Villagers
You tilt your head, watching the long neck in your reflection tip. Your eyes narrowed, showing red around their pupils. “How is this-” Your thoughts were cut off with a sudden rush of noise from the woods. A rattling of overlapping screaming bursts out from the brush.
“Where is she?”
“We have to kill her!”
“No more burning our land!”
“We starved before of It!”
“Kill! Kill!”
“Never again will terror reign!”
“Where is the fucking beast!?”
“Over here! Look!”
The clatter of rapidly approaching feet exploded out from the treeline. The dull snap of dead twigs breaking echoed out along with their shouting until the first villager appeared, visibly, at the forest’s edge. He hefted up a flaming torch above his head with a spear in the other, the sharpened tip glinting once. “Here she is!”
Then, around the first man filled in the followers. More torches flicker bright blotches of red against the fading pale gray of the sky, especially when cast down into the shadows of the standing trunks. Spears glint among pitchforks and assorted ‘weapons.’
“Shoot her down!”
“No more fires!”
“She burned down our homes!”
“Kill her!”
“Kill the baby!”
“Kill her child like she did ours!”
“Her? Her? Who is she?” you thought to yourself, frantically shifting away from this crowd until your foot bumped into something on the ground. Gaze dropping, your eyes land onto the smooth, faintly speckled surface of a massive egg. Its shell is a creamy shade of tan, speckled through with green and blue overtop. The villagers are continuing to scream, shouting constantly at your while your head spins with their noise.
Their footsteps rushed closer. The sharp spike of the spears tapped into your side, jabbing and bouncing back from the layered scales. Then, a sudden blast of white rushed through the air before ice smashed into your side. Splinters of frozen debris sprayed backwards from your flesh as the energy of the blast rippled painfully through your frame.
“W-what the-?”
Another, sudden explosion of paint burst through your opposite side before you could react to the first. A sharp, spreading sting shot through the entire length of your torso as though you shoved your tail into an electrical socket. You thrashed your entire frame, throwing yourself away from the direct blows while your head ducked down to see that one of the townspeople, hidden towards the back, had their hands raised up as sparks of blue and yellow danced at the fingertips like a miniature version of the Northern Lights brewing before BAM! Another balled blast of energy smashed into your side, but this time you watched it fly over the expanse of field from where it launched off that person’s palm.
“Magic!? This land must have magic?” you thought to yourself, quickly trying to figure out how to escape from this approaching crowd. Your side is pulsating where the bast have hit you. The shouting filled your entire brain with the echoing shouts: “Kill her! Smash the egg! No more fire! Kill the dragon! Kill! Kill! Kill!”
Distantly, someone in the back of the crowd coughed and spat out a hollering call, “If only we had a dragon born!”
To which the crowd responded, “Shut up, Carl!” with such a deep strain of anger their voices ebbed through the mass as if they were one.
“How am I supposed to get away?” you think frantically, looking down to where the egg is nestled atop a thin layer of the sparse, pokey grass within a shaped nest of rocks to hold it upright and safe. Your eyes tracked down its curve, imagining something curled within its walls.
“Without the egg... I could just run...” You glanced back to where the far edge of the field meld into more woods. “In there, the wouldn’t be able to run after me well. It’d at least slow them down...”
Another blast, ice crackled out from your skin. A bite of the cold attack chilled down through your body.
“But, can you leave a living thing? Your child to die?”
Something inside of you in clenching, hiding, burbling with distress at the mere thought of leaving the egg alone and helpless. The villagers are still shouting, crawling up the sides of the stony nest. Their spears are thrusting through the cracks, trying to strike at the shell.
“What would the do to it?”
Kill her! Smash the egg! Avenge our children! Kill hers!
Their calls echo through your mind. Vicious images of the egg smashed, a frail form spilling into the grass beneath the tips of the spears. The grass, crunched and flattened and smeared with blood and shards of broken egg...
Could you leave the egg to escape more easily?
Written by Picklesauce69 on 12 December 2015