Dragon Child

Captain Sara of Varnaways

Captain Sara had just finished settling into her office as the leader of the watch in the village of Varnaways. She had had to work long and hard to over come her superior’s sexism to attain her post. Even if it was the captain of a quiet village on the edge of nowhere where nothing ever happened she was happy to have such a high post.

Just as she finished thinking this, half a dozen of her men, dirty and bloodied, carried a naked stranger between them as they came running into the building. They quickly opened the door to one of the cells and tossed the unconscious man in slamming the door and gasping a sigh of relief.

“Crimmy!” one of the men gasped, “how is he still alive after all that.”

“I’m telling you,” another gasped, “he ain’t human!”

“What’s going on here!?!” Captain Sara demanded.

All of the men jumped in surprise at Sara's voice and saluted her. They all scampered back against the wall as Captain Sara ripped open the door to the cell they had just thrown the man in. Sara stopped short in the doorway as she saw that the man in it had several swords and arrows sticking out of his back. Sara spared her man a glare before turning to carefully removed each of the weapons from the man.

She was surprised at how shallow the wounds where, the swords fell away at a touch and the arrows had not even buried all of their heads into the man’s flesh. Even after Sara had removed the weapons from the man there was very little blood flowing from the wounds and the man was breathing easily. It seemed that the man had been knocked out by a blow to the back of the head.

Sara took a step back to get a good look at the man before her. His hair was a little longer than shoulder length and bleached white by the sun, while the sun seemed to have darkened his skin to a deep bronze and his chest seemed to be a lighter bronze. The man was huge, his head would brush the top of the cell if he stood up and he looked like he could lift an ox. The man had several hairline scars running the length of his body, they might have been fierce when he got them but now they where obviously very old injuries. The man’s finger/toenails where outrageously long and thick as well as coated with blood, as was the man’s jaws.

Sara turned to the men who had brought him into the cell and demanded, “Why have you attacked and thrown this injured man into this cell!?!”

The men looked at each other white faced before one said, “It would be best if we showed you mam.”

“Fine.” Sara said following the man trying to hold her temper in check.

As soon as Sara had stepped out of the cell one man ran in and tossed out the weapons before slamming the cell shut again. Sara was about to ask the reason when another man led her outside. Sara stopped and stood in shock at the sight before her, the sight of a slaughter.

Sara saw half of her entire force lying on the ground before her either dead or severely wounded. The other half where holding the survivors and trying to treat wounds ranging from broken ribs to nasty gashes across various body parts. Sara even saw one man that had his face torn off and several with caved skulls. In the center of all the carnage lay two horses that had been torn open by something sharp.

“Wha-? What happened?!?” Sara whispered trying to swallow her sickness, “What did all of this!?!”

The guard that led her here said, “We were attacked. This was the results.”

Sara switched to commander mode and demanded, “What where their numbers, what weapons did they use, and how many of them did we bring down?”

The guard hesitated before he said, “In order, one, unarmed, and captured.”

Sara staggered back and tried to wrap her head around what she had just been told. The man she had seen in the cell looked powerful, but not like he could bring down half the town’s defense without even a dagger. She needed more information.

“How?” Sara asked, it was all she could say.

“We where leading the new horses to their stalls when suddenly the horses started to panic.” the guard said, “A blur shot down from that building there and ripped the horses apart in a second. We surrounded the thing before we even knew what it was, when it had stopped moving we saw the man we just tossed into the cell crouched on all fours glaring at us. The man made some horrid hissing sounds and started eying us.

The hissing made us hesitant to approach, and then Lieutenant Mitchell advanced behind his shield and called out, “What are you doing good sir? Are you right in the head?” Then the thing shot toward the lieutenant as a blur, Mitchell tried to hide behind his shield but the thing just shattered it with a backhand slap and jumped off the lieutenant’s chest hard enough to cause a rib to impale the lieutenant’s heart. The man turned in the air and attacked private Thorson, who had been advancing to help Lieutenant Mitchell. The man smashed Thorson’s shield and slashed with his nails hard enough to take off most of Thorson’s face.

At that point, we all charged the man hoping to scare him off, the man just picked up a few stones off the ground and tossed them. The stones broke shields, broke bones, and killed Private Tom when it pierced his skull. The man then jumped something like a hundred feet into the sky and started spinning at amazing speeds. We all huddled together not knowing what he was doing, he just plunged into the center of the group and shredded almost a dozen good men.

Then he jumped onto one of our newest privates and bit his face off before kicking Corporal Stevens in the face hard enough to shatter his skull. When he landed we shot four arrows into his back, but they just seemed to annoy him. He shot into the archer’s legs all but breaking them before he leapt onto the backs of the other two archers backs knocking them to the ground.

Then Sergeant Samuel slammed his war hammer into the back of the man’s head, but this only dazed him so Samuel hit him again knocking the man to the ground. The man threw more stones behind him, cracking Samuel’s ribs. Then a half dozen of our swords men tried to run the man through, but the swords hardly pierced the man’s flesh. The man spun himself around and nearly tore the legs off the men who had stabbed him.

Samuel managed to get back up and hit the man repeatedly in the head with his hammer. Even with Samuel’s strength, it still took nearly four swings to bring the man low. Then Samuel fell to the ground and died from the wounds the man had given him.
That is what ended the fight Captain, Samuel gave his life to bring the man low and save us. I say we kill the man while we still can.”

Captain Sara was steaming by this point and ready to take the man up on his offer. Nevertheless, she remembered protocol and said through gritted teeth, “No, much as I’d like to, no. We need to find out if he has any accomplices as well as why he committed this horrible crime.” Sara looked the man right in the eye and said with a voice full of hatred, “Let me know when that monster wakes up.”

One of the men that had stayed inside came running out and stopped in front of Captain Sara and gasped, “The prisoner is awake! That monster has already gotten back to its feet!”

Captain Sara nodded and hurried inside thinking, “What kind of a monster is this man?”

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Rhzvanzin awoke in a small cave shaped like a box with its exit blocked by some strange growths. Two of the strange dragons stood just beyond the growths and looked at him with the oddest look, Rhzvanzin wondered how they changed their colors like that. One of the two strange dragons ran out of Rhzvanzin’s sight while the other cowered behind his piece of bark.

Rhzvanzin wondered how long he had been out; it could not have been long, for the blood on his claws was still drying. Rhzvanzin noticed that there was a hole in the cave he was in, it had more of the strange growth and let him look outside. Rhzvanzin saw more of the strange box shaped trees growing outside and several of the strange dragons moving around on two legs, he wondered why they did that, it seemed awfully precarious to him.

Rhzvanzin heard something behind him and turned to see three more of the strange dragons behind him. One of them looked very different from the others he had seen so far; this one was thinner and had long yellow soft scales on her head. Rhzvanzin noticed that this particular dragon did not look very happy at the moment.

“Hello,” Rhzvanzin said cheerfully as he sat down, “How are you today?”

The two strange dragons next to the new one shrank back at Rhzvanzin’s words while the new dragon dropped a foreclaw to cover something it was carrying. Rhzvanzin was surprised by the fear that these dragons where showing towards such friendly words.

“Was it something I said?” Rhzvanzin asked.

The first two dragons shrank back to the cave wall and seemed to be shaking violently. The new dragon snarled and revealed a very shiny talon and brandished it at Rhzvanzin. Rhzvanzin was getting very confused.

The new dragon seemed to be demanding something of Rhzvanzin at the moment.

Nevertheless, for the life of him Rhzvanzin could not figure out what it was saying to him.
Rhzvanzin cocked his head and asked, “What?”

The new dragon seemed taken aback by his question and seemed to ask something making strange sounds very slowly.

Rhzvanzin cocked his head and tried to figure out just what the new dragon was saying. Was this some sort of code that he had to crack to win a game? If it was, he would be here awhile.

The new dragon then seemed to be looking Rhzvanzin right in the eyes, pointed at itself, and said slowly, “Sara.”

Rhzvanzin thought of the word and looked at the dragon in front of him; it seemed to be waiting for something. Rhzvanzin got back to thinking on the word, he had never heard of any type of dragon called a ‘Sara’ or a dragon clan that went by that name.

“Sara,” the strange dragon said pointing at herself again putting real emphasis on the word.”

The strange dragon seemed to want him to repeat what it was saying. He tried saying the word, “Sssearra.”

The word was difficult for Rhzvanzin to shape his tongue around, though after he tried it a few more times he managed to get the word right. Then the Sara dragon pointed to one of the dragons cowering on the wall and said, “Henry.”

Rhzvanzin tried to wrap his tongue around the word and managed this one after just a couple of tries. The Sara dragon seemed happy and was about to point at another one of the dragons, but Rhzvanzin decided to show it that he had already figured it out what she was trying to get across.

He pointed at the three dragons cowering against the wall with three of his claws, causing the Henry dragons to flinch, and said with a smile, “Three Henry dragons and one Sara dragon.”

The Sara dragon made an odd face before it made one of the strangest sounds Rhzvanzin had ever heard. The sound startled him enough to make him leap back to the back the cave he was in and drop into a defensive crouch. This stopped the Sara dragon making her noise and pointed to the two dragons she had not pointed to before.

“James and Josh,” the Sara dragon said, “not Henry.”

Rhzvanzin did not know what ‘and’ meant but it sounded like a conjunction and ‘not’ sounded like a negative. This left Rhzvanzin to believe that the words the Sara dragon had been saying where titles or names, not race or clan names. Still these names where very odd sounding to Rhzvanzin.

“Henry, James, Josh, Sara.” Rhzvanzin said pointing a talon to each in turn before asking, “Did I get that right?”

Sara rocked her head forward and back in a violent manner that had Rhzvanzin considered dangerous for her neck while Henry, James, and Josh made a sound similar to a howl. Sara stopped the violent motions with her head, looked at Rhzvanzin, and pointed at him with an expectant look on its face. Rhzvanzin figured that it wanted him to share his name or title as well.

“Rhzvanzin,” Rhzvanzin said contently.

Sara’s face seemed to fall as it heard his name. Sara stood just beyond the strange growths before she drew something from her strange hide and put it into a particularly dense part of the growth. A large part of the growth fell open with a screech that drove Rhzvanzin’s ears insane. He hissed at the pain and shock his head to rid it of the ringing the screech he lift in his head. Sara seemed to hesitate when Rhzvanzin hissed but she kept coming towards him. The Henry, James, and Josh creatures started making horrible noises as Sara approached but Sara silenced them with a noise of her own.

Sara placed her foreclaws under Rhzvanzin and seemed to be trying to lift him. While she did not lift him off the ground, she did lift the front part of his body off the ground. The shift of weight threw Rhzvanzin off balance and he nearly fell to the ground, but he pressed off the ground with his hind legs, clung to the ceiling of the cave, and moved away from Sara. He did not know what she was trying to do, but he did not like it.

Sara inhaled deeply and Rhzvanzin dodged the expected flame by throwing himself in to the cave wall on his left. He felt the cave wall give way some but saw no flames come from the Sara creature, just a strange noise. It looked at Rhzvanzin again as it closed the growth and said, “Goodbye Rhz…Rhzvanzin.”

The Sara creature and the others walked away into the cavern beyond Rhzvanzin’s sight. Soon the Henry creature came by and slipped an assortment of foods on a strange rock under the growth. Rhzvanzin sniffed at the foods, he smelled old cooked cow meat, various things he had seen growing in the forest, and…

Rhzvanzin beamed at the bloody piece of horsemeat from one of his kills, they must have been thoroughly impressed to have left him a piece of such a delicacy even though they had beaten him in the fight for it. He hungrily devoured the horsemeat before he moved onto the cow and finally nibbled on the things that he had seen growing in the forest. They were ok but no horse. When he had eaten the rock bare of food, he slid back under the growth and called for more food.

The Sara creature had returned and looked at him questioningly. Knowing that she did not seem to understand him he simply taped on the rock and looked at her. She lifted the rock and walked off.

A few minutes later Sara came back with the rock piled high with raw bloody horse meat. Rhzvanzin instantly forgave Sara for whatever she had been doing earlier and started to inhale the horsemeat before the rock had even finished passing under the growth.

Sara drew her foreclaw back and walked off with a strange look on its face.

Rhzvanzin, now completely full curled up in the sunbeam and fell asleep hoping his mother didn't worry about him while these strange dragons played their game with him.