The smells are mostly familiar: the musk of hounds and beasts of burden, the acrid smoke of pine in their torches. The pinguid stench of greed and lust for fortune in their sweat comes to you just as easily. However, there is a tinge of something new mixed in to these scents- it's sharp like a spice, and stinks like the garlic that grows over the mountain range, but heavier, angrier.
You waste no time and unfurl your wings, plunging gracefully from the cliff side. In a dynamic arc, you ride the winds high into the air and let out a shrill roar; a signal to the older dragons of danger approaching. The sun's light has not yet ducked under the mountain tops to the west, and the human hunters spot you almost immediately, pointing and drawing their weapons. You circle high above them- hopefully out of arrow range, yet daring them to try- and wait for the clan. Time passes and you watch the hunters light up fires and spread out at the edge of a clearing, using the treeline for safety.
There is still no response from the clan. You signal again. After a wait, you try once more even louder. Why is there no response? Are they unable to hear you over Lyzann's party? It is unlike them to make the kind of racket that would require. If you delay any longer, the hunters could scatter into the forest and reassemble elsewhere. It will be dark soon, too. Eyeing the eerie light of the hunters' torches, just a bit too bright and red to be pine, you decide to advance alone.
You are young still, but as a hunter yourself, your instincts are sharp. Without any warning or noise, you fold your wings close to your scaly form and begin a dive towards the men. The wind whips past your face and the men seem a hundred beats closer every moment. If your nostrils weren't closed to block against the incredible wind velocity, you would undoubtedly smell their terror. It is instinctual in man; an immutable fact of nature that they fear the sight of this dive just as a mouse fears an owl, or a fish fears a shark.
In the brief moments before you are upon them, you notice several oddities in the party. Their clothing is dark, twisted and spiny, like a charred newt near a bonfire. Their ponies and mules are adorned with the same shimmering black armor, and carrying blood red tapestries where there would usually be tarps and bags. The fires they had lit, the ones that burned too bright and red, were not torches, but rather iron braziers, staked into the ground with what might have been polished bone. Their weapons were those of hunters- bow and arrow, sling and rock- but they carried long, slender blades at their sides that no woodsman would have use for. In your relative youthfulness, you could not yet know their proper names, but you are learned enough to guess their volition: these are demon worshipers.
Tucked into the treeline and spread out, the cultists are safe from a clean dive bomb. Instead, you swoop as low into the clearing as you are able. Your nostrils reopen- the scent of terror is overpowered by their garlic stench- and take a deep breath. Your chest is suddenly almost two thousand degrees. Before you crash into the treeline, you arc up just enough to clear the canopy and then unload your fiery breath into the party with a fearsome roar. The heat of the fire disintegrates the clearing's meadow grasses in an instant as the brilliant orange and blue flames light up the dusk. The treeline positively explodes: old pines ignite like match sticks, the duff of the forest floor is replaced with a burning lake. Branches crumple, wood shrieks. You are arcing back into the sky and preparing for another salvo before the first has even touched down.
Over the din of destruction, you roar your only spoken warning. Your voice is thunderous, hard and ancient, despite its speaker.
"Humans, leave this forest now or perish!"
As you circle back over the clearing to prepare for another pass, you feel a cold tingle in your right side. You glance down and spy barbed red arrows with black feathers lodged between your scales. Ordinarily, a dragon's scales act as much like armor as any suited knight, but bows were used to puncture armored suits when they first saw use in war. As a young dragon, your scales have not hardened to their full strength either. These barbed shafts seem to be poisoned, judging from the sting. What a nuisance. This proved the cultists were not out for game; you can't eat a poisoned catch.
you swipe the arrows out of your side and bear down again on the clearing. You can see that your breath has charred a swath of forest and every unfortunate cultist that it caught has burnt into something indistinguishable from the trees. However, they were properly spread out around the clearing beforehand; this will take several more passes unless they retreat. You wish the other dragons had joined you by now, but there's nothing else to do about it.
You whiz over the clearing and collect your breath again. It fills your heart with draconian strength and makes the pelting of fresh arrows around your wings and face seem as insignificant as bug bites. You spy a bearer of one of the braziers and his mule behind a sickly pine ahead. The gout of flame blasts from your mouth with even more force this time, obliterating the cultist and everything around him. The colors again blaze over the treeline in reds, oranges and blues. Pine sap burns very well. It is unfortunate that you must burn down your clan's own forests to be rid of these invaders.
On the next pass over the clearing, you are startled to find that you can't feel your right arm. As the surge of power leaves your heart, you feel drained and numb. You have to work much harder to beat your right wing then you should, and your head is heavy. The poison is much stronger than you thought and it startles you. You slow and try signalling one last time, as loudly as you possibly can. But, you can't stop here: if the cultists have brought such a toxin with them, they could do far worse given time to retreat. They could hide away until they find Nosferus. They could slip through in the night, and target the newborns or-
-or the sky parrot stew.
A new sense of panic fills your chest. Not of these men themselves, but of the new peril your clan is in, and the worry of losing them. Nobody has responded to your final call. It falls to you, then. You fight through the numbing sting spreading through your limbs, rake your claws over the arrows in your face, and descend on the clearing once more. These devil worshipers ought to pray to whatever petty deity they followed; a dragon's wrath is a force of nature.
Using the light of the fires as a backdrop, you scan for the remaining cultists hiding in the trees. There aren't many of them, but they are even more spread out now than before. They notch their bows as you come close, the light reflecting off of their twisted black armor like poised scorpions. You feign another dive, and then rear up in the center of the clearing. The arrows come like hail, but you shrug them off and take a deep breath, as deep as you can muster. The fire in your chest again fills you with that ancient, indomitable will that has made dragons the most feared creatures in the known world, almost more so than the inferno that follows.
You quickly find the first cultist at the furthest left position and let your breath flow forth. But you don't stop there; between the beats of your wings, you sweep your flames right, torching the entire treeline and causing the whole clearing to ignite into a hellish landscape. At the furthest rightmost cultist, you sweep back again. Still, the arrows fly into your belly and wings. One makes its way into your throat and pierces the soft flesh of your tongue, but you take another breath and return it a thousandfold.
The clearing is getting very dark- and not just from the sun. Your thoughts have to swim through a thick syrup to register, and your whole body is numb save for your burning heart. Like some loathsome parasite, the cultists persevere despite the pyroclasm, scuttling through the burning forest as it falls to pieces around them. One with a gleaming golden horned helmet looks like he means to charge you. He is suddenly crushed under a great falling pine, squashed like bug. You huff small, exhausted, involuntary flames through your nostrils in satisfaction.
In that moment, you lose your breathing rhythm, and your fiery core is extinguished. Your wings betray you and you slump to the ground. At this point only your neck will respond to your demands. Surrounded by the warmth of the hellish meadow, you could fall to sleep in a moment. But is your clan safe? Are they even aware? Are they... you dare not consider it. You slowly, drunkenly survey the forest. The cultists are out of sight, but there could be more in hiding. Or they could have joined the new reserves of charcoal.
At five points along the edge, you see the bony braziers which have miraculously remained in place through the blaze. Each now burns with a sickly green fire instead of a red one. You suppose if they weren't lit beforehand, you certainly ignited them yourself. It matters not at this point. Nothing matters but sleep.
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
More by this author