Shylldra

Shylldra's awoke to a facefull of slapping feathers. She tried to wave the microraptor away, she was tired, she needed to sleep, but--

And then the memories crashed down on her and she shot to her feet. The microraptor fluttered away with an irritated “Thcwark!”

It was almost noon. She'd passed out before she even bandaged his wounds! She looked down, terrified she would find his corpse lying next to her. What she found was almost worse: nothing. Hallek was nowhere to be seen. She fought down the panic long enough to hear the noises.

“Stay away!” Hallek was shouting from somewhere on the other side of the dead giganotosaur's bulk. “Stay away! It's mine!”

Shylldra pulled herself up on her staff, every muscle aching and pounding at the indignity of having to move again. She hurried around to the other side of the corpse to find Hallek standing over a pile of dead eoraptors, fending off a pack of live ones.

“Away! Get away it's mine!”

For their part the eoraptors seemed more confused than anything else. Every so often one of them would dart halfheartedly forwards and Hallek would kill it. Instantly. Shylldra had never seen anyone move so fast. And in that instant an eoraptor head would be cut away, blood would fountain, and another corpse would be added to the pile. They didn't seem to actually want to fight Hallek. It looked like they were trying to get around him. He wasn't bleeding anymore but Shylldra wasn't sure that was a good sign. Wounds that stopped bleeding were supposed to scab or heal, not irregularly flicker with orange light like there was a fire raging just behind them.

“Hallek! Hallek, what's happening?”

“They can't have it Shylldra,” Hallek looked at her dumbly. “It's mine, don't you see? They...you! No! No you back off! It's mine!”

Hallek charged right for Shylldra and for a moment she thought he was going to run her through but he just pushed her aside and kept running. Turning to follow she saw his target was a pack of ugly, misshapen looking animals. Three feet long and covered in fur, they had a huge head with comically small ears and scuttled around on all fours. They were approaching a fleshy part of the ginganotosaur's thigh.

Sinna, soona...cynognathus! Shylldra remembered. Lizards with fur. One of Ikkek's first experiments. Scavengers.

And then what was happening became horribly clear.

“Get away!” Hallek screamed, leaping on the cynognathus and slicing one of them in half with a single stroke of his sword. The rest of the pack, apparently more prudent than the eoraptors, bolted back into the forest.

“Hallek...” Shylldra said, but he ignored her completely as a shadow fell over them. Sitting atop the corpse was another creature, a cat four feet long, with tiny fangs poking out of its mouth. That mouth was red with blood as it tore a strip of flesh off of the carcass.

Dinofelis, Shylldra remembered. Small prey or carrion. Norak hunted one for the pelt while we were traveling.

“NOOOO!!!!” Hallek roared, crouching to leap, but Shylldra sprinted to him and wrapped her arms around his chest.

“Hallek no! Hallek just...just stop. It's alright. They're not hurting you. You don't have to kill them.”

“But they're...” Hallek looked at her with glassy eyes. “They're eating me Shylldra. Look at it, they're eating me. Look at the big cat's mouth, it's just...it's chewing my skin off Shylldra!”

“No! Hallek look, look down at yourself. Look at me. You're a human. Right? Human. That is not your body.”

“Not my...right. That's not...but I remember dying! I remember the sword going into my neck. And I remember...oh gods, Shylldra, I ate all those people! I tore the whole village apart!”

“No you didn't!” Shylldra insisted. “No, you didn't. That was the giganotosaur. Remember? That wasn't you. We were still in the city when it happened.”

“Right. Right. I remember the city.”

Shylldra called on all the power in her staff to calm and soothe. Orange light from Hallek's wounds flickered across them both, casting weird shadows. Behind her heavy footfalls heralded the arrival of a small pack of chindesaurs, really just bigger eoraptors, who joined the other scavengers in eating the corpse. Hallek tensed,but Shylldra gripped him tighter.

““It's not your body, remember? It's not you. This is you. Right here is you.”

“Ape men hurt the indricotherium,” Hallek babbled. “The one I bit, and threw....they stole my kill!”

“Hallek please. Please, you have to listen. We can't stay here. We can't stay. There are going to be more of them. There probably hasn't been a carcass that size up for grabs in the forest for...for maybe ever.Anything that eats meat in the whole forest is going to come here. They're only not here already because they were so scared of it while it was alive.”

“I can fight anything,” Hallek insisted. There was a growl to his voice that sounded decidedly saurian.

“Maybe you can. But not all at once. Right? Everything's going to come here, Hallek. There are going to be hundreds of animals and they're all going to be fighting. We have to go. We have to go right now.”

Even as she spoke a whole menagerie of scavengers was emerging from the trees. A flock of petinosaurs dotted the carcass like acne, the tiny pterosaurs clinging with their wings to gnaw off thin strips of flesh. A fin backed dimetrodon trundled out into the clearing. Even the cynognathus were coming back, emboldened by the lack of fresh corpses since Shylldra started calming Hallek down.

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“We need to get you help. The Scarred Men. They know about this kind of thing. And Dyryl's mother's supposed to be the best, right? She lives close by. We can ask her how to...how to handle what happened to you. Alright?”

“Right. Dyryl's kinda sexy.” Under the circumstances Shylldra decided to forgive him for that one.

“We'll go there. They know about this...this body-infusing stuff. Maybe than can fix you. Help you clear your head.”

“Yeah,” Hallek said, his eyes focusing a little better. “Clear my head. Damn, that sounds like a really good idea. I think I'm not okay, Shylldra.”

“I know you're not. But we're going to make you better. Come on, we've got to get going.”

Hallek nodded and they turned away from the carcass as the horde of scavengers descended. They walked through the village past creatures Shylldra had never heard of before, dinosaurs and mammals and lizards she'd have been terrified of if she had any terror left in her. They didn't seem very interested in two little humans anyway, not with a whole giganotosaur corpse on offer. That lasted until they reached the treeline.

Chindesaurs really were just big eoraptors. This one was big for a chindesaur, twelve feet of scaled angry muscle. It either believed in eating the meal it had to hand or it could already tell the competition for giganotosaur steaks was going to be vicious because as soon as it saw the humans it charged. Saliva dripped from its teeth and Shylldra tried to be scared. To muster up the will to scream, or panic, or get her heart racing. But she was just so tired. She almost collapsed and let it eat them.

Hallek exploded from her arms and ripped its head off with his bare hands. One instant he was beside her, the next he was flying through the air. The sword was still clutched in his hands but he barely seemed to notice it as he landed on the dinosaur's back, grabbed its skull, and pulled. Just...pulled. Its head came off in a spray of blood and Hallek discarded it into the trees. He leaped off the body before it fell and stood in front of her.

Then he roared. It was never something meant to come from a human throat, a scream from the bowels of the deepest hells. His wounds flashed orange, and all around him a ghostly image of the giganotosaur appeared, roaring in chorus with Hallek. The scavengers stopped their feasting and bickering to look his way, and sounds in the bush hinted that other hunters who had been considering having human instead were rapidly changing their minds. Hallek coughed, blood and phlegm sputtering from his throat, and his knees gave way. The ghostly dinosaur around him faded as Shylldra caught him.

“Hallek,” Shylldra sighed, wiping the blood off his lips. “Now what?”

Maia, hey...sorry to bother you but I could really use your help again.

A rattling noise from the road made her perk up. That didn't sound like another hunter. That sounded like wood against wood. And sure enough, walking up the road towards them, was Hallek's minmi. Still pulling the cart they'd arrived in, which was pretty much intact.

“Thank you!” Shylldra said aloud. “Oh, thank you!”

I forget which god looks after the dome-armored dinosaurs, Shylldra thought. I'll have to find out before we get back so I can make an offering.

“Hallek? Hallek come on, can you get up?”

Hallek mumbled incoherently but he made enough effort trying to stand that Shylldra could roll him into the back of the cart. She threw some blankets over him and tucked them in. The microraptor crawled onto the cart while she was getting him settled.

“Are you worried about him too?” she asked.

“Tchwark,” the microraptor said. She scratched it on top of the head and picked it up in her arms, soft feathers and comforting warmth against her chest.

“Okay,” she said to herself. “Okay.”

She walked around to the front of the cart and patted the minmi's cheeks.

“You are a very good dinosaur. Thank you.”

“Thcwark!”

“And you are too,” Shylldra assured it. The minmi just gave a soulful “Myrrrnnn.” “Let's get out of here.”

With the microraptor beside her in the cart she drove them out of the ruined village.

Illeth

The forest was wrong.

Illeth and her troodons could feel it in the air. Animals were off their usual routes, staking out new territories, acting nervous and erratic. Dangerous. It made the hunt longer and riskier. And by the time she caught up with them they'd teamed up with two others. Forest tribe. More aware of the noises in the trees than people from the city, both of them skilled warriors. Illeth and her troodons might have won but neither troodons nor assassins believed in battles or fair fights. They waited until the target was weak.

And then, when they finally split up, her target walked into horror. A place where something huge and powerful and awful claimed the palm forest as its own. The air tasted of ancient fury and imminent death for anything that crossed its path. Assassins and troodon believed in that even less. So she waited at the edge of the horrible aura to wait for them to either die or come out. For a while she thought they had died, when the roars cut the sky above the forest. Then quiet, for hours, then more roaring, then quiet. She was almost ready to slip in and see what was going on when when one of her scouts came back and led her to a minmi pulled cart hurrying down the road.

Prey in front blood in back, the troodon said. And feathernsack.

So they picked up a microraptor somewhere and the man she was with is injured, Illeth thought. Good. We'll get them when they camp tonight.

The pack gathered together and followed the cart down the road as the sun sank slowly past the horizon. Troodon preferred to attack at night. As the light dwindled her target pulled over to the same riverbank where she'd camped with the Birdfang two nights before.

Bad move. That's a very safe camping site for a large group. For a woman and an injured man alone it's barely defensible.

Hunt now? The pack demanded.

Yes, Illeth said, sliding her daggers out of their sheaths. We hunt.

The pack bolted forward like they'd each been shot from a bow. Their eerily silent silhouettes slithered out of the trees while Shylldra was tending to the minmi.

Want eat her troodons told her.

You can eat the minmi when the target is dead, Illeth told them. Give me just a moment.

She swung her dagger at Shylldra's back.

Illeth never knew what warned the target she was coming, but the priestess rolled away from the dagger at the last second. Illeth didn't curse as her blade buried itself in wood. She never spoke around a target if she could help it. She never spoke at all if she could help it.

“Who are you?” the target demanded. “What do you want?”

Illeth struck again, but somehow the target was able to block it with a staff she pulled hastily from the carriage. A staff of Maia. Sanctified to the mother goddess, a focus for Maia's powers of protection. A problem.

“Please. I can give you money. But someone's hurt, so if we don't need to fight...”

What did Illeth care about money? All this useless prattling on. She preferred her troodons so much to people. The target was chanting some kind of prayer or spell. It had to be working since the staff kept blocking Illeth's dagger strikes. It would just suddenly be there, no matter how out of position the target was. The target's stance and breathing were totally inept, but Maia was making up for that.

Come hunt she commanded the pack, and in a few moments the target was surrounded by hissing, snapping troodons. Her protection still held but Illeth's blades came closer with every swing. It wouldn't be long before--

Danger! Her troodons warned, and for a moment she almost felt afraid the way she had at the edge of that awful region of the forest...

“Hallek!” the target said, her voice a mixture of worry and relief. In the back of the cart the man who had been with her prey stood, wounds glowing orange, gripping a sword and glaring at Illeth with pure animal hatred.