Chapter Text
Fear is a strange, pervasive thing.
You never know how it will affect the body until you are face to face with death, on the verge of collapse or at the end of your sanity. Fight or flight. Berserker or coward. Fear brings out the basest of your instincts, exposes who you are beneath the flesh and strips away all pretenses.
As the girl lay face down in the mud she wasn’t sure which she was yet. But she was afraid. The rough hempen ropes binding her wrists to her ankles were tearing at her skin, the blood soaking into the back of her shirt as she struggled to alleviate the strain on her back at the uncomfortable angle. The moon was rising and it afforded her a limited view of the campsite she was being kept at. Sweat stung her eyes as she peered around at the men sitting around the small cook fire a short distance away. They largely ignored her, focused instead on pulling strips of meat from the animal spitted over the flames. Her stomach cramped and rebelled; it had been at least a day since she last ate, but seeing their meal wasn’t making her hungry. Her tears and screams had long dried up since that same morning when this squad of armed men had broken down the door of her crude wooden hut and taken her captive. Her sole companion, a sweet baby dilophosaurus only 3 months out of the egg, had been shot twice in the head, her body slung over the back of a heavily muzzled carnotaurus.
The girl choked on bile that rose involuntarily as she watched them cleaning the carcass of her only friend. One of the men, easily recognizable with a huge scar marring the right side of his face and sporting a grisly, unkempt beard, glanced at her in irritation before rising. His left eye was surrounded by a purple bruise and his nose sported a nasty gash encrusted with dried blood- a result of her boot connecting with his face hours ago as she had struggled desperately in another soldier’s grasp. He grabbed a strip of meat from the cooked dilophosaur and stomped up to her, crouching down and holding the greasy meat against her tightly clenched lips.
“Aren’t you hungry, brat? Don’t try to deny it, not when I was nice enough to bring you some of our hard-earned meal.”
She turned her head downward into the muck in an effort to get away from the horrendous offering. He grumbled and stood up to deliver a kick to the side of her head.
“Dumb little bitch. That’s the least meal you’ll be offered until we get to base. We’ll see how stubborn you are then.”
Her ears rang, her empty stomach churned, and her heart ached. The girl’s vision spun and doubled as she tried and failed to remain awake.
The next morning she regained consciousness as the same man heaved her up by her arms still bound behind her back. She couldn’t restrain the shout that erupted as her shoulders were pulled nearly out of their sockets. The man cuffed her again over the head and threw her high over the back of an armored triceratops. She blinked dizzily as she surveyed the camp, now broken down and packed onto their animals. The fires were out and the soldiers mounted and ready to go. The girl’s throat felt like it was on fire and her lips were cracked and bleeding. She lifted her head up enough to see where they were, though it would likely do her little good. She had been lost when they had found her house on the beach just as she was lost now in the depths of the jungle. The dino she was on began slowly moving along at a lurch with the caravan and she hung her head again. Heavy footsteps approached her and she cracked an eye to see a large red-haired man staring down at her. He surveyed her condition and then turned to her primary captor with irritation.
“I don’t give a fuck how difficult she’s been. We’ve barely anything to show from the last raid and no captives to speak of besides this scrawny kid. You bloody her again before we get her to the city and I’ll let you explain it to the boss.”
The scarred man gave a menacing grunt and mounted his carno. The red-haired one uncorked his waterskin and held it to her mouth with an annoyed and apathetic expression on his face. She pulled greedily at the spout and drank two large mouthfuls before he yanked the skin back and hung it at his belt. He then moved on without speaking and she fell back against the saddle, aching and tired.
That day they didn’t stop in the afternoon as they had previously. She heard talk in the group about making it home before nightfall and they prodded their mounts and pack animals even faster as the sun began to drop from its zenith. Twice during the day she had been set down from the trike to relieve herself and drink some water, but she still refused to eat any of the smoked meat they offered her. She wouldn’t risk it.
They were ascending a narrow cliff ledge near dusk when the dying light caught something shiny up on the mountain and flashed in her eyes; there she saw the behemoth metal gate emerging before them. Smoke and orange light rose from behind it and the front of the caravan began to file through, each step bringing her closer to being swallowed up. Her dread, her fear, deepened to a numb terror when that gate closed behind her. Above her head banners flapped in the hazy air, the sigil adorning them a black mass she couldn't decipher on a red field.
They unloaded her like the rest of their cargo and she was placed in an empty stockade and shackled to a splintery post surrounded by moldy thatch, her arm restraints cut and re-bound in front of her this time. Signs of other human life in the stall were evident but the naked footprints were old and the smell of unwashed bodies faint. She was alone. A few hours after being deposited there the red-haired man approached and held out to her some cooked roots and bread on a slab. After a cautious pause she grabbed the food as quickly as her restraints would allow and leaned down to eat ravenously. When the slab was empty he once again offered her water and left without saying a word when she was sated. The food went a long way towards waking her up and steeling her nerve. She stood up shakily and took care to observe her surroundings. She was under an old wooden roof that sheltered the earth floor of the stocks. The buildings nearest to her on either side were also made of wood, but some farther away were stone and masonry. A tall metal wall surrounded the city as far as she could see and large groups of men walking in formation periodically patrolled the streets in the darkness. A single torch served as her light source and it allowed her to see abruptly that someone was staring at her from the shadows of the overhang. He walked towards her, the hateful man with the beard and scar, his glowering stare making her quaver again. The bruise on his face was made more dramatic by the dim torchlight and she tried to pull grim satisfaction from it to try and stifle the ever-present fear. He stopped a step away from her and spoke in a low voice;
“If I’d had my way you would have been roasting on that fire with your beast, you worthless little shit.”
He grabbed at her closely shorn hair and wrenched her head back, the top of her scalp grinding against the wood post. His rank breath caused her eyes to water and she wanted to vomit. She wanted to kick him again. She hated this man more than she had ever hated anyone.
“At least I’ll have some fun watching you get worked to death. Maybe once you’re used up on the wall they’ll let me use you for target practice, then as feed for my animals.”
He let her go with a rough shove that knocked her already bruised skull and made her vision swim nauseatingly. This time she did wretch, pitching forward to spit a small stream of bile at his feet. The man exclaimed in anger and made a move as if to strike her with his gauntleted fist when a sound from the road made him pause and look over his shoulder with irritation- he wasn’t keen on being reprimanded a second time. Without another glance in her direction he slouched off into the street and disappeared in the gloom.
The girl didn’t sleep. She sat with her back to the post and observed the activity around her and thought furiously. And the more she thought, the more her fear morphed into anger and purpose. This city didn’t seem to sleep. She could see throngs of people making their way to and fro along the unpaved streets. A few women were glimpsed but mostly more men in dull and dented armor. Occasionally the ground shook as an angry carno or rex was led down the boulevard, covered in metal plates and looking vicious. A loud hammering had begun in the stone building across the street from her stocks; what must be the smithy was fired up and a man wrapped in oiled leather was folding metal into weapons.
She wasted some time watching him work and was distracted enough that when the accident happened it took her by surprise. A young carno, perhaps freshly tamed by the way he was throwing his massive, muzzled head around trying to smash the men holding his ropes, had been led too close to the smith. The ringing noise and the hot sparks had caused the beast to panic. He kicked his legs out to knock down his captors and charged headfirst into the shop. The poor blacksmith barely had any warning when two tons of horned- tipped rage crashed into his forge and tore his anvils up from the foundations. Wood and metal and bits of stone flew in every direction as chaos consumed the street. Nobody even thought to glance across the street. If they had they would have seen the now empty handcuffs, opened crudely by a shard of sharp metal jammed into the locking mechanism and splattered with drops of fresh blood.
The girl couldn’t believe her luck when a metal filing had skid all the way across the street to her stall. She immediately reached with her feet to grab it and made a bloody mess of her fingers wrestling it into position so she could free herself. She constantly glanced up at the madness in front of her, certain someone would look up and see, but she was soon loosed from the cuffs and rushing to the rear of the stockade. The wall at the back was high but it didn’t reach all the way to the roof, allowing her to grab a hold of the wood planks and squeeze through the gap at the top. She was on her feet and sprinting down the pitch black alleyway as fast as her cramped and tired legs could carry her. She spent nearly an hour navigating the city, dashing from one darkened archway to another and making every effort to avoid detection. Her heart hammered and sweat made her roughspun clothing cling to her skin and itch. The houses and shops began to fall back and she suddenly had some open ground to cover that appeared to be an empty training field. On the far side she could hear the roars and screeches of animals as they were corralled and caged.. The field wasn’t lit but she slowed and crawled the length of it just in case a sharp-eyed watchman happened to spy her.
When she had navigated over to the pens she let herself stop and breathe for a moment. On the other side of a short metal fence was a sea of carnivores and pack animals in varying methods of restraint. Overhead the air thundered as several massive wyverns were flown in by their riders, and she was momentarily paralyzed by terror again. She had only ever seen dragons from a distance but stories from her childhood of people being cooked alive or melted in acid had given her a healthy fear of the creatures. It seemed like it would be only too easy for one to pluck her from between the pens and swallow her whole as simply as they would a skinned rabbit. She wasted even more time sitting in the filth beside a cage housing a sleeping tyrannosaurus, waiting for the wingbeats to cease as the beasts were brought down and tethered for the night. Slowly she forced herself to move again, sliding as close as she dared to the pens and keeping her head low. It was like a maze here; she stumbled across the same raptor twice before she finally risked climbing a railing high enough to see where she might be able to squeeze through a gate. It didn’t look promising, the wall seemed intact all the way around and the huge gates were heavily guarded. These warlike clans were clearly practiced at keeping people in as well as out. She moved to climb back down, but not soon enough. Someone in a nearby pen had spotted her on the railing and, not recognizing her and seeing her filthy clothing, shouted an alarm to the nearest watchmen.
Once again the girl was running so hard that her heart was threatening to pound out of her ribcage. She had enough of a headstart to keep her pursuers confused by weaving around the large pens. She even dared to cut through a few of the larger ones, the bars spaced to keep in the huge carnivores they contained but still wide enough for her to slip through before their occupants knew that potential food had passed so close.
She heard the sounds and shouts of the hunting party fall behind and gradually fade away as she wove deeper into the morass of animals and metal. She took careful notice of the creatures in these particular cages and didn’t dare cut through any of them; these housed the untamed dinosaurs and monsters that were there to be trained. Feral and furious eyes watched her from all angles as she carefully avoided claws and teeth. All at once there was a clamor right next to her, someone had seen her run this way! She could see the glint of armor in the moonlight just on the other side of her row of pens. She was out of time and out of luck. In desperation she squeezed into the nearest cage, observing even in haste that its immense occupant was unmoving and unresponsive. Perhaps even dead. She dove behind scaly mass and abruptly clamped a hand over her mouth to stop the scream when a single eye the size of her head opened and stared at her from inches away. The hulking animal remained still but she could see its pupils constricting in fury. She stayed frozen, the sounds of the soldiers fading again as they hurried onwards through the night. The eye before her blazed orange and yellow like a molten pool. It wasn’t until it lifted its head up slightly and the wings rustled that she knew what was in this cage.
It was a wyvern.