The floating building was now expelling even more oddness.
Soldiers were falling from the belly of the thing. Attached to big sheet constructions they floated down with great big weapons in their arms. Iris’ village did not have weapons besides arrows, spears, and swords, but she had seen the work of the heavy black shafts which the soldiers were cradling. They could kill a man at great distance, and obliterate dozens before a sword could be drawn.
She hunkered down, knowing it was too late to do anything for those inside the village. They had build the barricades to stop soldiers coming in from the outside, but they had never considered the air as a possible route in. They had not known that buildings could fly either. It seemed to Iris that they had been very ignorant about a great many things.
The king addressed his troops as they fell in a dangerous rain. “He who bears the name, wears the crown, and he who wears the crown must commit the crimes of office. Kill these people! Each and every one of them. Let their blood soak the soil they refused to work! Let them serve as examples to those who would come before them.”
“No…” Iris hissed the word to herself. She wanted to scream, but self-preservation made her stay as quiet and still as possible.
“They wished to rebel. Now they shall burn. Their warriors shall be put to scale-blade, their maidens taken to serve our loins, their offspring bonded into servitude. This is King Archon’s justice!”
The dragon swooped once more, opened its mouth, and poured flame upon the world.
Iris watched her village burn, the light from the flames reflected in her tearful brown eyes. The granary which held supplies for winter was torched first, combusting in the breath of the dragon rider who urged his purple and gold winged mount so close to the ground she could still feel the gusts from its wings even at a distance.
The screams of the dragons almost covered the screams of the people who could not out-run the attacking forces. Peasants on foot had no chance of escaping the swathe of volcanic fury spewed across the ground, turning fertile land into charred black nothing in a matter of seconds.
The villagers never had a chance. The barricades they had constructed to keep the world out now kept them in, vulnerable to an attack so powerful and so strange Iris could not entirely believe what she was seeing. A mixture of horror and disbelief made her uncertain that she was even where she was. She felt as though she was floating above her body, trapped ever so slightly out of reach of herself.
She wanted to look away, but she could not. She wanted to run, but it seemed there was no place to run, nowhere to hide. And the dragon was getting lower. Closer.
It landed outside the burning village, so close to Iris she felt as though she could have reached out and touched it.
Once it landed, she could not help but marvel at the smell of the thing, like oil, and the stillness of it, like a statue. It was eerie and uncanny and it terrified her now somehow even more than it had when it was flying about burning all she loved. There was an emptiness in its great crimson eyes, which turned black as it stopped moving.
But the beast was the very least of Iris’ problems.
When his mount was perfectly still, the king dismounted, sliding with muscular agility down the wing of the beast until his boot clad feet hit the ground with a puff of charr and dust.
He was at least nine feet tall, and handsome, but what did handsomeness matter when his heart was as black as the pupils in the dragon’s eyes. A shudder of disgust and despair rushed through her. She knew better than to look upon the king. She also knew better than to run. The secret to being good prey was to stay perfectly still when predators were close. She’d learned that long ago, watching rabbits and foxes who evaded the jaws of hounds.
She stopped her breath and listened. The king spoke in a booming voice which carried easily on the breeze. He was holding something in his hand. Something which sparked and glowed, a crystal of some kind.
“Someone survives,” he said, lifting up the crystal. “I detect a life sign.”
“Impossible, sire,” one of the other soldiers said. “We surrounded the village to ensure there were no escapes.”
“Survival is never impossible. Someone is alive. Someone defies the sentence of death.”
Iris felt the king’s eyes on her even though there was no way he could see her. She was crouched behind a big tree stump with plenty of foliage which she knew from experience made her impossible to see. If Iris knew how to do anything, it was to hide.
But he was seeing, or at least, sensing her. He knew she was there. She felt the knowing, and saw the glint of those impossibly blue eyes. For a terrible second, they locked gazes.
Turning on her heels, Iris ran. These were her woods. She had explored every inch of them, knew every gully and root intimately. The knowledge would do little if the king took his fiery metal mount and began to burn the world around her, but she did what all prey has done from the beginning of time. She sensed that her chance of escape was narrowing to nothingness, and she chose to run rather than wait for the predator to come upon her.
Chapter 5
There was a skittering throughout the forest, the horror of nature beholding what sentient creatures were capable of doing one another. The smell of smoke had frightened the inhabitants. He knew every four legged creature would be fleeing the area, but he had a feeling that there was a two legged one somewhere in the mix. He had felt eyes on him, intelligent, angry eyes. Those never belonged to an animal. They could only belong to a sentient being. Perhaps one allied with the humans who had just been swept up into the belly of his ship while their village was turned into soot and cinders.
“Sire?” Sergeant Nanite came up behind Archon. He was a bold, bearded, beast of a clawed male with more fur than scale. Only on a far-flung planet could a mutant with actual fur be considered for the position of sergeant. “We have safely stowed all the villagers in your ship, transported them up with the flash drives. They are all sedated and awaiting transport.”
“There was someone here,” Archon said. “I want each and every one of these villagers. I want people to wonder for centuries what happened to the village of flames.”
“Village of flames?”
“That's what they’re going to call it, I’ve decided. The village of flames. Every single one of them gone in an instant. Probably should have refrained from burning it, now you mention it.”
Nanite had not mentioned it, but he didn’t like to say. Contradicting a king who had just destroyed a village was not the way to career advancement, or general continued existence.
“I doubt anybody escaped your net, your highness, but if they have it is of little importance. The rebel village is destroyed. All will know that you are not one to be defied.”
“I would have thought they already knew I was not one to be defied,” Archon drawled, his eyes scanning the dark trees for hints of human life.
Archon’s senses were far keener than his general’s rationale. He had felt the eyes of the prey on him. He had felt the way they searched him. Saw him, not as the generals did, or as the charred and fallen villagers did. There was something in that gaze he wanted to feel again.
“I want everyone. Every. Last. Person. If I do not, there will be consequences. Fatal consequences for those who have let me down. Have you seen war, Nanite? Have you felt the blade of your enemy slashing your flesh?”