by Loki Renard
The dragon was a ship of sorts, a shuttle, a fighter, and also a massive animatronic dragon. It had wings which flapped and a neck which arched, and a head from which fire emerged. It had been commissioned for Archon's coronation, a work of art which was as dangerous as it was beautiful.
In the special bay set aside for the metal beast, Archon mounted the side of the metal dragon, taking care not to step on the more delicate scaling. There were foot holds designed to take the weight of the pilot, and it was on those he stood as he ascended onto the back of the beast, as if he were riding it.
In front of him, the scales parted to reveal a bank of controls. He could do almost anything with those controls. He could set the beast in flight, or rain fire on hapless villagers.
He was intent on not doing harm. A reputation for brutality was just that, a reputation. First he would frighten them, and then he would abduct them, then he’d take this wooden village and turn it into kindling.
The ship flew low over the village, whence a clattering of spears against the undercarriage suggested that the villagers were aware of their presence. Throwing sharpened sticks was a poor way to greet a king, but Archon had experienced worse. He would rather a barrage of spears than a smarmy greeting like the one Naxus had given him. At least the spears indicated some kind of fear.
It was right that a king should be feared and perhaps even reviled by the weakest of his subjects. After all, those so poor they resorted to refusing to pay their universally appointed taxes were in no position to aspire to nobility. A duke might one day become a king if he were to slay enough people, or encounter a kindly plague or two, but a peasant like one of the ones below, they would never have a chance to come even tangental to royalty. It was fitting therefore that they would try to destroy it.
“UNLEASH THE DRAGON!” He cried at the top of his lungs, while simultaneously pressing the launch button.
The belly of the ship opened, and he and his dragon fell out. He had intended to glide, but the dragon hadn’t come online yet and for the first few seconds of his arrival he was more plummeting than flying.
Fortunately, the dragon’s wings fell into a default outstretched position enabling him to regain control over the hunk of metal and not have a regency second only to Braxus the boy-king in terms of shortness.
Chapter 4
Crouched in the forest, Iris watched a dragon fall out of a floating building. For the last several weeks she had been avoiding soldiers and tax collectors and the odd mercenary who had been sent to quell the rebellion by killing villagers until they gave up. She thought she had seen everything there was to see in terms of aggression, but apparently the universe had been holding something back.
That something was at least thirty feet long, or maybe fifty. Hard to tell at a distance. It was a behemoth which seemed to pop into existence against all reason. It was also a very, very bad omen.
For a moment, she barely believed what she was seeing. Perhaps she was hallucinating. She had nibbled on a few mushrooms while in the woods. Sometimes one with a little magic slipped in. Sometimes she had one on purpose. Today, though, she had been careful. The war between the village and the tax collectors was escalating. There were reports of troop deployments and perhaps even some kind of secret weapon. It was not the time to go getting high in the woods. This was a tragedy, as Iris’ entire adult life up until this point had revolved around getting high in the woods. That’s what being a wise woman meant. She was a relatively young wise woman, but she was all the village had.
A dragon falling out of the sky was bad news for a great many reasons. Besides the general dragon-ness of it all, she was going to be expected to explain this, and probably answer as to why she hadn’t seen it coming. A wise woman was expected to be a healer and a seer. Iris’ mother and grandmother had both been exceptionally wise. Iris was pretending to be somewhat knowledgeable, and for the most part she had been able to pull it off - but she was buggered now. Failing to foresee a dragon was the wise woman equivalent of a blacksmith who didn’t know how handle metal.
Curiouser and curiouser, the closer the dragon plummeted, the more details she could make out. There was some kind of alien on its back, a massive beast perched up between his wings.
Obviously, Iris was not the only one to have seen the monstrosity. Even the least observant villager noticed the shadow of a monolithic collective nightmare appearing more or less out of nowhere. Their attempts to repel it with spears were fruitless and pointless, largely because they’d wasted most of the spears on the first attack and now only had shouts and stones to try to keep the thing away.
Her father, the chief, had decreed that nobody should leave the barricades. The forest was full of spies and tax agents, but Iris had defied him to gather the berries she needed to brew a tonic for her monthly blood. Chiefs did not understand things like monthly bloods, but without the brew she made from the berries she spend five days rolling around in agony, and she was not prepared to do that.
There was an alternative. Getting pregnant, but given the male warriors in the village were all her brothers, Iris was not terribly open to that idea. She had her berries clutched in her pocket, ready to make a fresh batch.
But anyway, now there was a dragon.
Iris knew as well as anybody else that dragons didn’t exist. But this one did. This one shone red and gold, sun flaring off ominously shining scales as the beast circled the village, roaring with ferocious intensity.
She crouched down, hoping that she would be able to avoid the worst of whatever terribleness was about to unfold. Fear warred with awe in her chest as she stared at the dragon and its rider, uncertain which of the creatures was more terrifying. The dragon was the obvious choice, being a dragon, but surely anybody who could mount such a beast would have to be even more dangerous a creature.
The dragon continued to circle around the village, clearly intent on doing something nasty to the inhabitants. Iris racked her brains for an action which would make a difference, but she did not know how to stop a soldier, and she certainly did not know how to stop a dragon. Her great-grandmother’s books might have had something about dragons in them, but they were inside the walls, and she was outside.
She was helpless and uselessly awestruck as the dragon circled so closely to the ground she could feel the draft from it buffeting the ground. It cruised overhead and then hovered over the village, its neck arched, its wings beating the air to stay in one spot and allow its rider to speak in impossibly booming tones which were unnaturally loud. It was as if he was speaking through the dragon, somehow using the beast as his own voice. She almost thought the dragon itself was speaking, but for the fact that the rider’s mouth was moving and he was gesticulating with the words which emerged from the dragon. Maybe they were one entity. One thing.
“Humans! I am your king!”
As introductions went, that was quite an impressive one. Still very much frightened, Iris found herself paying less attention to her fear and more to the intrigue which was aroused by the appearance of this fearsome monarch.
They had heard of the king, but never seen him. Some had even doubted that he existed. General Naxus was king as far as the occupants of Zeta were concerned. He was also judge, jury, and more often than not, executioner. But he didn’t fly on dragons, and he certainly never appeared in the provinces.
“Your rebellion has not gone unnoticed, peasants! Your arrogance has brought destruction upon you. All will see and hear what befalls you today. Your blood will soak the soils. Your homes will burn. You will wail in misery and gnash your teeth in fear! This is the end of times! The worst of times! And all because you could not obediently pay what you were owed.”
The floating building was now expelling even more oddness.
Soldiers were falling from the belly of the thing. Attached to big sheet constructions they floated down with great big weapons in their arms. Iris’ village did not have weapons besides arrows, spears, and swords, but she had seen the work of the
heavy black shafts which the soldiers were cradling. They could kill a man at great distance, and obliterate dozens before a sword could be drawn.
She hunkered down, knowing it was too late to do anything for those inside the village. They had build the barricades to stop soldiers coming in from the outside, but they had never considered the air as a possible route in. They had not known that buildings could fly either. It seemed to Iris that they had been very ignorant about a great many things.
The king addressed his troops as they fell in a dangerous rain. “He who bears the name, wears the crown, and he who wears the crown must commit the crimes of office. Kill these people! Each and every one of them. Let their blood soak the soil they refused to work! Let them serve as examples to those who would come before them.”
“No…” Iris hissed the word to herself. She wanted to scream, but self-preservation made her stay as quiet and still as possible.
“They wished to rebel. Now they shall burn. Their warriors shall be put to scale-blade, their maidens taken to serve our loins, their offspring bonded into servitude. This is King Archon’s justice!”
The dragon swooped once more, opened its mouth, and poured flame upon the world.
Iris watched her village burn, the light from the flames reflected in her tearful brown eyes. The granary which held supplies for winter was torched first, combusting in the breath of the dragon rider who urged his purple and gold winged mount so close to the ground she could still feel the gusts from its wings even at a distance.
The screams of the dragons almost covered the screams of the people who could not out-run the attacking forces. Peasants on foot had no chance of escaping the swathe of volcanic fury spewed across the ground, turning fertile land into charred black nothing in a matter of seconds.
The villagers never had a chance. The barricades they had constructed to keep the world out now kept them in, vulnerable to an attack so powerful and so strange Iris could not entirely believe what she was seeing. A mixture of horror and disbelief made her uncertain that she was even where she was. She felt as though she was floating above her body, trapped ever so slightly out of reach of herself.
She wanted to look away, but she could not. She wanted to run, but it seemed there was no place to run, nowhere to hide. And the dragon was getting lower. Closer.
It landed outside the burning village, so close to Iris she felt as though she could have reached out and touched it.
Once it landed, she could not help but marvel at the smell of the thing, like oil, and the stillness of it, like a statue. It was eerie and uncanny and it terrified her now somehow even more than it had when it was flying about burning all she loved. There was an emptiness in its great crimson eyes, which turned black as it stopped moving.
But the beast was the very least of Iris’ problems.
When his mount was perfectly still, the king dismounted, sliding with muscular agility down the wing of the beast until his boot clad feet hit the ground with a puff of charr and dust.
He was at least nine feet tall, and handsome, but what did handsomeness matter when his heart was as black as the pupils in the dragon’s eyes. A shudder of disgust and despair rushed through her. She knew better than to look upon the king. She also knew better than to run. The secret to being good prey was to stay perfectly still when predators were close. She’d learned that long ago, watching rabbits and foxes who evaded the jaws of hounds.
She stopped her breath and listened. The king spoke in a booming voice which carried easily on the breeze. He was holding something in his hand. Something which sparked and glowed, a crystal of some kind.
“Someone survives,” he said, lifting up the crystal. “I detect a life sign.”
“Impossible, sire,” one of the other soldiers said. “We surrounded the village to ensure there were no escapes.”
“Survival is never impossible. Someone is alive. Someone defies the sentence of death.”
Iris felt the king’s eyes on her even though there was no way he could see her. She was crouched behind a big tree stump with plenty of foliage which she knew from experience made her impossible to see. If Iris knew how to do anything, it was to hide.
But he was seeing, or at least, sensing her. He knew she was there. She felt the knowing, and saw the glint of those impossibly blue eyes. For a terrible second, they locked gazes.
Turning on her heels, Iris ran. These were her woods. She had explored every inch of them, knew every gully and root intimately. The knowledge would do little if the king took his fiery metal mount and began to burn the world around her, but she did what all prey has done from the beginning of time. She sensed that her chance of escape was narrowing to nothingness, and she chose to run rather than wait for the predator to come upon her.
Chapter 5
There was a skittering throughout the forest, the horror of nature beholding what sentient creatures were capable of doing one another. The smell of smoke had frightened the inhabitants. He knew every four legged creature would be fleeing the area, but he had a feeling that there was a two legged one somewhere in the mix. He had felt eyes on him, intelligent, angry eyes. Those never belonged to an animal. They could only belong to a sentient being. Perhaps one allied with the humans who had just been swept up into the belly of his ship while their village was turned into soot and cinders.
“Sire?” Sergeant Nanite came up behind Archon. He was a bold, bearded, beast of a clawed male with more fur than scale. Only on a far-flung planet could a mutant with actual fur be considered for the position of sergeant. “We have safely stowed all the villagers in your ship, transported them up with the flash drives. They are all sedated and awaiting transport.”
“There was someone here,” Archon said. “I want each and every one of these villagers. I want people to wonder for centuries what happened to the village of flames.”
“Village of flames?”
“That's what they’re going to call it, I’ve decided. The village of flames. Every single one of them gone in an instant. Probably should have refrained from burning it, now you mention it.”
Nanite had not mentioned it, but he didn’t like to say. Contradicting a king who had just destroyed a village was not the way to career advancement, or general continued existence.
“I doubt anybody escaped your net, your highness, but if they have it is of little importance. The rebel village is destroyed. All will know that you are not one to be defied.”
“I would have thought they already knew I was not one to be defied,” Archon drawled, his eyes scanning the dark trees for hints of human life.
Archon’s senses were far keener than his general’s rationale. He had felt the eyes of the prey on him. He had felt the way they searched him. Saw him, not as the generals did, or as the charred and fallen villagers did. There was something in that gaze he wanted to feel again.
“I want everyone. Every. Last. Person. If I do not, there will be consequences. Fatal consequences for those who have let me down. Have you seen war, Nanite? Have you felt the blade of your enemy slashing your flesh?”
“Yes, your highness. I have served for ten years in Naxus’ army.”
“My army, Nanite. My army.”
“Of course, sire. Your army. My apologies.” Nanite was starting to sound less and less confident in his ability to remain breathing. Archon was evoking thoughts of war, and with those thoughts of war, the possibility of death for an underperforming sergeant.
Everybody was bold and brave until they heard the screams of the dying and realized that those screams would one day invariably come from their own throats. Then they started to look for reasons to be merciful, in the false hope that mercy might one day be shown to those they loved.
“If someone did escape, they will spread the word of your terror and they will ensure that others know never to antagonize their great king. Was that not the purpose of this exercise?”
“Perhaps, but it was supposed to be a mystery. An attack can quell rebellions for
a few years, but a mystery can last for generations.”
Archon had at first thought that making an example of the village which had started the rebellion would be a good idea. Then he had decided that it would be better to simply remove the village and let everybody wonder what had happened to it.
If he could not secure every single one of the humans, then the illusion would be broken, and if the illusion was broken, then real war was inevitable. The humans might possibly believe that they had some chance of succeeding in their rebellions.
Archon wished to avoid war. He knew that once the killing had begun it could not stop until each and every witness, relative, scribe, or bard lay in the cold ground or danced upon the ashes of a funeral pyre. To truly win a war, one had to kill until there was nothing left to die. To show mercy to a woman or a child, to allow them to escape and spread the word of tragedy was to ensure that there would be someone left to grow up and seek vengeance, or to breed a small army of those who would wish to reclaim what was taken.
The best way to maintain control was to be cruel, but if one was not prepared to be cruel, then it was absolutely essential one appear evil.
A flash in the distance caught his attention, a brightness suddenly glimmering among the trees. There she was. He knew she was a she, in the same way he had known she was there in the first place. Instinct.
Archon gave chase without a word, leaving his army and his war machine behind, throwing his body into the task of pursuit. It felt good to use his own flesh. To chase with muscle and bone, not electricity and metal.
It did not take long to catch up to the prey. She was relatively slow compared to him, and she had little in the way of strength. Archon slowed his pace to closer match hers, drawing out the chase.