Wings Of Fire Facts

Nightwing, Teardrop scales and scales down the side

As many of us know Nightwings seem to have small white dots on some of their scales going down their sides. The base/Nightwing example in the front of the book has this.

Though not all Nightwings actually have these scales.

Starflight for example does not have them.

Only Nightwings with mind reading have the white dots on their scales down their sides.

Winter in Moon Rising even points out (in his mind) that he didn't know Nightwings could have scales like that, when he is thinking about Moonwatcher. He didn't previously know any Nightwings had silver scales anywhere except under their wings, this is of course due to almost none having been mindreaders for thousands of years since they were not born under moonlight to gain mindreading and get the teardrop and silver scales.

The size of the teardrop scales also indicates the amount of power the mind reader possesses.

Moonwatcher's teardrop scales are noted to be bigger than Fatespeaker's teardrop scales.
Fatespeaker does read minds, she is just so very bad at it that it's only small fragments of it when she focuses really hard, those are her "future visions" it's just her picking up on other thoughts. Fatespeaker even jokes about reading Moonwatcher's mind, though it is in italics. And Darkstalker questions why Fatespeaker would have teardrop scales at all, since she isn't a true mind reader and it isn't even useful. But the Darkstalker bit is in a later book.

I know that in the graphic novel this isn't clear but the graphic novels have their own weird oddities when it comes to drawing some of the characters.