Bang, bang, bang!
Naida’s head snapped up and her teeth scraped up the length of him. Darion cried out in pain as the bedroom door burst open. Naida fell off him and backed away against the wall, covering her large bosoms with both arms.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Darion screamed as three men stomped into his room. They parted and his father walked in, slowly. Darion didn’t move from the bed. He was nearly spread eagle and naked, his falling erection now aiming at the door.
Davidyus, the elder and ruler of their country, took all of this in, including Naida hiding against the wall. The woman’s arms barely covered her voluptuous features. Darion’s room was dim, with the only light coming from a red candle on his nightstand and the glow of warm lamps flooding in from the hallway through the open door.
“Get out, now,” his father said to Naida, barely looking at her. He did not raise his voice, did not yell, only stepped slightly out of the way to let the naked woman pass.
“Yes, Father?” Darion playfully asked from his place on the bed. His vigor was now completely gone and he was left with only a shameful little stack of buttons limping between his legs. There goes my Friday night.
His father was tall, with a stout belly and steel-colored hair that was combed straight back over his long oval head. His face was deeply lined and thin jowls hung from his jaw. He might have once been an impressive creature, Darion thought, but that was many years ago. He wondered briefly just how old his father was, a hundred? Two hundred? It didn’t matter, he barely talked to the man.
“Get up,” his father said. His voice was deep but quiet, and seemed to stop short in the air. “Your sister needs you.”
Darion sat up on the bed, not even bothering to attempt to cover himself. The men beside his father said nothing and looked nowhere. They were his sentinels, silent deadly machines of a war that had long passed, sworn now to protect the head of the Lexian clan.
Darion shook his head. “What could my sister possibly need from me?” He swung out of bed and came to stand in front of his father. He wasn’t yet as tall as the man, but he had youth on his side. “And what makes you think you can just come into my chambers unannounced and uninvited?”
He was chest to chest with his father, so close that he could smell red wine and age emanating from the man. He stared into his father’s eyes for a long minute. The aging man said nothing, only stared back at him, his old eyes still sharp, his green irises just as bright as they had been when Darion was a boy. His senior breathed out a long sigh and Darion felt his taut shoulders begin to soften and his posture begin to slump. Another long minute passed and Darion looked down.
“I’m sorry Father, what are your orders?”
Davydius nodded to him. “Your sister is in danger.”
Darion glanced up at him. “An imminent danger or a threat?” They received those once in a while from other clans or random civilians. mostly crackpots, he thought, and nothing had ever come of them.
“She went to the air this afternoon, about six hours ago. She slipped her detail and the last time a spotter saw her she was heading east toward the black ridge.”
Darion nodded. “Could she be rebelling, asserting some kind of independence?” he asked, scoffing a little as he did so. His sister’s petulant attitude about her duties as a princess were well known. The girl lived a pampered life, would never have to work for anything, and yet she still skulked around morosely, spreading her discontentment everywhere she went.
His father paused, he had obviously thought of this already. “I sent a man out to the ridge. He said he saw signs of a crash, and blood on the ground, but your sister wasn’t there.”
“A crash? How could she crash?” Darion sputtered, then immediately caught himself. A dragon didn’t just crash, not unless it was hurt or trying to do something it shouldn’t. And say what he would about Skye, she was a damned graceful dragon and a fierce flyer.
“You will locate her and assist her in returning.”
“Yes Father.”
Davidyus started to turn away and then paused. “There is something else.”
Darion waited, looking up to his father.
Davidyus motioned to the man at his side. From under a long maroon robe the sentinel pulled a brown shaft the length of his forearm. Darion took the slender shaft of wood. It was an arrow, made of hardwood with three lines of feathers on one end. He rotated it in his hand, then flinched when he saw the tip. It was made up of three steel fins, forged and cut and sharpened into killing blades. There was blood on the tip and down the shaft of the arrow. Darion smelled the dried blood. He hissed. It was dragon’s blood, of that he was certain. His heart began to race.
“The humans?” he asked.
“It would seem so,” his father answered. “Use caution, they have grown in their ingenuities.”
Darion scoffed again. If his sister had been shot by one of those animals there was no caution to be had. He would paint the countryside with their charred corpses. His father walked out and Darion was left standing alone in his room, his plans for a lust-filled evening thwarted. But now he was being filled with another kind of lust, the thirst for blood. He grabbed leather shoes and a thick black sweater that his mother had knitted for him before she died. He shoved the clothes into a leather bag with a thick cord threaded through the top. Then, remembering he would be entering the cold country, he added a pair of brown leather pants he had not worn in many years. They would be tight, but warm. Darion stalked through the manor, still nude, there was no point in putting on clothing now. When he reached the wide stone terrace he continued another ten paces.
Darion looked back at the white manor, carved from hundreds of quarries found throughout the land. The strongest and best minds had engineered this beautiful home and it fit together perfectly. He gazed out over the railing at the scattering of stone houses below. They were modest home, mostly, with small fires lighting up the interiors. Then he hung the leather bag with his clothing around his neck and willed his change.
The dragon burst forth in an instant, consuming his human body with fire. His bones softened and stretched and snapped into place. He winced as his skin was burned away and replaced by the metalline scales, shimmering even in the dim light of the moon. Then he jumped from the terrace and flapped his great wings, catching the warm thermals and rushing high into the sky. He turned east, out over the high hills and eventually into the mountains where the cold country began. Another Darion settled over his psyche as he flew and prepared for the fight ahead of him. This one was not flippant and horny, this Darion was deadly.
Chapter Seven
Deep in the valley, Jenisia walked the nude woman into the village of Vegas. Twenty feet below the canopy of the tall valley trees, the village ceiling was constructed of raw wood and vines woven into a tight layer ten feet off the ground, camouflaging the village from the eyes of the flying serpents. It was a strange thing living under the ceiling. It was always dim, there was never true daylight, but it was the only way they could remain safe.
Jenisia passed no one as they walked, turning right then left on the earthen paths, meandering through small wooden huts and the long building that was their dining hall. The village was communal, everyone helped to support the others, and meals were normally eaten together in the lodge, so that they could all share equally in the bounty of the land. It was the middle of the night now, and the village’s sixty inhabitants were tucked away in their small homes insulated by layers of moss and leaves. The temperature rose as they walked into the village, accumulated body heat and the insulation the village ceiling provided, created a temperate biosphere to live in.
Jenisia walked through the village without stopping and then out to the far edge, where the ceiling and walls were stretched and broken with age. The air was mustier down here from years of decay. She was almost there and her feet were starting to complain about the day’s abuse. Then, around one particularly dense stand of trees, the old woman’s s
hack emerged.
Jenisia pulled in several breaths, then urged the dragon forward, toward the door. She couldn’t help but being nervous, everyone was when it came to the old woman. Finally she reached Kaetlyn’s door and knocked thrice. Then she stood back anxiously. Skye looked at her curiously.
“You are nervous to come here?”
“Shut up.”
Some shuffling sounds inside the small house. Finally the door pushed open and a small, wrinkled head appeared with wild, curly locks of dark, graying hair. Her eyes were small, like tiny black rocks. She did not look pleased.
“What is this business, Jenisia,” she grumbled. Her mouth was turned down in a permanent scowl which had drawn deep lines on her cheeks and her nose had the appearance of a piece of dried fruit. Kaetlyn appraised the naked woman. “And why the hell do you have a naked lass with you?”
“She kidnapped me, ma’am; I am injured and I need help-” Skye pleaded.
Jenisia silenced her with a kick to the back of her knee, forcing Skye to the ground.
Kaetlyn peered down at the fair woman, and extended a hand to her, which touched her cheek briefly. She looked back up to Jenisia with her beady black eyes. “There is something strange about this one,” she said slowly.
“I need your wisdom, Lady Kaetlyn. May we please come in?”
Kaetlyn sighed. “I have not been called lady in a great many years, since long before you were born. And I am not some turnip that needs to be sweetened so much.” She stared down at the naked woman again, this time poking at her injured arm. Skye flinched at the old woman’s gnarled fingers poking into her injured flesh. “Is she dying?”
“Yes. Which is why I need your wisdom,” Jenisia said anxiously, “and quickly.”
Kaetlyn turned in the doorway without answering and shuffled into her small home. Jenisia followed behind the old hag, gripping Skye by the arm tightly. Kaetlyn led them into one of two rooms of her home. There were pillows on the floor and she directed them each to sit. Kaetlyn herself sat on a stool, her long brown sleeping dress nearly touching the floor. She looked even more frightening now than when Jenisia was young; her skeletal arms and legs protruding from the robe in odd places.
“I need to hear your stories, great grandmother, I need to hear the stories of the old days, before the ceiling went up.”
Kaetlyn nodded thoughtfully. “The old days...there was so much fire.”
The interior of Kaetlyn's home was very dark, with only a single candle lit in her sparse cooking space. Jenisia sat slightly behind Skye, to keep one eye on her, but very soon they were all being carried away into Kaetlyn’s story, her gravelly voice transporting them to a time one hundred years ago.
“We came down from the mountains in the spring. It was a miracle any of us survived the winter.”
“There were many of us at first, adults and children. We had been trapped on the east side of Last Pass the entire winter, blocked by snow twice as tall as a man’s head. We were starving and freezing. We knew the mountains could not continue forever, and that was the last ridgeline in sight. So we stared up at it all winter, dying slowly. Every few days someone else would try to go over the mountain. But they were never seen again. By the time winter ended, we had no spirit left, but we had to keep trying, we could not stay where we were.”
Jenisia nodded. “It was too cold without the ceiling.”
Kaetlyn looked at Jenisia as if she were an idiot, then continued.
“We started out with a group of maybe one hundred, and only thirty of us made it down out of the mountain. What we found on the other side was… paradise. It was a warm land with many plants, and game animals abounded. A perfect place, and we thought we were saved.”
“Except you were in someone else’s home,” Skye said.
Both Jenisia and Kaetlyn stared down at Skye, who was hugging her legs to her chest. She wouldn’t make eye contact with Jenisia, but her emerald eyes were locked onto Kaetlyn’s.
“Yes, we were on someone else’s land, their piece of paradise, and they did not want to share.”
“You were invaders,” Skye said.
“We were pilgrims, refugees. We were beaten badly and mostly broken. We walked on to the west, taking our time, and in one week we found the great sea.” Kaetlyn trailed off and stared into the darkness around them for a few moments. Then she continued.
“That very evening we saw him. A beautiful man walked up to us out of nowhere. He was tall and regal, with a long maroon robe and dark hair. Silver ropes were draped around his neck. He looked like he could have been a king.”
“He was a king,” Skye interrupted again.
Kaetlyn pretended she hadn’t heard her. “We were all stunned to see another person. My uncle met the man and started asking him many questions. The man came into our camp and observed us all carefully. Then he told us that we must leave. We were on his land and he would not allow it.” Kaetlyn paused.
“You can imagine, the adults were not pleased to hear this. Our group had suffered for long months. We had lost many mothers and fathers, and of course, children. None of the babies survived the winter, none of them, they were all buried in snowy graves high in the mountains. The adults tried to negotiate with him. All they wanted was a little land to live on. We could move north or south, as far as he wanted, just not back to the east. But that was not good enough. He said we had to go back over the mountain, back to where so many of us had died. The grown-ups told him we couldn’t go back, that we had lost scores of those we loved. He didn’t care. He told us that if we were not back over the ridge that very week then great misfortune would befall us.”
“What did you do?” Jenisia asked.
“I did what I was told; I followed the adults north, far away from the camp. We walked for ten days, until we were sure we were far from the strange, beautiful man’s land. The ground was so fertile that fruit trees grew everywhere. We ate splendidly, and we caught squirrels and rabbits. It was a happy time for us. But that did not last. On the tenth night, the winged serpents came out of the sky. They burned everything around us. The food and the game was scorched from the earth, and we were left in a desert by the sea. We were confused as we had never seen such beasts. There were stories of dragons from back east, but we always thought they were just that, stories. The adults knew we could not stay. So we started east, where we hoped we could hide in the foothills of the mountains. Just before dusk, we saw a group of men standing on a hill in the distance. They didn’t try to contact us, nor did they approach. But that night the dragons came again, and this time they attacked the camp.” Kaetlyn closed her eyes and took several breaths.
“They landed among us and unleashed their fire. Then they started eating the dead. It was terrible. Ten died that night. The next day we walked further east, into the mountains, back to the high ridges that line the cold lands here. Every night the dragons came back, taunting us some nights, throwing fire at us on others, picking off one or two people here and there. They were tormenting us and torturing us. When we finally got into the valleys here, there were only fifteen or sixteen left, all of us kids. The oldest was sixteen. We hid among the trees. The oldest hunting for small game, and us younger children gathered whatever fruits and berries we could find. We made children, and taught them how to hunt and forage. We saw the beasts now and again, flying over the ridge. We hid from them. Most of the times we were lucky, but a few,” Kaetlyn glanced over to Jenisia, “a few still perished. The ceiling was constructed over two years, and now we hide here, away from the flying beasts.”
“So did you think the strange man had set these beasts upon you?”
“We did, we thought they were his pets I guess, his guard animals, the watchdogs of his domain. But now I am not so sure,” she said, looking down at the naked woman. “Now Jenisia, tell me who this woman is and why you are in my home.”
“I walked out into the Valley of Lost Souls-”
Kaetlyn hissed, sucking the air in through her few teeth
. “Child!” she scolded.
“I was hunting,” Jenisia said defensively, knowing she had broken an important law. “I saw a dragon, and fired upon it. And I struck it whilst it flew.”
“And then?”
“Then it fell. I watched it crash to the earth and tracked it. But what I found was this,” she said, pointing at the naked woman hugging her knees.
“You found a naked woman in the woods?”
“She is not a woman, great grandmother. She was injured badly by an arrow. By my arrow.”
“What are you saying child? I am old and tired, I don’t want to play guessing games.”
Jenisia stood. “This woman is a dragon, great grandmother; I shot her out of the sky. Those people you saw when you were a child, those weren’t the masters of dragons, they were the dragons themselves.”
Kaetlyn was quiet as she digested this information. She rose and came back with a wool blanket which she handed to Skye. Then she lit a candle and positioned a small teapot on the rack above it. Jenisia watched her do this. She sat quietly, knowing better than to interrupt Kaetlyn’s thoughts. Ten minutes later, Kaetlyn brought a cup of tea over to them. Jenisia thought it was for her, but the old woman handed it down to the dragon. She brushed Jenisia’s fingers away when she reached for it.
“We will all be judged, Jenisia, not by who we are, but how we treat those around us.” Kaetlyn moved back over to her stool and sat. The old woman stared at Skye as she drank the tea. “Even if they are our enemies.”
“What do we do with her?” Jenisia asked.
“Bandage her arm properly, there are bales of cloth in the lodge.”
A Plague of Dragons (A Dragon Anthology) Page 34