Rask
Brown, brown, brown. The once vibrant and green island was nothing but brown. Not a single tree seemed to be left standing. The little cove that we carefully built to fish in was gone. Even the shape of the island looked different now. Destroyed by the hurricane that had raged for the last two days. It looked like everything on the island but us was dead.
I scanned the island again, desperately looking for some sign of life. There was nothing. Despair like I hadn't felt in god knows how long passed over me. I had only feared the wrath of Mother Nature twice in my life, in spite of the countless hurricanes I weathered here. The first time was the storm that took the ship that marooned us on the island. And the second was the hurricane that had just devastated it.
Four figures moved on the island below me. Abe was easy to spot. His hair, as fiery as his scales, stood out against the pale sand. He was walking among the smashed remains of our little village. Not a single hut still stood. Umber was equally easy to identify with his dark skin. He was in our farm area with one of the others. I couldn’t tell Lawrence from Florian at this distance, but I was confident the man kneeling on the sand with Umber was Lawrence; they were inseparable. They were doing something in the sand that covered half of what had been our farm. That left Florian, as the one who was picking his way through the smashed trunks of our banana grove. He should have been hidden from my view by the trees, instead I could easily see him clambering over them.
Defeated, I climbed slowly down from the high peaks that jutted up one side of our island. I picked my way down, mindful of rocks that the storm had loosened. At last, I was back on the beach. The now calm waves lapped around my ankles as I trudged along. They had all easily seen me climbing down and one by one, they join me on the sand. Each face looked more hopeless than the last. I could see Lawrence crawling in the distance, still on the farm.
“What is he doing?” I asked.
“Looking for wheat seeds, Rask. ‘Tis all gone,” Umber said in a shaking voice. “We could not find even a single grain left that we can replant. Half of the farm is buried. Everything we had growing is destroyed; blown or washed away. I bade Lawrence keep looking. If anything is left we must find it before it rots. Abe, pray, tell me you have recovered something.”
Once, long ago, Abe would have bristled at Umber’s tone. He had never met an African who wasn’t a slave and had trouble adjusting to the free man’s authority. It was even worse after he was changed. He didn’t care about the shifter hierarchy that put a beta like Umber above an omega. I don’t know that he would have adjusted under other circumstances, but working together for survival over the years brought us all together. Our place in the pack, the color of our skin, or what we had been before the shipwreck didn’t matter as much anymore.
Abe’s only reaction was to hang his head. “Nay. Some of the material from our houses is salvageable, but much was destroyed. Two of the cellars have been ripped up and most of the food storage is gone. There is very little left…” He shook his head at Umber. “I fear we shall not recover any wheat from there. If Lawrence cannot find any it is gone for good.”
“Did you find the still?” I asked. The whiskey still was our only source of fresh water.
“Aye. And undamaged, thank the Lord,” he answered.
One thing had gone right, at least. “What about the trees, Florian?” I asked.
“Gone,” he said in despair. “Everything is smashed or washed away. I gathered what I could find, but there is naught left. And I saw no trees that still stand. I fear everything is dead.”
“What saw you, Rask?” asked Abe.
Their faces fell as I described what I had seen from the cliffs. The four of us stood silently. Everything was destroyed. We walked wordlessly back to where we made our home to survey the damage. The measly pile of bananas and coconuts that Florian had rescued would be bad within a couple of days. We’d have to cook it all just to get it to last. All of our storage was indeed gone, as were most of the meager possessions we had.
I sat down on a stump that I was pretty sure had once been a chair in one of our homes, but couldn't even tell who it belonged to. With a nod to me, Umber excused himself to go help Lawrence sift through the sand. Abe followed him, while Florian returned to the trees to find more fruit.
With nothing else to do, I decided to walk around the perimeter of the island to see what had changed. It wouldn’t be difficult, I knew every inch of the coastline. Knew it better than I remembered the town where I grew up. I was fifty-two when we fled. I had been here longer. Much longer.
None of us knew how many years we had been stranded here. Days blended into days. Since none of us aged we didn't even have our appearances to help gauge the passage of time. We kept track for fifty years or so, give or take. And we picked it back up again now and then for a decade or two before stopping. All we knew was that we had a few full moons of peace between clusters of hurricanes. Sometimes I think even a year or two passed without any hurricanes and other times I think maybe they were winter storms, but there was no way of being sure. The truth was, we didn’t expect to be rescued anymore, so we didn’t care how long it had been.
We were all confident though that we had been here for over 100 years. And in that time we had made the island we were shipwrecked on into a home. We cultivated the wheat that we rescued from the ship and concocted a number of recipes that we were quite impressed with. The flour made up a substantial part of our diet now and I didn't know what we would do without it. To lose the bananas and the coconuts as well was devastating. We might be able to live on the fish, but without our lagoon it would be a lot of unpredictable hunting until we could rebuild it.
Still, there was no predicting what we would be able to catch and if the storm had affected the fish numbers like some previous storms had we were in real trouble. Sometimes it was a month or more before the fish really seemed to replenish their populations and without any fruit or flour to hold us over, we would never survive.
I turned my attention to the sky and wondered if we should try escaping again. It was ridiculous that a bunch of dragons should be marooned on an island. We thought we could simply fly away. Who would have imagined how vast the sea was? The moment the sun set we changed and flew as far as we could. No matter what direction we tried, we were always driven back to the island. If dawn came while we were still over water, we’d end up as helpless humans in the waves. Assuming we were lucky enough to not drown before the sun set again, we wouldn’t be able to take off from the water. There could have been land, just out of reach, but we were afraid to fly any further and not be able to get back to the island in time. Otherwise we’d end up just like Jens.
There were seven of us in the beginning. No, that wasn’t entirely accurate. nineteen of us survived the wreck. I’m not sure how many were on the ship, but Umber, Florian, Jens, and I were the only dragons who made it to shore.
Together, the survivors salvaged what we could from the ship and started building on the island. We didn't expect any sort of immediate rescue but we assumed that sooner or later someone bound for the New World would come along; we just had to wait it out.
Considering we were shipwrecked on a deserted island we were pretty well-off for the first couple of weeks. We rescued several barrels of the food, including the wheat that we planted. Luckily, we recovered the whiskey still as well to distill the salt water into fresh. We built shelters and started planning ways to survive for the long haul, just in case it took years for potential rescue to arrive.
We dragons helped them, but did so with heavy hearts. The full moon was coming. As the sun set every day, the humans patted each other on the back and congratulated themselves on another day of success. We, on the other hand, watched the sunsets with sorrow. Each setting sun was leading up to the final one. The one that sank as a full moon rose, unleashing four dragons onto the small island. We'd kill them all. There was nowhere on the island that could contain even one dragon and nowhere for the humans to hide.
As I looked back on it, years later, I thought that maybe we could have just told them the truth. If we changed into dragons they would believe us and we could have tried to find a way to have them help us restrain the beasts for the night or build a place for the humans to shelter. Maybe if we hadn’t been on the ship to escape the dragon slayers we would have told them.
Instead, we awoke the morning after the full moon to utter devastation. There weren’t even bodies left. The dragons had eaten them, or maybe tossed some of them into the sea. Only three survived. A couple of them were horribly injured.
Knowing they’d never survive another full moon, assuming they recovered from the injuries, I offered a way to save them. I could turn them into dragons. I knew it was a violation of our laws to change more than one, but couldn’t leave them to be killed.
They agreed to be changed. When the next full moon rose there were seven of us; me, the three betas, and three brand new omegas. They adapted to being dragons quickly. Soon, we had carved out a life on the island. As the years went by, we slowly resigned ourselves to the idea that we weren’t going anywhere.
Jens, however, wasn’t content to remain. He wanted to know if his family had escaped the dragon slayers. One night, with the promise of sending help, he flew away for the last time. He built a little raft that he clutched in his talons as he flew. His plan was to set it on the water before dawn and rest on it as a human. I didn’t think it was large enough for him to take off from again. He’d probably end up drifting on it.
He never came back and neither did help. We knew he’d be true to his word and send help, so the only conclusion was that he was dead. We’d never know if it was at the hands of a dragon slayer or if he had died before reaching land. None of us had tried to escape since.
And now we had the flying dragon hunters to worry about… The first time we saw one we thought it was another dragon. The silver scales caught and shimmered in the light from the sun. Impossible that it was flying during the day, but we didn’t know what else it could be. Years went by and we gradually saw them more and more frequently. One came close enough we saw that it wasn’t a dragon, but some sort of strange metal object. It never flapped its wings, it just soared by, roaring.
Eventually we came to realize that the mysterious flying lights we saw at night were being carried by the same roaring, metal beasts. They left alone, just harmlessly passing overhead, never slowing or swooping closer. Benjamin, one of my omegas, decided to investigate one night. He flew up to get a closer look and catch it if he could. We watched as he drew near to it…
A blinding flash of light, followed by a boom louder than any cannon echoed through the night. His body, or parts of it, fell into the sea along with the remains of the dragon hunting contraption. We knew now that the things patrolled the skies, looking for shifters in dragon form. Ben was gone and we had just one more reason to stay on the island.
I took a deep breath. We’d find a way to make this work. We had to. I would not let my pack die here. Nor would I let them fall to the silver hunters or fly away only to drown.
Now I just had to figure out how.