effect of skyfire.
• Psycho Electric Eel: Coral has a prison where no dragons dare escape because of eels with shocks powerful enough to kill a dragon. There is water flowing from the ceiling so even flying out would be risky. Justified by how all Pyrrhian animals and plants are larger than ones on Earth to be more "dragon sized".
• Pygmalion Snapback: Darkstalker tries to use his animus powers to give Clearsight earrings that make her forget all of the bad futures she sees and see only the good ones. Clearsight doesn't take it well, especially since most of her visions now show Darkstalker having no qualms with going further than this and using his powers to shape her and Fathom however he likes, and the whole thing leads to tragedy for both.
• Quicksand Sucks: The RainWings don't have any prisons, since they typically exile offenders. As a result, when Mastermind is held prisoner for experimenting on the RainWings, they put him in quicksand and drag him out and then back in every few hours so he doesn't die.
• Race-Name Basis: Several dragons refer to others by their tribe's name.
• Raise Him Right This Time: Foeslayer and Kinkajou turn Darkstalker into a dragonet with no memories of his previous self to allow him to live a happier life without becoming evil. Though it's as much for Foeslayer as for him, given that Darkstalker is now the only dragon she knows from the past who's still alive.
• Rebellious Rebel: Neither the Dragonets of Destiny nor some of the Talons of Peace accept the organization's decisions.
• Renegade Splinter Faction: Belladonna's faction of the LeafWings turn out to be this. Her mother left with half of the tribe out of frustration that Queen Sequoia refused to continue the war and take revenge on the HiveWings.
• Resurrection/Death Loop: Queen Diamond punishes Foeslayer by killing her over and over with an enchanted spear that will freeze her when she dies and then revive her whenever the user wants. She ends up tying her there for thousands of years so new dragons can come to kill her during their Diamond Trials.
• Rewriting Reality: Darkstalker's scroll works exactly like an animus dragon's magic does, because he put all of his powers into it, and is activated by writing in it.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: RainWings think sloths are this. Scavengers also, Glory notes upon seeing this that she can see why people like them, since they look like slightly less furry sloths.
• Rock Theme Naming: A sizable number of dragons are named after gems, such as Ruby, Tourmaline, Pearl, Onyx and Diamond.
• Royal School: Since there are only 35 students at Jade Mountain academy (5 per tribe) and all of them are selected by their queens, quite a few are royalty, as are some of the founders.
• Royalty Superpower: SeaWing royals have extra bioluminescent scales and are often animus dragons. IceWing royalty used to have animus powers due to marrying whatever animus was born in another family, until 2000 years ago when Foeslayer and Arctic fell in love.
• Sapient All Along: Dragons find out humans a.k.a scavengers are sentient in book fourteen, and a group of humans find out dragons are sentient at what is timeline-wise towards the start of the series. This causes many dragons to be rightfully horrified, since they have been eating 'scavengers' since the dawn of time.
• Sapient Eat Sapient: Humans are not the dominant species in the world, and are treated as animals by dragons. While dragons don't go out of their way to hunt them, most of them are certainly not above opportunistically eating humans. When ironclad proof of human sapience surfaces, some dragons are noted to look rather ill all of a sudden.
• Series Continuity Error: In The Flames of Hope, it's mentioned twice that Tsunami's blood was blue. This contradicts earlier books, most evidently in The Lost Heir, where SeaWing blood is stated (and shown in the graphic novels) to be red.
• Shadow Archetype: In book 2, part of Tsunami's character arc is learning to be a better leader than Queen Coral, her mother. Queen Coral, despite her redeeming qualities and her overbearing affection for her daughters, has plenty of flaws that reflect what Tsunami would be if she didn't learn from her mistakes about killing willy-nilly. On one hand, she shows no remorse for killing Tortoise over neglecting to protect her eggs. On the other hand, Tsunami learning she accidentally killed her father gives her pause (to say the least) and prompts her to only resort to killing sparingly.
• Ship Tease: Just about every protagonist gets a love interest, save for a few exceptions.
  • In Arc 1, we have Clay and Peril, Tsunami and Riptide, Glory and Deathbringer, and Starflight and Fatespeaker (Starflight initially had feelings for Sunny, and although Sunny was confused about her own feelings at first, she eventually decides that she loves Starflight as a brother and encourages him to pursue a relationship with Fatespeaker).
  • In Arc 2, we got the love triangle between Moon, Qibli, and Winter, and although there was plenty of teasing on both sides, Moon eventually decides to start a romance with Qibli, which thankfully did not damage their friendship with Winter. We also got some teasing between Turtle and Kinkajou (although whether or not Kinkajou's feelings are due to some level of aftereffect from Anemone's love spell has yet to be determined), as well as some more teasing between Clay and Peril.
  • Arc 3 gave us Blue and Cricket, and Sundew and Willow were also teased a little bit before they were revealed to be girlfriends later on. Luna and Swordtail were already Official Couple status to begin with.
  • The Legends books gave us Fathom and Indigo in Darkstalker and Ivy and Leaf in Dragonslayer. The latter book also teased Wren and Undauntable a little bit, but the romantic feelings are purely one-sided on Undauntable's part, and given how their last interaction went, a potential future romance between them is looking very uncertain.
  • The Winglets books gave us Snowflake and Snowfox, who were the series' first official gay couple.
• Sliding Scale of Animal Cast: Level 3. Humans do exist, but they are an endangered species. Only a few humans actually appear (usually in the Once an Episode of the main character deciding to save a human instead of eating them during the first arc), and fewer are actually named. The series' main focus are the dragons, and the most that the humans ever get mentioned are the three humans that killed Queen Oasis and started the war.
  • Dragonslayer is, by itself, at Level 10, with three human protagonists and a dragon as a major supporting character. It also appears to push the series as a whole towards Level 4, with the protagonists actively setting out to establish peaceful contact with dragonkind at the end of the book.
• Sliding Scale of Animal Communication: Level 2, as the dragons can communicate with each other, and the humans present are treated as prey at worst and pets at best. LeafWings are capable of talking to plants to varying extents, though.
  • As of Dragonslayer, the scale has shifted to Level 5. As Wren and Sky demonstrate, humans and dragons are capable of learning each other's languages, albeit with some difficulty over the course of several years, making the lack of understanding between the two species an ordinary language barrier.
• Sliding Scale Of Free Will Versus Fate: Level 4, because while prophecies do exist, they are just predictions of one of many futures and dragons still have free will. Though skilled Seers like Darkstalker can know every single future and their odds, it is the individual dragon's choice which future will happen.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism:
  • The first arc's setting is a cynical, somewhat hellish environment torn by a decades-long war that seems to have no point of stopping, with the only real hope being the five Dragonets of Destiny destined to save the world. However, the first arc never really loses its idealistic streak of hope, despite its use of Cruel Twist Endings and whatnot. The dragonets keep fighting for what they believe is right, even when life throws every curveball at them. It's through their determination and hope that leads to the arc's happy ending.
  • The third arc is similar, and focuses on some more mature subjects like tyranny, genocide, and discrimination. Despite this, the third arc is quite idealistic, even more so than the first arc. The protagonists of the first two books of the third arc are also idealistic and hopeful. In fact, one of the arc's major themes is empathy and learning to be empathetic to others.
• Snakes Are Sinister:
  • Queen Blister, one of the major villains, is described as having a snakelike face and later uses venomous snakes to try to kill Burn. Both dragons named after snakes, Viper and Rattlesnake, are antagonists.
  • Snakes are among the animals used to attack the first settlers of Pyrrhia in the Legend of the Hive. Hawthorn later follows suit by using the Breath of Evil to control the snakes one of which he uses to hold Willow hostage when he is controlled by the Othermind.
• Socially Scored Society: In the Ice Kingdom, an Icewing's place in society is determined by their rank on the wall in the seven circles, which is in turn determined by the Queen and her council assessing their accomplishments. The highest-ranked Icewings are among the aristocracy and royalty in the top of the first circle, while the bottom of the seventh circle is the worst place in Icewing society for any tribe to be in. Because of all the harm the ranking system has caused for Icewing society, Snowfall destroys it when she takes the throne of the Icewing Kingdom.
• The Sociopath: Most of the adult dragons, even those on the heroes' side, say that dragons are not supposed to feel empathy for others. (Though this is probably just propaganda to justify the war, since the dragonets and others are able to show empathy just fine.)
• Song of Courage: Clay gets Queen Scarlet's prisoners who are about to be killed to sing the "Dragonets are coming" song. Not only does it instill hope in the prisoners, it makes Clay more reassured that dragons really do want the dragonets to save the world and for the war to end.
• Snow Means Cold: All dragon tribes besides the NightWings, SilkWings, and HiveWings have names based on their environment. IceWings live in an area with very cold temperatures, and some have names involving snow (and there's even a dragon named Hailstorm).
• Standard Evil Empire Hierarchy: For Blister's side of the war:
  • The Emperor: Blister
  • The Right Hand: Morrowseer
  • The General: Commander Shark
  • The Guard: Moray
  • The Evil Counterpart: The alternate Dragonets of Destiny
  • The Oddball: Mastermind and Deathbringer
  • The Man Behind the Man: Battlewinner
• Story-Breaker Power: As time went on, there came to be quite a few of these.
  • Surprisingly enough, RainWings of all dragons turn out to be this. With incredibly deadly venom, camouflage, and tranquilizers, they'd be more than capable of resolving most plots if they weren't held back by pacifism and their own sheer idiocy. Tellingly, Glory spends most of her time (after learning how to use her abilities) being Queen away from the plot, and Kinkajou is incapacitated or elsewhere whenever the other dragonets have to fight anyone in their league.
  • NightWings would certainly qualify for this, if their abilities were as real as they'd like to have others believe. Moon is the only character in the present-day that actually has the fabled powers of seeing the future and reading minds, and she's far weaker than most in this department.
  • Animus Dragons have the power to do anything they want. Yes really. The only things that hold them back are themselves, the fear of losing their souls, and the fact that there are multiple of them (It's also common knowledge in-universe that they can't bring back the dead, though this has never been known to be tried). Once the arc involving them ended, they had their powers removed because they'd be far too capable of fixing everything and likely willing to.
  • There's a reason Clearsight is only present in one book (two if you count the prologue of book 11) and only with fellow story-breakers. Her omniscience is so ridiculously strong that she really shouldn't have any problems dealing with anything less than animus dragons... who of course use their own powers to blind her to the futures to get what they want. Once she gets her powers back, she manages to resolve the plot in a couple hours. What really cements her as this, is the fact that if she existed during the timeline of any of the main books, she'd easily be able to resolve every conflict the protagonists face.
  • The reigning king of this however, is Darkstalker. While this trope normally doesn't apply to antagonists, Darkstalker becomes the biggest Story-Breaker in the series by a large margin by being an animus with omniscience, Complete Immortality and Mind-reading. This isn't so bad in Darkstalker (the novel) since his animus powers are confined to his scroll, his Morality Pet has better omniscience than him, and he has very little practice seeing the future. However, when he wakes up in book 9, it becomes clear very quickly that next to none of the protagonists actually stand a chance against his whims, especially once he rapidly makes himself immune to other animus magic. As such, he spends most of the storyline attempting to use his powers very little, and still faces no real opposition from anyone besides Turtle (an animus) and Dragons helped by Turtle's magic.
• Stranger in a Familiar Land: Downplayed in "Winter Turning". Although initially conflicted by his brainwashed life as Pyrite, Hailstorm does regain a good deal of his personality by returning home. But at the same time, he and Winter also comes out of the experience realizing their people's Meritocracy isn't nearly as important as they previously thought.
• Stronger with Age: Dragons get larger and thus more powerful as they get older, and RainWings can also shoot venom farther.
• Strongly Worded Letter: All of Admiral's attempts at "reform" are laughably small requests to the HiveWings, but he still convinces himself that the changes he is accomplishing are worth being a glorified prisoner to the HiveWings for.
• Stumbling Upon the Lost Wizard: Sunny discovers the animus Stonemover in Jade Mountain. He stays there because he turned himself partially into stone to counteract the standard effects of using animus powers, and sustains himself by enchanting a fox to bring him food every few days.
• Succession Crisis: The SandWings are having one throughout the first series that turns into a continental war. The MudWings are mentioned to have had one a few centuries ago.
• Surprisingly Happy Ending: The first arc, where first it looks like Clay is going to die and then that Blister is going to win, but Peril heals Clay and Thorn becomes queen instead.
• Survived the Beginning: In the second arc, the seven dragonets of the Jade Winglet class are introduced and set up to be the main cast, only for one of them, Carnelian, to die halfway through the first book. However none of the others of the main cast, nor any other character who's not a villain, dies after this.
• Switching P.O.V.: Most books have just one perspective (excluding the prologue and epilogue), but there are occasional exceptions.
  • Darkstalker alternates between the perspectives of Clearsight, Fathom and Darkstalker himself.
  • Runaway rotates between Foeslayer, Arctic, and Snowflake.
  • Dragonslayer rotates between Ivy, Leaf, and Wren.
  • The Dangerous Gift occasionally switches to another character's perspective thanks to Snowfall's animus-touched ring, known as the gift of vision. The visions include Atala, Blue, Bryony, Raven, and Jeroba I and Jeroba III.
• Tagalong Kid: Bumblebee in the third arc, who's mainly just there to act cute and bring some levity. At the end of The Dangerous Gift, she stays in Sanctuary instead of going with the stealth team.
• Take a Third Option: Sunny chooses Thorn over Blister and Blaze as the next SandWing queen. ^note Burn was already dead, due to getting bitten by a snake that she received as a gift from Blister
• Tap on the Head: The other NightWings use this to knock Starflight unconscious to bring to their island. He remains semi-conscious for days with no long-term affects. Later in a flashback, Ruby has Hailstorm knocked out this way.
• Taught to Hate: Winter and Snowfall have both been raised to despise NightWings, a prejudice that has been held among IceWings for the past two thousand years. However, they both manage to grow beyond this.
• That Poor Plant:
  • Plants are often used to test out the effects of RainWing venom.
  • Post-Heel–Face Turn, Peril vents her fiery temper and abilities on vegetation.
• That's What I Would Do: Qibli figures out that Darkstalker is using a spell to make himself A Charm Person because that is what he would do if he had animus powers. It's later revealed that Darkstalker, being a mind-reader, got the idea from Qibli.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Kestrel is killed after having her throat slit, getting poisoned, and is then thrown off a cliff for good measure.
• Thread of Prophecy, Severed: Burn kills one of the five prophecy dragonets in its egg in the prologue of the first book, leading to the guardians trying to raise said dragonets getting a replacement that clearly doesn't fit the prophecy. Turns out this is because the prophecy was made up in the first place.
• The Tooth Hurts: Queen Coral punishes certain dragons, like ones who failed to protect her eggs, by having all of their teeth pulled out and then killing them, as shown with Tortoise.
• Time Skip: Six months pass between the first arc and the second arc. Dragonslayer has a couple timeskips early on until around the beginning of the first arc.
• Title Drop: In The Brightest Night, twice near the end of the book. First Clay says that Peril might really be the Wings of Fire, then Sunny, responding to Clay's statement with the knowledge that the prophecy is false, says the wings of fire are in all of the dragonets of destiny. And then there's how the Eye of Onyx is mentioned to look a lot like wings of fire.
• Toad Licking: A variant. Winter Turning has Moonwatcher warning her friends against eating brightly colored frogs. The last time she ate those, she says, she has had strange dreams about anteaters and newts taking over the world.
• Token Aquatic Race: The SeaWings are the only fully aquatic dragons; they have gills as well as lungs, are one of the few tribes to not have a Breath Weapon, and their kingdom covers a chain of islands and the sea around it. The MudWings are also amphibious and live in a swamp, but they can't stay underwater indefinitely.
• Trailers Always Spoil: Nearly every book's back cover blurb contains a major spoiler for the previous book, to the point where only three books in the main series manage to avert it:
  • The Lost Heir reveals that Tsunami is Queen Coral's only surviving daughter.
  • The Hidden Kingdom reveals that Glory can shoot venom.
  • The Dark Secret reveals that the NightWings were the ones responsible for kidnapping fourteen RainWings.
  • The Brightest Night reveals that Morrowseer made up the prophecy.
  • Winter Turning reveals that Hailstorm is alive.
  • Without even looking at the back cover, anyone who is browsing the bookstore looking for their first Wings of Fire book can find out about Scarlet's face being disfigured from the cover of Escaping Peril.
  • Talons of Power and Darkness of Dragons reveals that Turtle is an animus and Darkstalker has returned after 2000 years.
  • The Hive Queen and The Poison Jungle reveals that The Leafwings aren't extinct after all and there's an entire tribe of them in the Poison Jungle.
  • The Dangerous Gift reveals that Snowfall becomes the next IceWing queen and that the Pantalan dragons are evacuating to Pyrrhia.
  • The Flames of Hope reveals that humanity's sentience is discovered and that they will play a massive role in the stopping the breath of evil.
• Tranquilizer Dart: The RainWings use these. They become useful in The Dark Secret for taking down the NightWings without harming them.
• Transformation Trinket: Chameleon uses Darkstalker's scroll as this. It is capable of doing much more, but he keeps the full extent of its power secret.
• Tree Top Town: The RainWings live in one, unsurprisingly given that they are large, flying animals that live in the rainforest.
• Triumphant Reprise: Near the beginning of "The Dragonet Prophecy", Tsunami sings the "dragonets are coming" song to annoy her guardians, which Clay notes that she does often. Later in the book, Clay, in despair at being imprisoned by the SkyWings, sings the song and the other prisoners join in. This serves as a moment of affirmation for Clay and the audience that the dragonets do mean something to the world.
• True Companions: The Dragonets of Destiny were raised together, and through the shared suffering they endured for six years, became very close, almost like siblings. Even when they meet their families, the dragonets still choose to stick together, even after the war was over.
• Truly Single Parent: Jerboa I uses her animus power to create Jerboa II "Boa", who she keeps around for more than a thousand years while using her powers to edit her mind to be the ideal child whenever Boa does something she doesn't want. Eventually Boa realizes the truth and effectively kills her mother.
• Twins Are Special: It is extremely rare for SkyWing twins to hatch from the same egg, making any that do considered special. One of them is constantly Wreathed in Flames (known as firescales), while the other has no fire at all.
• Two Dun It: The culprit for the deaths of Coral's unhatched daughters turns out to be a different dragon, an enchanted statue created by Orca, than the one who tried to kill their sister Tsunami, Whirlpool.
• Two Girls to a Team: The alternate dragonets and the Jade Mountain group (with Kinkajou or Peril). Inverted with the original prophecy dragonet group, which consists of three female dragonets and two males.
• Underwater City: The SeaWings live in one, unsurprisingly.
• The Unfavorite: Glory is this to the Talons of Peace, on account of the fact that she's not a SkyWing (as the prophecy demands) and was a last-minute replacement. In fact, the guardians and Morrowseer threatening to outright kill Glory is what incites the other dragonets to finally try to escape.
• Unknown Relative: Sky from Dragonslayer is Peril's twin brother and Kestrel's son, but no one in-universe actually knows that because everyone believes that he's dead. It's not explicitly revealed in the books either, though there are enough clues in Dragonslayer to figure it out, and was further confirmed by Word of God.
• Unfinished, Untested, Used Anyway: Battlewinner decides to go ahead with the invasion of the Rain Kingdom with only prototype guards against venom, despite Mastermind's protests.
• Vagueness Is Coming: The Jade Mountain prophecy, which ominously states that "something is coming", but doesn't say anything about what it is.
• Veganopia:
  • RainWings are the only vegetarian tribe in Pyrrhia, and eat only fruit. They live in a utopian village with no real threats until the NightWings show up.
  • Sky is vegetarian as well.
  • Averted with the LeafWings, the other hidden jungle tribe. To Cricket's surprise, despite their association with plants they are carnivores, and at least for half of them not very peaceful.
• Velvet Revolution: Sunny plans on ending the war this way, with a peace meeting between the tribes. It works, but not without two of the three queens dying anyway. A book earlier, the battle between the RainWings and NightWings, which has been set up to be potentially very bloody, is resolved relatively peacefully with only two deaths due to a combination of Sunny's suggestion to use tranquilizer darts to incapacitate the NightWing guards, Greatness peacefully agreeing to Abdicate the Throne, and the erupting volcano forcing the NightWings' hands.
• Vitriolic Best Buds:
  • The dragonets themselves at times, especially where Tsunami and Glory are concerned. They may in-fight a lot—well, OK, all the time—but they are nonetheless fiercely loyal to one another.
    • Sadly averted with the replacement dragonets, who strongly dislike one another, and show little concern when any of their number are in peril.
  • Qibli and Winter, although they both fight a lot and Winter tries to deny it, they’re still friends.
• Volcano Lair: The NightWings live in one. Living there has all of the problems one would expect from living in an active volcano, though, so they are desperate to leave and find a better home.
• "Wanted!" Poster:
  • Thorn posts one in the Scorpion's Den featuring Dune, Morrowseer and Stonemover.
  • Blue, Cricket, and Swordtail end up on one for stealing the book of Clearsight.
• War Arc: The first arc is set in the middle of a civil war among the SandWings which most of the other tribes of Pyrrhia have been caught up on in as well.
• War Is Hell:
  • The dragonets of the first arc get to see the utter horror of a pointless war filled with Family-Unfriendly Violence and death. Highlights include Queen Scarlet making her prisoners fight in arenas, which culminates for the "winners" in Peril burning them alive, the dragonets coming across a battlefield full of mutilated dead bodies from Burn and Blaze's sides (one of the casualties being Clay's sister Crane), the SkyWings bombing the summer palace, and Burn's side planning to lead an attack to kill all of the IceWings with the full knowledge of the dragons involved, including Child Soldiers, that a fight in such cold temperatures will likely nearly kill off every single tribe involved.
  • The Tree Wars were this for the LeafWings, who were very nearly wiped out and all of the trees which they fought to protect were destroyed soon after. It's no wonder that Sundew bears so much hatred towards the HiveWings for what they did to her tribe.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Morpho alienates the other members of the Chrysalis by refusing to accept any SilkWings into their organization unless they have properly pure principles and reject the HiveWings enough, no matter how otherwise enthusiastic they might be.
• We Have Forgotten the Phlebotinum: The war would have already been over a long time ago if the Eye of Onyx hadn't been lost along with the other SandWing treasure.
• Wham Episode: Book 4, the Dark Secret. The alternate Dragonets are revealed, removing any Plot Armor the Dragonets previously enjoyed. The NightWings after 3 books of seemingly being omnipotent, are revealed to be frauds. The Dragonet Prophecy is a fabrication intended to help the NightWings seize the rainforest. Starlight manages to arrange for the RainWings and NightWings to be ruled by the newly queened Glory. Oh, and Starflight is blinded by a blast of flames from an erupting volcano, which also incinerates Morrowseer. So much for the status quo.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: In-Universe. In A Guide To The Dragon World, Smolder once read a scroll made for dragonets that teaches how to take care of pets. The scroll includes a section with recipes if the reader gets bored and want to eat their pet instead. Smolder himself thinks this would be gruesome for a dragonet to read.
• When the Planets Align: The brightest night that the dragonets were born on refers to the day when all three moons are full. It only occurs about every century though the end of the book "The Brightest Night" features a fake brightest night caused by two full moons and a comet.
• Win Your Freedom: Queen Scarlet's arena is like this in theory - but anyone trying for freedom has to get past Peril first.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Being an animus means each use of your magic does further damage to your soul until you eventually go insane. Or, so it seems at first; the trope is zigzagged because it is corrupting, but not literally so. As the series goes on, it's revealed that the shift in the animus mindset is more a psychological one — the more you use your powers, the more powerful you feel, and the more entitled you become as you start thinking that you're unbeatable. This was proven when a character decided to enchant an amulet that would protect their soul from being corrupted, so then they believed they could use their magic as much as they wanted without restrictions, but slowly started acting more spoiled and reckless because they now beleived that they were untouchable. The basic conclusion that most of the characters come to is that these evil temptations are stemming from that were always there, and With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility if you don't want to lose your mind. In short, the power was corrupting them, but it's because the temptations of power itself were causing the shift rather than the animus magic itself making them go insane.
• Women Are Wiser: It is noted that the female scavengers tend to live longer in the arena because they tend to be more clever and work together. Not particularly true of female vs male dragons, though.
• A World Half Full: Pyrrhia is full of plenty of horror and sadness, and the grudges that dragons and tribes hold against each other don't easily go away, but dragons are still capable of slowly working towards a better world.
• World of Action Girls: All of the queens by definition, given how they gain power. And, in general, most female dragons are competent to great at fighting. Even female scavengers are action girls.
• World of Badass: Dragons are expected to be powerful fighters, and most of them are.
• World of Snark: There are many, many Deadpan Snarker characters running around.
• Worshipped for Great Deeds: Clearsight is worshipped by the dragons of Pantala for her protecting them with the ability to tell the future, which no Pantalan dragons could do.
• X Must Not Win: In "The Brightest Night", when it seems like the war is about to end, the dragonets are motivated to still try to do something about how Blister will win.
• You Have 48 Hours: In The Hive Queen, the main cast is given two days to enact their plan, or else Belladonna and Hemlock will enact their own, much more violent, plans for revolution. They succeed in finding out how to stop Wasp. Unfortunately, by that point, Hemlock and Belladonna didn't want to wait for Sundew's report and they go through with their plan anyways.
• You Need a Breath Mint:
  • In The Dark Secret, Starflight notices that many of the dragonets from the NightWing tribe have "horrendously bad breath," which he later realizes is because they've only been able to eat rotten flesh for nourishment. The graphic novel even has him inwardly wondering why Fierceteeth's breath is so awful and visibly recoiling from Mightyclaws and remarking to himself that his breath is just as bad as hers.
  • In Darkstalker, Clearsight tells Fathom not to eat a fruit with purple spots on it that Darkstalker bought because it'll "make your breath smell like vultures for a week." When Fathom questions how she knows this, she mentions that Darkstalker ate one once, and she had to endure his breath for a full week.
• Your Size May Vary: How big are scavengers compared to dragons? An illustration of a dragon and a scavenger in one book suggests that dragons are much bigger and scavengers are only as big as a dragon's head, while the graphic novel depicts dragons only being about twice to three times as big as scavengers.
  • Dragonslayer shows that while a newly-hatched dragonet is smaller than a scavenger, they quickly grow much, much bigger. Wren can easily carry a dragonet on her shoulders when she's seven years old. After a year and a half together, Sky's shoulders were level with her waist and his wingspan was wider than her outstretched arms. After another Time Skip of around seven years, he's more than twice her size and can fly with her on his back. Bear in mind that Wren is 14 years old and the dragon is 8 years old at that point.

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