by Lizzy Bequin
Katrine turned, darting behind a thick tree trunk. She turned again and again, zig-zagging through the dark columns of the forest.
Behind her, the sound of huffing breath and the scuff of paws stood her hairs on end. She was expecting any second to feel the weight of the beast slam into her.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, in an almost detached way, Katrine wondered how she would find her way back to the others if she did manage to escape.
It probably wouldn’t be an issue.
The muscles of her thighs burned. Her lungs seemed on the verge of combusting. She felt hot breath wash against her back.
Any second now, and it would all be over.
She almost welcomed it.
The impact, however, did not come from behind as she expected, but from in front. Katrine slammed into something hard, and her body rebounded backward, sprawling her on the ground.
Had she run into a tree trunk? She hadn’t seen one in front of her. Whatever it was, it seemed to have suddenly appeared from nowhere.
There was an awful wet sound, followed immediately by another and another. The sound of something hard and sharp penetrating living meat.
In that same detached manner, Katrine thought to herself that it must be the cat’s fangs sinking into her flesh, devouring her alive. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t feel any pain—an effect of the adrenaline, perhaps—but she was grateful. She just hoped the painlessness would last until the end.
But the end didn’t come.
A second passed, then another, and Katrine found that she still wasn’t dead. Her eyes, she realized, were squeezed shut in a combination of fear and shock from the sudden impact. When she finally opened them, what she saw made her gasp in surprise.
People. A dozen or more.
They were dressed in primitive clothing—skirts made of rushes, jewelry made of bones and teeth. Their bodies were marked with runic symbols that appeared to have been drawn with charred wood. They were armed with obsidian-tipped spears.
Behind her, a group of these primitive warriors were repeatedly stabbing these weapons into the dead, dark bulk of the cat—that was the sound Katrine had heard.
The others were standing over her, looking down. Their white eyes were made brighter by contrast with the dark charcoal smudged around the sockets.
Suddenly a sharp but distinctly feminine voice split the air like one of those spears.
“Kree lah ganah!“
The warriors ceased their stabbing of the dead beast. The others parted, and from the midst a smaller figure stepped forward—a woman. Her body was small and tough, and she was dressed in the same way as the males, which meant her breasts were uncovered. The only difference was her headdress. It was fashioned from some kind of skull—to Katrine it looked like the crocodile skulls she had seen in souvenir shops in Louisiana, and the back was topped with plumes of brightly colored feathers.
The woman stopped and glared down at Katrine. Whoever she was, she seemed to hold some position of authority here.
“Th-thank you,” Katrine stammered between ragged breaths, “I’m—“
“Gneela!“ The woman in the headdress cut her off sharply.
A chill rippled over Katrine’s skin. These people had saved her from the predator cat, but their intentions did not seem particularly friendly. This was about to be confirmed.
“Gneela,“ the woman in the headdress intoned in her weird guttural language. “Dra’akhan no atma.“
A dozen spears, some of them still dripping with the blood of the alien beast, shifted toward Katrine, ringing her in with their stony points.
CHAPTER 7
Drums rolled in the distance, growing closer with each step. The warm sand grated under Katrine’s feet. Rough hands gripped her by the arms, leading her forward against her will. She had given up struggling long ago.
In the forest, after the rescue-turned-kidnapping, a blindfold of coarse fabric had been bound around her eyes.
Now, with her vision taken from her, Katrine’s other senses were heightened. She heard the incessant rolling of the drums, the crunch of feet in the coarse sand, the murmuring of voices. She smelled that omnipresent, scorched odor of smoke and charcoal. She felt the hot wind ghosting over her mostly bare skin like a giant’s breath, indicating that they had moved out of the forests and into an open plain.
She had been taken earlier into what sounded like a village. There had been other voices, some of them women, others children.
She had been given water from a wooden vessel, which she drank greedily. It was warm but refreshing, its flavor almost sweet with minerals. She had drunk until her belly ached from drinking. That water had seemed to flow into her extremities, and she felt like a wilted plant coming back to life after being watered. The dry, cracked feeling left her lips. Her tongue stopped sticking to the top of her mouth like masking tape.
But the relief was short-lived.
Unyielding hands had stripped away her clothing, leaving her naked and exposed. Even her underwear had been removed. The hands had explored her as if checking for flaws. Waves of terror had washed over her insulted body, and it had been a struggle not to scream or cry.
After that, she had been re-dressed, not in her own clothing but in some crude rustling garment that felt like a grass skirt and hard, heavy jewelry that felt like it was fashioned from bones—bracelets, necklaces, and a primitive band around her head as a crown.
She was being prepared for something. A ritual. A rite.
She didn’t know what it was, and she didn’t want to know. Besides, it would have been useless to ask, since she shared no language with these strange people.
And they did seem to be people. As far as Katrine could tell these were humans, not aliens, though they didn’t match any culture that she knew of on Earth.
As the drums grew louder, filling Katrine’s ears, her thoughts turned to Nora and Blair.
Her companions would be worried about her now. Perhaps Blair had set out on her own to search for her. Or perhaps more of these primitive people had found them. It would have been an easy task to follow Katrine’s tracks back to the shelter at the base of the boulder.
That thought made her stomach cramp with despair.
Once again, she couldn’t help feeling that this was all her fault. Her own self-absorbed thoughts had helped get them into this mess in the first place when she had done nothing to stop Petra. Then, in her stubbornness, she had insisted on going to look for water and food all by herself. All she had accomplished, however, was to get herself caught, and probably her friends too.
She regretted the unkind way she had parted with Blair, and she feared for her injured friend Nora. With her eyes now covered by cloth, she felt an extra sympathy for the blind woman and the terror she must be going through in this unfamiliar, alien place.
The drums were all around her now. The steady, ominous beat thumped inside her very bones.
Her bare feet touched smooth stone.
She was being led up a set of stairs. What was this? Some sort of altar?
Katrine tried to resist, tried to dig in her heals, but it was no use. The men merely lifted her off her feet and carried her the rest of the way.
“Please,” she begged, “Please don’t do this.”
Katrine didn’t know exactly what she was pleading with these people not to do, but whatever it was, it clearly wasn’t good. She knew, as well, that they couldn’t understand her words, but she hoped that somehow the plaintive tone would find some hidden sympathy within the hearts of her captors.
It did not.
There was a dull jangle of rusted chains. Hard clamps of pitted iron were placed around her wrists. The muscles of her arms ached as she felt herself suspended from above. And through it all, those incessant drums throbbed like an enormous heart.
At last, the coarse fabric of her blindfold was torn away and she could see.
Just as Katrine had suspected, they were in a broad, flat plain filled with
more of that dark sand. She was positioned on a stone dais, her arms fastened by thick chains to a pair of tall, rough-hewn wooden pillars. Ahead of her, the landscape was hidden behind a blurry curtain of gray smoke.
“What the hell?” Katrine murmured. “What have I gotten myself into?”
She twisted her body—naked except for her grass skirt and primitive bone adornments—and craned her neck to look behind her. Many more tribal people had gathered now, maybe a hundred in all. Some of them were beating huge animal-skin drums while others stood like statues clutching obsidian spears. Farther off, in the smoky distance, she could just make out the squat shapes of huts and wisps of white smoke from campfires—a village.
The woman in the headdress—Katrine imagined she must be some kind of priestess—moved around the dais.
“Please,” Katrine begged again with even greater emotion. “Please just let me go!”
The priestess remained unmoved by her pleas. She stared at Katrine blankly for a long moment, then turned toward the smoky gloom in front of them and started to chant.
“Gha’al-lee-mah, Dra’akhan no atma!“
Katrine struggled against her chains, trying desperately to free herself.
It was useless.
The rough iron of her shackles bit into the flesh of her wrists. The muscles and tendons of her arms ached with struggling. But the chains refused to budge.
Now the rest of the tribespeople had joined their priestess in her chant.
“Gha’al-lee-mah, Dra’akhan no atma!“
The drums beat faster and harder, matching the panicked rhythm of Katrine’s heart. Sweat beaded and rolled down her neck and naked chest.
“Gha’al-lee-mah, Dra’akhan no atma!“
Then, with an abrupt gesture from the priestess, the crowd grew silent. The drums stopped, the sound of the last beat echoed away into the smoky distance. The priestess stood, her feathered head cocked slightly as if listening for something.
Then she yelled.
“Dra’akhan!“
Behind, the others took up the cry as well. There was a commotion of running feet as all the people, the priestess included, fled away to the distant village. In a matter of seconds, Katrine was left all alone.
She heard nothing except the sweep of the wind over the sand and pummeling rhythm of her frantically beating heart.
Then her ears caught something. A soft whump of air. It was quiet at first, distant. But a moment later the sound came again, this time a little closer, and then once more.
Whump…whump…whump…
It was the slow, steady beating of wings.
Katrine tried to swallow, but her throat had turned as dry as the dark desert. She felt an impulse to scream, but her constricted lungs wouldn’t allow her. She could do nothing, it seemed, but stand like a chained statue staring into the screen of smoke ahead of her.
Then there was movement.
An enormous shadow, its undulations matching the whump, whump, whump sound that sent goosepimples flaring over Katrine’s sweat-beaded skin.
By slow degrees, the amorphous shadow became distinct. Shapes and contours emerged. Horns, claws, and those awful, flapping wings.
The beating stopped, and the thing in the smoke glided into view, the gray vapors spiraling beneath a pair of leathery, bat-like wings, the span of which was fifty feet across or more, and they carried a massive, muscular body lined with red, reptilian scales.
It was a dragon.
Just like her dream.
For a fraction of a second, all of Katrine’s fear vanished, displaced by an overwhelming sense of awe at the gargantuan creature gliding toward, its red wings trailing gray wisps of smoke.
The dragon touched down. Its bulk shook the earth and rattled the chains binding Katrine between the twin pillars of wood.
Her knees buckled. Her bones turned to jelly. Only the chains kept her from collapsing.
With a rustle of leather, the dragon folded its great wings and prowled forward on four legs. Each step sent out vibrations that Katrine could feel in the soles of her feet. The creature’s movements were not reptilian, but more like that of a tiger—a tiger with bright red scales that caught the dirty light as they shifted over the tremendous musculature working under the skin. A long, serpentine tail dragged in the sand behind.
Katrine was shivering uncontrollably. Her heart seemed ready to burst out of her chest.
Now the dragon’s enormous head was filling her vision. Its features were at once fearsome and elegant. Its face was covered in hard, bony scales. A crown of ivory horns protruded from its skull. Its mouth brimmed with overlapping fangs like a crocodile’s.
But the feature that captured Katrine’s attention, that drew her stare with a magnetic power, were the creature’s eyes. Yellow eyes marked with narrow vertical slits that dilated as the dragon examined its captive prey.
Its offering.
For Katrine had no doubt that’s what she had become. A sacrifice to the dragon. A snack for a winged beast straight out of ancient myths, somehow transplanted here on this alien world.
Katrine’s heart beat a rapid tattoo against her ribs. Her breath came in shallow, painful gasps. Her skin tingled with fear.
The dragon touched her. Its cool, scaly snout prodded her naked belly. Nostrils big enough that a small dog could climb inside them expanded as the beast snuffled her, drawing in her scent with powerful snorts.
It was testing her scent.
It wanted to see if she was edible.
Katrine’s eyes filled with tears. She wished she had never run from that saber-tooth cat in the woods. She never would have if she had known she would just end up a meal for a dragon instead. Images flashed through her mind of her naked flesh penetrated by those bright, dagger-sharp fangs that were grazing her belly. She pictured her body ripped in half by the creature’s chomping jaws.
One last snuffle, and the dragon exhaled. Hot breath blasted her body, carrying with it the scent of a campfire and a few orange sparks that stung her bare skin.
Faced with this seemingly impossible situation—this creature from legends and from her own dreams, Katrine did the only thing that seemed to make any sense:
She drew a deep breath, screamed until every molecule of air had been expelled from her aching lungs, and promptly fainted.
CHAPTER 8
Skalamagdrion woke from his dreaming with a cold shiver. His sleeping chamber deep within his mountain fortress was dark. The fire in the hearth had waned, and now all that was left were a few faintly glowing embers that provided scant warmth in the large, domed chamber of stone. Blackwood logs would burn for nearly a month before going out, and it must have been about that long since he had last awoken to replenish the flames.
Moving only his long, flexible tail, the dragon scooped the last remaining blackwood logs from the winter supply and swept them into the carved stone hearth. The embers still burning there seemed to crackle in protest and sent an orange spittle of sparks up the stony flue.
Skalamagdrion grunted. With great effort, he dragged his weary head along the rocky floor of the chamber until he was facing the hearth. His tooth-cluttered jaws yawned wide, and he belched a stream of yellow flame onto the logs in the fireplace. The wood ignited, and within a few seconds, the hearth was filled with lapping tongues of flame.
The light from the fire illuminated the space around the dragon, the space he had called home for many years. How many, exactly, he could not recall. He had lost count after the first century.
The chamber was octagonal, the walls curving upward to a high domed ceiling. Three of the walls bore yawning black archways that led through the circuitous arteries and tributaries of the mountain’s tunnels. The stones around these doors were carved with blessings to their corresponding winds. Where the fourth archway should have been, set into the northern wall, was the fireplace which now radiated heat through the cave.
After his long winter’s nap, Skalamagdrion’s body felt as though it w
ere carved from stone. Normally he overslept a little, perhaps a day or two, but this time he had woken early, not yet fully rested.
It had been the dream that roused him.
The dream of his atma.
Now, as the warmth of the crackling hearth thawed his hibernation-weary limbs, that dream came bubbling back into his consciousness.
The dream did not convey any sequence of events, just a churning welter of impressions. The touch of smooth, supple meat that yielded softly beneath his raking claws. Springy buds of flesh that throbbed with lifeblood. Hair smoother and softer than cave spider’s silk.
But there was one sensuous impression that dominated all the others.
The scent.
It was like nothing Skalamagdrion had ever smelled before. Not just one odor, but a mixture. An entire garden of smells. Perfumes soft and fresh as the most delicate flower. Earthy undertones, warm and robust. Ripened fruit, sweet and tangy and begging to be devoured.
The memory of that scent woke the member between his hind legs, just as the radiance of the fireplace roused the life back into his other appendages.
As the warmth of life returned to his limbs, the dragon began to stir, flexing and stretching his legs and leathery wings. The enormity of the hollow space rang with echoes. Every scuff of scales against stone was amplified and multiplied by the curving walls and domed ceiling.
Skalamagdrion was awake now. May as well drag himself outside and greet the new season.
With slow, steady movements, he crawled his red bulk through the western archway, the one that led to the mountain’s peak. After a few minutes, he emerged into the open air, clambered up the curved ramp that spiraled up the mountain’s spire, and perched himself atop the highest point, coiling his tail around the rocky steeple for support.
He had woken late in the day. The fiery orange sun was already drooping low in the sky. Angled beams stretched the mountaintop’s shadow across the sea of clouds below.
Skalamagdrion sighed contentedly. The sun’s rays felt good on his scales.