Ferro

Tendons creaked as they worked hard, seeing the first extended use in any number of years. Although his muscles didn’t atrophy without use, at least not at any sort of measurable rate, it didn’t mean he couldn’t feel the work being done. A tremendous amount of calories would be needed by the time he reached his destination.

The daylight long gone, he could no longer rely on the strong thermals that appeared with the sun’s light. The earth still swept up a warm wind from time to time, but night flying took much more effort from him.

Far below, his shadow crossed a meadow that had been bathed in moonlight. As the meager white light faded, a startled deer broke and ran for cover. The beast inside of him salivated at the idea, but Ferro shook it off. He would feed, but not until he had arrived at his destination. Distractions were unnecessary at this time.

Looking away from a potential meal, he cast a glance around, once again marveling at how much he could truly see in the night sky.

I need to get out more... take more night flights and truly remember what it is like to fly.

Ferro chuckled, a rumbling noise that sounded like thunder followed by a slight chuffing noise through the twin nostrils at the end of his long snout. By his reckoning, that was the seventy-eighth time he had made himself such a promise. Though the number was likely more; he hadn’t started counting right away.

With a lifespan measuring millennia, it was tough to keep himself to any sort of promise like that. He simply…forgot. It sounded ridiculous that a dragon shifter would forget the joys of flying, but there it was. Mating a human spirit to a winged animal often meant the beauty of it was only ever appreciated mid-air.

He inhaled slowly, his great lungs filling to capacity before he blew it all out in rapid succession. Feeling ambitious, he tucked his wings in and twisted his body. In the blink of an eye, he was upside down. Just as fast, his body began to drop, and he was pointing straight down.

Hold it…

Hold it…

Not yet…

Now!

The giant membranous wings snapped open and he hauled up, swooping out of his dive and back into the air, only a few dozen feet from the ground. A particularly tall treetop tickled the scales on his underside as he cleared the tree line, his momentum carrying him higher and higher. When it finally stalled he flexed his wings several times, propelling him even higher.

A smile passed over his spirit. The smile of a dragon was more of a toothy “I’m going to eat you now” type of look, so he refrained from doing so physically, but his soul felt refreshed at the exhilaration. Sometimes he had to remind himself he was alive.

What is that?

Ahead the forest tapered off, split in one section by a winding road as it exited the tree cover, becoming pin-straight as it headed for a village. He was very close to his destination. Perhaps it would be a decent spot to stay for the night. Banking one wing, he circled around the small town.

Flickering lights caught his attention. In human form Ferro was blessed with exceptional eyesight. But in his dragon form, well, it beggared comparison. He focused his eyes on the lights, and the picture came quickly into focus.

What the…

He could see it, but it wasn’t making any sense to him. He scanned the area until all the details came clearer. He saw now the lights were torches, held aloft by a mob of people. The confusion came, because they stood facing opposite another mob, none of whom held torches.

How odd.

Then he saw the figure dash out from between them, headed for a wall. He winced, noting the slight size of the woman being chased, and the ten-foot-high wall. Idly wondering what she could have done to earn such ire from the villagefolk, he continued to circle high above them, remaining invisible to the humans below. Perhaps he should find a place to hunker down for the night, before approaching them in the morning.

They certainly don’t seem like the most welcoming lot, now do they? He could tell that the woman wasn’t a village native. The pale white skin that showed on her face and hands, the little skin that was exposed, was nothing like the dark-tanned complexion of those who faced her.

He felt sorry for her as the mob closed in. His attention almost wavered, not wanting to see the conclusion. It didn’t though, which allowed him to watch in full detail as the unknown woman turned and simply jumped, clearing most of the wall in one go. Her hands grabbed the top and she vaulted the rest of the way over in one smooth move.

Ferro blinked.

Then he did so again, trying to convince himself he hadn’t actually seen what he’d just seen. That wall was a solid ten feet high. There were a few shifters he knew who could have done what she did. But not many. It confirmed one thing however: she wasn’t a human.

The rest of the puzzle fell into place after that. It made sense now why a backward, out-of-the-way village would be hunting her in the middle of the night with torches. And pitchforks too, he saw in disbelief. He couldn’t believe people still did that. He watched, wondering what type of shifter she was. A newblood, perhaps, just come to her powers? That might explain why she had done something that revealed herself to the agitated villagers. That didn’t explain her ability to clear the wall, however.

“Shit,” he muttered to himself as a crossbow bolt flew from the darkness, impaling her right calf clean through. The woman cried out and tumbled to the ground, her momentum preventing a clean stop.

Villagers streamed to other places on the wall, where ladders leaned against it. They were going to catch her, there was no doubt. Ferro considered the options, and whether he should intervene or not. As if on cue, the woman’s head snapped up, eyes into the sky. She is likely praying to her god. Something about that assumption just didn’t sit right with him. It wasn’t until he realized her head was moving and her eyes were open and focused that it became clear. She was looking at him.

Hell. He didn’t have much of a choice now. He wasn’t going to willingly abandon her. Life was valuable, but Ferro considered a female shifter to be several degrees above that. The way shifter genetics worked, the odds of a female child of a shifter being blessed with an animal of their own was extremely small. Coming to the acceptance that he had to intervene, Ferro knew he had to do so soon. There wouldn’t be much time before the villagers caught up with her.

He folded one wing in, the air speed forcing him into a high-speed turn. Aimed at the area between her and the oncoming villagers, he pulled the other large membrane in tight against his body. He plummeted from the sky like a shadow of death. Ferro had no intention of killing anyone, but if he gave them that impression, it was much more likely they would scatter.

Plummeting to the earth, he once again snapped his wings open as the ground rushed up at him. He kept his legs oriented downward this time, until he slammed into the ground. Dust and small debris flew through the air, the cloud enveloping the oncoming villagers. They stopped, coughing and hacking on the particles swirling through the air. It was a harder landing than he would have preferred. His leg muscles screamed at him in protest, but they accepted the sudden deceleration.

He waited patiently, slightly offset from both parties so that he could view the oncoming villagers and the unknown woman. She might be a shifter, but he had no idea who or what she was. After everything that had been going on lately, he intended on being far more careful than might have been necessary.

“Enough.” The single word cut through the silence that had descended upon the villagers at the sight of him.

He didn’t blame them. A massive dragon the color of rust and measuring more than one hundred feet from head to tail had just dropped out of the night sky in front of them. On top of that, it had spoken to them. The chattering of voices in a foreign language told him he might have spoken in vain, since they wouldn’t understand a word he had said.

“It is the Apocalypse,” said one of them.

Ferro’s swiveled to impale the man with a yellow-eyed stare. He was a little taller than the others, with a slightly lighter skin as well. He also clearly wore garments of a higher quality. A large wooden cross hung from some sort of metal chain around his neck. He clutched it tightly, holding it in front of him as he began to whisper phrases in Latin.

The dragon shifter winced. He had been around when Latin was the spoken word of the world. What the man was saying had clearly been butchered by time and lack of education. Instead of saying “Oh Lord, help us and save us, Your glory over all,” he was actually saying “Old man. Your gory over all us.” He tried not to laugh, knowing that would not help the calming of the situation.

“Send them home, reverend,” Ferro told the man, singling him out by speaking in English once again.

A voice shouted in the background. The response was ragged and uneven. A second voice from the other side echoed the call. The crowd stiffened its spine as someone else took up the call.

Mob mentality. It never ceases to surprise me.

The villagers at the front took a few tentative steps forward, brandishing the torches in his direction.

“Fire?” he said with frustration. “I shall show you fire.”

He inhaled sharply, his lungs swelling up to much larger than normal size. The villagers drew back. Taking hold of his inner dragon, he opened his maw and unleashed his irritation. A stream of intense flame burst forth from within him, the red-blue flame searing a line in the ground. He dragged it forward, separating the villagers from him and the injured woman.

In his peripheral vision, he could see the female shifter struggling mightily to pull the crossbow bolt from her leg. He knew it would heal, and she should know it as well. But something like that still hurt like all hell. Pulling something from your own wound was a tough call. Especially when it had a spiked end to it that insisted on ripping flesh as it went.

The villagers scrambled back as the flames seared the air, causing a reddish tan on some of the closest of the mob. Even as he watched, they still didn’t disperse. Angrily he shifted from his dragon form to human, hoping that seeing him look more like them might convince them to leave.

“Go!” he shouted, waving his hands at them from across the field of fire.

This time several of the villagers at the back seemed to follow his word. He almost sighed in relief, until the flicker of torchlight glinted off some metal. There was a distant twang and the crossbow discharged another bolt, this time in his direction.

An honest to goodness crossbow. Seems so out of place these days.

But it wasn’t. Ferro knew what types of people used those. It didn’t bode well for what was to come.

All of these thoughts took place in the split second the bolt took to cross the distance to him. If it had been aimed at a human, they would have taken it in the chest. Ferro was a dragon shifter, however, and had a long time to hone reflexes that didn’t decay as he aged. He spun, moving his body out of the way. In its place, he left his hand. The bolt was already losing speed by the time it got to him, but it pierced his hand nonetheless. The force was spent, however, so the bolt only stuck out halfway from his palm.

“Are you nuts?” The woman, who had just finished pulling the bolt from her leg wound, was looking at him in shock.

“No, but I suspect several people in that crowd are,” he said, turning back to face them. He had many questions for her, but just then, he needed to deal with the others.

Holding up his hand, he made them watch as he slowly pulled the bolt through his palm without even a wince. There was pain, but he had long since learned to ignore it for the time it took to heal. As he held his hand up for the villagers to see, he focused, ignoring the hole. He let them watch as it slowly closed of its own accord.

“Go!” he shouted, and this time they did. Even the trouble makers—who he had only ever caught a glimpse of through the crowd—left, leaving him alone with the woman.

He waited until the last of them disappeared back down the wall before he went to her.

“Are you okay?” he asked. She had risen to her feet, but was hunched against the rock. “Miss?” he asked, laying a hand on her shoulder. He had meant it as a comforting gesture. A crossbow through the shin was no pleasant issue. So when she spun and hammered her palms into his sternum, it caught him completely by surprise.

As did the fact that he suddenly found himself flying through the air.