by Jade White
“Thank you, Onris,” Geri said. “Don’t worry, I’ll get your daughter back.”
“She is no longer my daughter. She is your mate now,” Onris said with his remaining eye brimming with worry.
“She’ll always be your daughter,” Geri said. “And we will get her back.”
CHAPTER SIX
Gerda woke up in a makeshift metal cage surrounded by bipedal reptiles. “What in the hells is going on!” she shouted as she rattled the cage. She was stuck in her human form and had a leather collar on her neck with a lunar shaped charm decorating it.
A reptile walked up to her cage and hissed. It was small and had brightly colored blue feathers sprouting from its bright yellow head and forearms. “So the warm blood is awake.” Its voice sounded male, from what Gerda could tell.
“What am I doing here? Let me speak to your Alpha,” she commanded.
The lizard laughed a hissing laugh. “You’ll see her soon enough,” he said as he sauntered off.
She? What kind of strange pack was this? The females were in charge? Not that there was anything wrong with females having a leadership role, but it just wasn’t done with the Wolves. Geri broke tradition when he gave her equal status to his own.
She sat there and sulked about how she could be so stupid. She should have woken Geri to stand watch over her but she felt he needed his rest. She shook her head as she stewed in the cage. Now these lizard things were going to eat her. Gerda wasn’t going to let that happen. She decided to bide her time until she could see an avenue of escape and take it. She fingered her collar to see how she could manage to take it off, and found a mechanism on the back. What in the seven realms is that? she thought.
A tall, olive green, predatory reptile with black feathers walked up to her cage; this one was significantly larger than the brilliant colored one that taunted her earlier. “So you’re awake,” a female voice said.
“Yes, why am I here and what are you going to do to me?”
“Well, I’m not the Alpha, but she’ll be with you shortly; I’m the second in command, my name is Stha. It isn’t every day we get a warm blood in our camp, of course, we never venture this far north. It is rude of me, by 'we', I mean the Raptors. We inhabit the rainforests south of here. We have heard of your people and their heathen ways, so we are going to correct that and bring them to the one true path of enlightenment.”
“Why?” Gerda asked.
“It is our mandate by our goddess. Everyone must bow to her,” Stha replied.
“Where do I fit in? A tool: convert or we’ll kill your pack mate?” Gerda sneered.
“No, nothing as simple as that.” Stha purred. “You see we can’t survive where your people are. So we need to take your power.”
“Wait, what?” Gerda said.
“You’ll find out in a moon’s time,” Stha purred as she walked off, swishing her thick reptilian tail dramatically.
Gerda sat down on the floor of her cage wondering what the raptor meant by taking her power. Will they rape me? A cold sense of dread filled the pit of her belly. Or would they kill me? That was more likely. She looked at the cage and wondered how she could get out of this mess and back home. She examined the door and saw it was tied shut with an intricate knot of vines and thongs. She scoffed and realized she could untie that in a matter of hours, so she began to work on it with her nimble fingers.
Whenever a raptor walked by, she stopped her escape attempts. As the sun was setting in the west, she felt a familiar pang of hunger in her stomach. She hoped they would at least feed her. There would be no way she could go a full moon cycle without having anything to eat.
A small, red colored raptor walked up to her cage holding a pile of cooked meat in his clawed arms. Gerda quickly ascertained through her observations that the males were smaller and vividly colored whereas the females were much larger and less vibrant.
He pushed the meat through the bars. “Since you cannot change to your animal shape, we needed to cook it for you,” he hissed.
“What do you look like out of your animal form?” she asked, genuinely curious.
The raptor looked around nervously. “We aren’t supposed to let outsiders see us, but for you, I will,” he said as he changed shape.
He was tall and olive skinned, his black hair was groomed in a foppish bowl cut and his eyes were heavily made up. He wore a short loincloth and nothing more. His bare, slender chest gleamed in the setting sunlight. Gerda wasn’t terribly impressed as he changed back.
“I’m the lowest ranked member of this pack,” he said. “That’s why I’m serving you food. I’ll be going to serve the mateless females after I’m done here,” he said dejectedly.
“You don’t seem too happy about that?” Gerda asked.
“Well, it isn’t pleasant, for one. They have very little regard for males,” he said.
Gerda found that strange. “In my pack, males are the leaders, and their mates are slightly below them in rank. I’ve been given equal power to Geri, and it made a few people angry.”
“I bet. Traditions are difficult to break. I must be going now,” he said as he walked off.
“Wait, what’s your name?” she called out.
“I don’t have one yet. Males get their names when they mate,” he said as he walked away.
Gerda grabbed a hunk of meat and started chewing on it while she worked at the intricate knot. If she managed to get out, she could see if Holda could get rid of this stupid collar. Geri was probably trying to find her as well, but she couldn’t take that chance. She needed to run, and fast.
The sun set and the raptors dragged the sledge on which her cage was placed closer to the protective camp fire. She surveyed the gathering and noticed all the females were on one side of the camp, and all the males were on the other. She also noticed a very familiar face. It was Astri. Gerda visibly paled as she saw her dead pack mate walking through the clan of Raptors as if nothing had happened. She crawled away from the cage door and cowered in the corner hoping he wouldn’t see her.
She was wrong. Astri padded up to her and sat down. He cocked his wolf head one way, and then the other, examining her curiously. She noticed his eyes were clouded over and he had an unwholesome stench about him.
“So, you’re alive,” she said.
“No. I’m still dead. I was brought back by the High Priestess of these people,” Astri said quietly.“Get away from me you abomination!”
“I wanted revenge. Now I have it. You will serve the one true goddess, all of you. The entire pack will bow down to her, and when they do, they will be nothing but animals, serving the one true race of this world, the Raptors,” Astri explained.
“Never.” Gerda spat.
“You won’t live to see it, fortunately for you. Or unfortunately, it makes no difference to me. You’ll be sacrificed; your body burned to grant the Raptors power to go into the cold.”
Gerda stared at him in horror. “I don’t understand.”
“You don’t need to,” he said as he walked away. “By the way, the knot is enchanted, you can’t undo it, every loop you pull, three more form in its place; it’s quite ingenious actually.”
Gerda cursed loudly and kicked at the cage in a fit of rage. She didn’t want to die, she didn’t want to be sacrificed, and she didn’t know if Geri was coming for her. She needed to get out of there. Maybe she could ask to go relieve herself and escape then? It was worth a shot, but if she were stuck as a human, they would quickly re-capture her.
She shivered in the cool fall air as the night fell, hoping her captors would at least toss her a fur hide or something to cover herself with to ward off exposure. They might be further south than the northern mountain range, but fall evenings still got plenty cold around those parts.
Gerda looked up to the sky and wondered if Geri was trying to find her. She should do something to help him. Mixing her scent in with the scat the Raptors were leaving would give him hope that she was still alive. She had an idea. She noticed t
here was a pile of grass and rushes in her cage and decided to mark them and drop them on the ground for Geri to find. With her scent on them, grass eaters wouldn’t want to touch it.
A male raptor showed up and touched the knot with his clawed finger. “I am to take you to relieve yourself before we bed down,” he hissed. Gerda grabbed a handful of rushes and climbed out of the cage.
“Why are you grabbing those?” he asked.
“There are no leaves on the trees anymore.” Gerda explained vaguely.
The raptor shrugged and led her off to the bushes. After she was finished, she wiped herself off with the rushes and tucked them into her leggings while the raptor kicked dirt over her mess.
“We don’t want your people following us,” he hissed. “Alpha’s orders.”
Gerda nodded as she followed the reptile that was the size of a deer back to her cage. “Do you have a name?” she asked. The male had bright yellow plumage and scales.
“No. Not mated yet,” he said sadly.
“I just don’t understand the pack structure,” Gerda said as the raptor locked her back in.
“Females run it. The Alpha assigns mates to the hunters that please her the most. We don’t have any say in the matter,” he said sadly.
“That’s kind of sad. Where I come from, if the female doesn’t want to mate the male, it doesn’t happen. Well, sometimes it does,” she said remembering her own mating. “But it usually works out for the best.”
“You must be fortunate, then.” He said as he walked off.
After the Raptor walked away, Gerda scattered the rushes outside her cage, making it look like she kicked them accidentally while getting comfortable for her night’s sleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Geri, Freki and Bargi were fighting against the nonstop blizzard at the base of the glacier for the third day in a row.
“Geri, we can’t pass!” Freki shouted over the howling wind that whipped their fur around.
“We need to find a way to get to the giants!” Geri shouted back “It’s the only way we can find out how to rescue Gerda and avoid the war!”
“If we take one more step, we’ll be blown back to the Asper Crag!” Freki hollered as an even stronger gust of icy wind blasted him.
“Not even Holda knew how to get past this!” Bargi said. “There’s no way we can get up to the glacier where the giants supposedly live.”
Freki sniffed the bitter air and sneezed. “I think I smell something burning, like a fire or a torch, but the wind is so strong and erratic, I can’t pinpoint where it’s coming from!”
Geri and Bargi sniffed around trying to find the source of the elusive scent Freki was talking about. Out of the corner of his eye, Geri spotted a flickering orange glow. “This way!” he shouted as he struggled against the wind in the general direction of the orange apparition.
The trio followed the flickering light, not knowing, nor caring, what it was. They had been without food for two days now and there was no prey to be seen in the barren arctic wastes. As far as they knew, it could be a will-o-wisp luring them to their doom, but they didn’t care, they were hungry and any sign of habitation was a welcome one.
The glow was growing stronger as they charged towards it. It wasn’t moving either towards or away from them, just standing steady in the blinding snow. The three wolves skidded to a halt when they saw, towering over them on four tree-like limbs, a giant shaggy creature with curving tusks and a long trunk. Its small ears were close to its dome like skull. Next to the giant, shaggy pachyderm stood an enormous mountain of a man. He had shaggy red hair and matching beard, and he was dressed in warm furs.
“You must be the wolves of the south, my name’s Mamut!” he boomed.
“Well, compared to here, you could say that! I am Geri,” Geri replied jovially.
“What brings you up all this way?” the Giant asked. He must have towered easily four more feet over Geri’s six foot three frame.
“We need help. My mate was taken by the Raptors and we don’t know how to defeat them. Our witch, Holda, told us that your people might hold the key,” Geri replied.
“Holda’s still alive?” The giant man guffawed as he led them to his home. “You’d figure she’d be ashes by now!”
“Who’s the one with you?” Geri asked.
“Oh, that’s just my mammoth. We don’t change shapes up here. He helps me get the things I need; wood, food, whatever. Everyone in my tribe has one, we’re given one when we are babies and they stay with us for life,” he explained.
“Oh, that works well. What do you do for food up here?” Freki asked.
“Well, there is an ice ocean not too far from our village. We hunt water animals.”
“Makes sense. Thanks for helping us,” Bargi said.
“Not a problem. That blizzard has been raging for a thousand years or so. Our legends say that one of our shamans went to the glacier and found something so powerful and terrifying that he put the storm up to keep everybody away,” Mamut explained as he guided them to a village of domed snowy shelters.
“You live in snow?” Freki asked, astounded.
“Why, what else can we build out of up here? We eat every part of the animals we kill because even the bones have nutrition,” Mamut explained. “Don’t worry, it’s warm. I’ll take you to our shaman, Tal. She’s a friend of Holda.”
“That’s probably how she knew about you guys,” Geri said as they crawled into the opening of the large igloo.
There was a lamp glowing on a wooden shelf as the three large wolves tried to make themselves comfortable. The wolves changed back to their human forms and sat down on the furs as Mamut pulled some meat from the kitchen area.
“Here you go, you're probably famished,” he said as he served the blood red, raw meat.
The three looked at each other and sighed and turned back into wolves. “Sorry about that, we can’t digest it in human form if it’s not cooked.”
“That’s okay,” Mamut said, laughing. “We can’t cook our meat up here. Nothing to cook it with, so we just eat it raw. It fills the gut. That’s all that matters.”
The three adventurers scarfed down their meal in short order. Two days without food had famished them almost beyond reason and if they could have eaten it in their human forms, they would have.
After the trio had finished eating, they changed back to their human forms to discuss the matter at hand. “So, the Raptors have my mate, Gerda. They want to invade further north to convert all the peoples to their own religion, I guess,” Geri explained.
“That can’t happen,” Mamut said.
“They plan on sacrificing her to get the ability to survive up here,” Freki explained.
“Impossible!” Mamut gasped. “How could they draw the warm blooded power out of her and…”He rose to exit the igloo. “I’m going to get Tal, stay here,” he said as he pushed through the hide door.
The three looked at each other concerned. “You wouldn’t think that he would get flustered like that,” Bargi said as he lounged on the padded seal fur bed.
“So what do you think that object is?” Freki asked.
“I don’t know but I think it’s what we need to rescue Gerda. I don’t want to completely wipe the Raptors from this land, but I do want them to get a hard enough beating to realize that the smart thing to do is leave us in peace,” Geri explained.
“Yeah. We don’t want to rule the world, we just want to be left in peace,” Bargi said as he bit off one of his fingernails.
“Who knows, maybe we could trade with them? They probably have goods we don’t,” Freki said. “They don’t seem too peaceful, though.”
Geri heard the hide rustle and peered towards the door. In crawled Mamut followed by an elderly giantess. Her hair was white as the snow around them, and her skin had so many wrinkles it looked like a withered apple.
“So you’re the wolves that are having trouble with those damned lizards again?” her wizened voice croaked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Geri replied respectfully. “We were told your people could help us.”
She started cackling and wheezing. “Oh, Holda has so much faith in me, doesn’t she?” Her rheumy eyes looked around the igloo, taking the trio in. “So, they took your mate and found a magic that will allow them to weather the cold huh?” she asked.
“Yes, by sacrificing her. We have one moon to find her,” Geri said softly. “We can’t attack them in our wolf shapes, their blood is like silver to us, but we are at a disadvantage in our human shape because they can overpower us easily. It’s a lose-lose situation.”
Tal stared at them incredulously. “That’s further than I thought they would go. Tomorrow we go past the glacier,” she said as she left the igloo.
“What’s gotten into her?” Freki asked Mamut.
“You have no idea what it would do to the north if the Raptors manage to get a foothold past the forests,” he explained in his soft rumbling voice.
“Are they that bad?” Geri asked.
“They’re zealots,” Mamut said sternly. “They care about nothing except to force conversion to their goddess. The thing is, once people convert, they lose their ability to shapeshift, and are placed into a position of subservience forever. “
“Make us lapdogs?” Bargi growled. “Not gonna happen.”
“Exactly,” Mamut said. “A very long time ago, we were given an object to keep safe from the shape shifting tribes of this land. The Wolves, the Raptors, the Bears and the Horses. The Bears were wiped out by the Raptors in the beginning because they chose to convert to the raptor goddess. The Eastern Wolves moved in to their territory and now the Wolf tribe is the dominant one. The Horse tribe keeps to themselves off in the deserts of the west, but the Raptors of the south want to dominate all.”
“Wow. So how were they stopped?”
“We stopped them,” Mamut said sadly. “We came down the mountain wielding the sacred vessel, and opened it up in the midst of the Raptor camp. A bright light engulfed them and all the other shifters around and turned them to ash. Wolves, Bears, Raptors, they were all disintegrated by the power inside. Only we, the Ice Giants were left unscathed.”