Dragon Writers: An Anthology by AA. VV

Author:AA. VV. [AA. VV.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Relato, Fantástico, Ciencia ficción, Otros
Publisher: ePubLibre
Published: 2016-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

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Jace Killan lives in Arizona with his wife, five kids, and two dogs. He works as a CFO for a biotech company. He volunteers with the Boy Scouts and enjoys everything outdoors. He also composes music and is a novice photographer.

Shattered Pieces Swept Away

Gregory D. Little

Draconis was impossible to miss, for it was very large and the world had grown tragically small.

Holed up in the wide boughs of an easily climbed tree, Hursk popped his head above the forest’s tattered canopy. The rushing hiss of the ocean behind him was an affront to his ears, foreign as it was—or had been—to this place. The sea now lay south, once the direction of Hursk’s homeland. Only a shattered crescent of land still poked above the waves, the barest fraction of all the peoples and cultures that had been lost.

Ahead, Draconis stamped and chuffed fiery mucous from its strangely webbed mouth. Four-legged with a short neck and a long tail, flame utterly wreathed the beast. It was flame, flesh of molten rock grafted to a metal armature of a skeleton. He could feel the heat from here, miles away.

Draconis’s huge, lamplike eyes seemed unfocused to Hursk, sweeping the lands around it but not truly seeing anything. Unlikely he and the boy sitting in the tree with him would be spotted so far away. The forest separating them from the dragon was already alight with fires from its passing.

Any motion from the behemoth shook the ground beneath the trees, sending ripples hissing through the canopy of leaves. The southern tip of the mountains stood as its backdrop, yet it seemed of a size with them, as though a hand of the same scale had forged each.

Hursk wasn’t sure if the gods, may they rot forever in their prison, had made the mountains, but he knew they were to blame for Draconis.

“Do you see it?” Whispering up from the branch below, Marnium was the lone, young soldier offered up by the fledgling central government as a replacement after Juriel’s and Parnata’s deaths. And Yalla’s. The last name was sharp in Hursk’s mind, a dagger without a hilt.

No one left who wants to fight, and the so-called leaders don’t care.

“I see it.”

“And?” Hursk could hear the boy’s restraint creak, trying to hold in all that eager energy. “Has it gotten bigger?”

“No.” It was hard to say, in truth. Past a certain point, degrees of immensity became absurd to try to gauge. But it appeared the rumors were true. The gods’ imprisonment and the resulting end of the war had stripped the great beasts of their more frightful abilities along with the will that had driven their actions. In a way, it almost disappointed Hursk. The idea that they no longer faced the creatures at their best insulted the memory of those who had fallen so recently.

Crocodilius had been a fight worthy of story and song. Or it would surely seem so to someone else. The weight of the last smiter in Hursk’s pack called up the bitter memory of that battle.

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