Sheilah was wholly feral; the only time she felt truly alive was when she drank the blood of the dragonlings she hunted. In those moments she was herself again, her heart was aflame, but her mind was clear, she felt like she was aware of herself in a way she’d never been before, from the tips of her toes to the ends of her hair.
But those moments faded quickly.
Her meals largely consisted of the dragonlings she hunted, raw, stringy flesh going down her throat in handfuls. There were plenty of times that she wasn’t able to find dragonlings, and for that, she ate whatever she could find and chewed the spongy, bitter cactus flesh to drink in the water.
Caidi, Caidi, Caidi. The brief times she was aware of herself she could think nothing else but of her little sister and how she shouldn’t have brought Caidi along to hunt gnolls. Everything else was a blurry smear of tracking and hunting.
She hunted to forget, but the memory of her little sister would not lay quiet. It haunted her, chased her through the Redstone, wove between lonely spires and deceptively deadly box canyons, always dogging her heels, refusing to be forgotten.
There was a disjointed memory that persisted in Sheilah’s mind and filled her dreams; she was in a place she shouldn’t have been, fighting gnolls. The place was burning with a furious blaze as the hyena-men screamed and laughed in their high-pitched voices.
The flames refused to be doused, which only seemed to encourage her.
She awoke from those dreams shuddering and shaking, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, her black nails digging into her skin hard enough to draw blood.
*****
Her dream- or was it a memory? Started out clearly enough: She was where she shouldn’t have been.
There were three places that were considered forbidden and taboo by Clan Law: The Keep, the Tower, and the Town, all three remnants of the Stormheim occupation.
The Stomheim Keep in the Redlands was placed on a short rise with cliffs on every side. It was bordered with thick stone walls and the gates themselves were made with thick wooden beams harvested from trees that didn’t exist in the Redlands themselves.
The stones that made up the keep weren’t native to the Redstone either; they were dense gray things carved and fitted together. The whole keep stood out from the reddish-brown soil and stone of the Redlands, an obvious intrusion, something foreign and alien that didn’t belong.
There was a steep path that led up to the imposing structure; Sheilah jogged up the incline easily.
There was a strange sense of defiance and rebellion that burned in her breast. If her father had forbidden something, she would do it. Her depression and apathy had hardened into a bitter canker that occasionally flared into a resentful stubborn belligerence.
A strange, bitter smell wafted across her nostrils, something that immediately evoked feelings of hate, fear, and despair. She fell on her ass and nearly rolled back down the incline.
What was that smell, so rancid and bitter? She couldn’t place it, despite its familiarity. She unlimbered her bow and rose into a crouch, pushing her shoulder against the cliff of Redstone and nocking an arrow. Her skin crawled with the sense of danger, and she warred with the demanding sense that she stand proud and defiant against whatever it was that terrified her so, and the more hardheaded and grounded belief that she approach cautiously.
She struggled with the conflicting impulses, struggled to keep her breathing under control. Her heart was trying to punch its way out from her ribcage and her veins were filled with molten fear.
She strained all of her senses to catch the slightest hint of what it was that terrified her so, even as she struggled to force her frozen legs into movement.
Her legs didn’t want to move. They didn’t want to move at all. She grimaced, gritting her teeth. She wanted to go on, but something within her denied that impulse, rejecting it with terror.
It would be so easy to give up.
She wasn’t sure how she was able to take her first step. There was no catharsis, no great revelation, There was just a sense that her feet had moved and she was moving up the incline slowly.
That bitter stench wafted over her again, but she kept moving. That was important.
A shadow appeared from further up the trail; Sheilah immediately planted her back against the cliff face and tensed her bow string. She couldn’t forget the familiar stench that drifted down from above; it was something she was intimately familiar with.
She stepped around and looked up the path; a gnoll stood between two boulders and sniffed the air.
She immediately brought the bow up and drew the arrow and released without thinking. There was no need to think about such things; a gnoll was a blight to the land, a bringer of death and suffering.
The arrow punched through the gnoll’s skull; the beast dropped limply.
Sheilah nocked another arrow quickly and advanced up the path leading up to the keep.
Three more gnolls suddenly appeared; she fired quickly, drawing more arrows from her quiver with quick, dextrous movements.
When you were on your own in the wilderness, there was nobody else to rely on except yourself.
*****
She walked up the path cautiously, arrow nocked, bow ready.
The gnolls wore bits of leather armor, some of them carried battered, rusted weapons. She stared blankly at them for some time, trying to put the pieces together. Metal was somewhat rare in the Redlands.
In fact, aside from the Dragon Metal that the Dragon Clan used for some of their tools, most of the metal that was used throughout the Redstone had originally come from Stormheim.
*****
Up ahead, there would be the front gate into the keep. She scampered past the bodies, wondering how she was going to get inside.
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Her fears were unfounded; one of the keep doors had fallen over, the metal corroded and warped. She crept forward in a crouch, an arrow nocked but not drawn, peeking into the keep’s interior.
The main keep was a large garrison, designed to host hundreds of Stormheim soldiers during their occupation of the Redlands. Between the outer wall and the keep was a training yard where a half-dozen or so of the giggling hyena-men growled and yipped at each other. Some had spears, others carried swords, each wore bits of armor, some of it leather, others wearing battered metal.
She froze when she recognized the symbol on the armor they wore, lightning over a castle.
Somehow the gnolls had occupied the keep and appropriated the weapons and armor left behind?
These were far, far more dangerous than the ones she’d faced with her sisters.
She focused her attention on each of the gnolls, picking her targets, judging them, trying to figure out how to pick them off one at a time.
After about twenty minutes of careful, quiet observation, she realized that there was simply no way that it could be done. The moment she killed one, the others would be on her too quickly to retaliate against. She wasn’t sure her arrows could even get through that armor.
She shouldered her bow and glanced up.
Of course.
A Dragon’s strength came from the highest heights.
She climbed up the gray stone blocks, quickly but carefully, at times forcibly digging her nails into the stone for handholds. People from the Clan of the Dragon had immeasurably strong and sharp nails; a natural result of constantly taking in the flesh and blood of dragon hatchlings and dragonlings.
She scaled the wall, and reached the fortified top, slipping between the battlements.
Once she climbed through, she eyed everything quickly- left, right, up and down.
The other side of the battlements looked down on the same yard she’d observed from outside the gate, and for that she was immeasurably glad.
She’d only seen six of the gnolls, but tucked in the corners there were several more. She’d have faced at least ten if she’d attacked from the front.
She drew an arrow and nocked it, and, while still crouched, scooted cautiously across the battlements. There was a much larger part that looked over the gates; she headed there and sat down and did something her father often complained that she didn’t do enough of; she thought.
With her bow, she could kill several of the gnolls in the yard, but then what? Were there many ways up here to the battlements?
It made sense for the walls to be patrolled. That meant that there had to be ways up the walls that weren’t nearly as creative as her way up. There was one all the way across the yard, a ramp of stone stairs that joined the walkway that eventually wrapped around where she was. Was there one on this side as well?
She couldn’t tell.
She peeked over the wall and eyed the gnolls again. She had a clear line of sight on all of them.
“For Caidi-” she croaked- unaware she’d spoken aloud.
She picked her first target and let fly, and then ducked back behind one of the stone battlements as she listened to the whinney-like laugh of the gnolls below.
She peeked again and after a long moment picked another target, drew and released in a smooth motion. That one dropped, and then she dropped another, who fell to the earth, screaming and scraping at the ground in the yard with its brutal claws as its lifeblood gushed from a gaping wound in its neck.
Suddenly they started screaming and milling around; she scuttled across the battlements and hid, worried that she’d been spotted.
*****
Sheilah’s arrow ripped through the throat of one and pinched into the guts of a second; a lucky shot.
There was now even more of the damned things, and they waved battered swords and spears as they searched for whatever it was that was killing them.
Several of them got into a fight, at first flailing about at each other with swords, but eventually casting them aside in favor of teeth and claws.
They snarled and ripped at each other, blackened blood splattering, broken yellow teeth flashing.
She watched them fight until there was only one left, and was about to reward the winner with an arrow when it toppled over, groaning and thrashing.
She took a shaky breath, and then a second; then refocused her attention on the rest of the training yard.
There were at least fifty gnolls down there, just in the yard alone. She didn’t have nearly enough arrows. She’d need at least four times the amount of arrows she had at the start, and that was assuming they obediently let her shoot them.
The remaining gnolls fell on the corpses of their fallen and savagely ripped them apart; Sheilah watched their grotesque cannibalism with a horrified look on her face.
A much larger, more muscular gnoll came out of the keep, then. It was massive. She’d never seen a gnoll that huge before. It looked as if it could have torn apart a dragonling with its bare hands. Not only did it wear bits of leather and battered metal armor, strange designs were scrawled all over it, swirls and zigzags. Feathers from hunting hawks dangled from its snarled and matted fur, along with what looked like claws, bits of stone, and pieces of what looked like bits from a Glass Spider.
Strange black mist curled from its claws as it looked over the milling mass of its brethren.
It let out a heavy bark, and many of the gnolls went inside the keep. It gestured with its mangled paws and whiplike extrusions of that mysterious black smoke lashed at the others that weren’t quick enough to obey.
Whatever was touched by that strange smoke rotted away; the gnolls afflicted by it screamed in pure pain even as their flesh rotted off of their bodies in rancid slush, revealing decaying, crumbling yellow bones beneath.
Sheilah raised up, aimed carefully and fired; the arrow punched into the thing’s face and it screamed and tore the arrow free, even as she launched a second shot that caught it in the throat.
The gigantic gnoll tore that one free as well, heedless of the freshets of black blood that splashed down its body. Sheilah launched arrow after arrow at the thing, each arrow finding a vulnerable spot in its neck, throat, head, and even its eye.
Still, it contemptuously tore each arrow out of its body.
Its eye rolled Sheilah’s way, and it raised its hands and the black smoke lashed out at her. She threw herself backwards and saw the extrusions of smoke wrap around the stone block she’d been near flake and crumble away. She skittered back on her ass as the black substance snaked across the ground in pursuit of her, eroding the stone as it advanced relentlessly.
She kicked with her feet and pushed with her hands, finally in an ecstasy of self-preservation, she heaved herself over and ran as hard as she could to the spot that she’d climbed up.
After that her dream- or her memory- grew hazy, disjointed. There was screaming, there was darkness, and there was fire. Endless fire, fire that flowed and seared and roared with all the ferocity of a dragon.
*****
This morning, she awoke from her nightmare and opened her eyes to see that she was only a few inches away from one of the more deadly venomous snakes that made the Redstone its home.
She had a vague and dim memory of crawling under the cleft of a boulder and curling up in a tight ball to preserve body heat the night previous; apparently the snake had decided to do the same.
She bit back a scream, bunched her hands into tight fists, and desperately tried to figure out a way to live. She was absurdly aware that her toes were clenched and curled in her tattered shoes as she desperately tried to make no movement to provoke the deadly predator.
The blunt head of the snake’s head lifted up; she could see its forked tongue tasting the air as it quested back and forth slowly.
Miraculously, it turned away from her and slithered out into the morning sun.
Once it was well and truly gone, she crawled out herself and stretched in the sun, feeling the dry wind chill and then dry the rivulets of sweat on her skin.
The terror of her immediate death had returned lucidity; she looked around herself, briefly wondering where she was.