Blood Shaper

Book 3: Chapter 14

"What's a-" Lauren started to shout her question over to Mayor Kay.

"Scatter!" Chief Halloway screamed. She saw him start to run off to the side.

Glancing up, she noticed one of the creatures starting to turn its body and fold in its wings. Its shape seemed to go from a giant sheet to a long spear as it turned to dive, and then it vanished. Lauren had a brief second to start to worry when an explosion went off to her left. Chunks of rock flew in every direction. Lauren turned her head slowly and saw the creature standing in a crater, its head pointed toward the ground. It pulled back its long neck and pulled its beak out of the crushed body of one of the expedition members it had just simultaneously slammed into the ground and pierced with its beak.

The creature towered over them, its neck longer than any of them were tall, and Lauren realized it must have been incredibly high up before it dove. That increased the terror she was feeling as it turned its head and surveyed the shocked and scared people standing frozen around it. To have been that high up and have disappeared from sight when it dove like that, it was fast enough to make dodging it impossible. Its skin was a mixture of scales and small feathers in dark green colors that waved and danced about its body. The long flaps of skin that made its wings were featherless, but the rest of its body had some coverage, all the way up to its head, stopping near the sail coming out the back of its skull and its piercing, spear-like beak that was almost as large as its gargantuan neck.

It opened its beak and let out a cry that sounded like a parrot mixed with a demented goose, deeper than the roars of the plains lions that hunted near her hometown and loud enough to be heard over the waterfall and through their hurriedly prepared earplugs.

"Squoooooooooooooooonk!"

The two monsters still circling above echoed its cries, and they started to tuck their wings in as well.

"Run!" Halloway screamed again, "We can't beat them! They're tier seven!"

His screams broke through the shock and fear that held most of the expedition still, and they broke and ran. Lauren scrambled to get away, her feet slipping against the stone ground as she desperately worked her legs.

Two more blurred shapes slammed onto fleeing scouts and broke craters into the rock. Both of the people that had unluckily been chosen by the creatures as prey died instantly. One scout screamed in fear and rage, pulling out a crossbow and firing a bolt at the closest of the beasts. The one he shot at was smaller than the other two, and it squonked angrily as a bolt bounced off its hide. It lifted one clawed forelimb and slashed through the air in the direction of the scout that had dared try and hurt it. A blade of wind formed in front of it and, before the man could react, flew through the space between them to bisect him.

Lauren whimpered in fear as the two halves of the man dropped to the ground.

The first monster that had landed squinted its eyes at the fleeing group. Its wings, wide enough to wrap around a building, flared out and twisting winds formed underneath it as it started to flap.

Tendrils of blood flew towards it and started to wrap around its limbs. It squonked and startled to struggle, ripping through multiple red ropes as it battled against the binds, trying to hold it down.

"You can't beat it!" Halloway repeated.

Mayor Kay ignored his cries, gritting his teeth as he struggled to keep the monster restrained. "If it gets back in the air, we're done for! It'll be able to pick us off as easily as it likes!"

The giant bird-lizard-thing traced its struggle to the one puny being that dared to face it, and it let loose a cry of rage. A spiral of wind, like an upside-down tornado, formed around it and blew every bit of blood away from it. Easily freed from the bloody ropes, it opened its beak in Mayor Kay's direction. A spinning ball of wind formed and rocketed forward, slamming into Kay's torso and sending him flying back through the air.

The other two creatures looked up from their nauseating business of tearing strips of flesh from the dead bodies of the deceased scouts when they heard the angry screech of their kin. Tossing back the food they had down their long beaks, they each started to rise up into the air, using their wind magic to push themselves up higher and faster.

Lauren was terrified. She'd never seen anything as fast or as powerful as these beasts. But she'd been terrified before, and she hadn't let fear stop her from what she needed to do then either. She ran to the prone form of Kay and threw him over her shoulder in a fireman's carry. She'd be slower to get away and potentially a bigger target when the monsters dived again, but she couldn't leave him to die. What would there be left of Avalon without their Mayor? She didn't know, and she wasn't prepared to find out.

"Here!" Someone screamed. Lauren barely heard it over all the sounds of battle and the waterfall rushing from behind them.

She glanced up from where she'd been watching her feet as she struggled to carry the heavier man on her shoulder. One of the scouts had found some kind of structure sticking partially out of the ground a few hundred feet away. They probably would have seen it earlier, but they'd all been distracted by the sight of the glorious waterfall.

The scout waved and shouted, trying to gather everyone up. "There's an opening! We can hide in here!"

Lauren dragged her load over towards the cracked and crumbling stone brickwork as fast as she could. A weight slammed into her side.

"Keep going!" Halloway shouted as he took half of Kay's weight. "We can make it!"

People started funneling into the ovular opening in the wall, pushing and jostling as they tried to force themselves into the meager shelter of a roof. "There are stairs!" Someone shouted.

"Go down then!" Halloway bellowed, "The farther away we are, the better off we'll be!"

The two of them ended up pushing Kay through the hole into the waiting arms of another person. As the Mayor was dragged out of the way, they struggled to pull themselves through the small opening. Turning to look behind her as she scrambled inside, she saw one last expedition member behind them.

Eye's wide, Halloway reached out and grabbed the elven woman by her shirt and yanked her through the gap. She screamed in pain as the explosive sound of one of the creatures landing shook the structure. The force of the landing sent them tumbling down the stairs in a pile.

After she landed at the bottom, she looked up the incline towards the opening to see the creature throw back its head and swallow the leg ripped from the woman's body in a single bite. It stuck its head through the hole, and its beak and neck combined were almost long enough to reach them at the bottom of the stairs. Its crest bumped up against the edges of the opening, stopping it from reaching them. Its squonk of annoyance at its prey escaping echoed around them in the small passage, literally stunning Lauren for a moment.

Hands grabbed at their clothing and dragged them back away from the monster. They ended up in a small room, the surviving members of the expedition gathered around in the cramped space.

"Did Joseph make it?" Halloway called out as he tried to extricate himself from the tangle of people.

"I'm here!"

"Tyuah lost a leg; get your ass over here!"

The scrawny healer slammed his knees into the bricks next to the injured woman as he started casting spells, and one of the scouts who had been acting as his assistants started trying to stop the bleeding.

"Let me." Mayor Kay limped over, clutching at his ribs as he sat next to the working healer. With a wave of his hand, he started to control the blood flowing from the stump to stop the bleeding.

"Sir," Joseph panted, "I'm not skilled enough to-"

"Keep her alive," Kay ordered in a harsh voice, "We'll pay for her to have it regrown, or we'll get an enchanted prosthetic or something once we get home. But she needs to get home first."

"Yes, sir."

Exhausted, Lauren let her back slide against the wall as she slowly lowered herself to a sitting position.

Halloway peeked out of the door, looking up the stairs at the monster struggling to push itself through the much smaller opening to get at its trapped prey. "I don't think they can get down here. The stone's holding."

Exhausted, still scared, and completely drained from the adrenalin rush that had raced through her body, Lauren instantly fell unconscious.

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"You have a cracked rib, sir." Joseph, the healer, told him, hands glowing with magic as he let them slowly drift over Kay's torso.

"Only one?" Kay tried not to shift in place as he laid down on the stone floor of the building they'd taken shelter in. Every movement sent twinges of pain through him, so he did his best to hold still.

"You had three, actually, but your own skills seemed to have taken care of them. This last one is starting to heal itself as well. You'll probably be at full strength in about an hour." He pulled his hands back and let the glow fade. "Try not to get hurt anymore, though. You need to let your body rest naturally for a while, or all the magical healing is going to start catching up to you. Trust me, you don't want healing backlash."

Kay laughed, then groaned in pain. "I'll do my best. I have no idea what's going to happen at this point, though."

Joseph nodded and stood up, moving to check on the next worst injured person.

Halloway stepped over and crouched down next to Kay as the healer moved out of the way. "It doesn't look like they can get in. They tried to force their way through, and they sent some magical attacks down the stairs at us, but we pulled well back so they couldn't hit us. It does sound like they're holding position outside the opening, though, so we won't be able to get back out that way."

"Is there another way out?"

"There was another passage farther on; I sent a couple of people to check it out."

"Good. We can't go out the way we came in, period, even if it seems like they've left. Pterosaurs like that can stay in the air for really long periods of time. They could just fly up and wait for us to come out. We wouldn't be able to see them waiting till it was too late."

Halloway shifted a little bit, "You've run into Ancients like that?"

"Is that what you call them? No, I've never seen one in person before. Back on Earth, they'd all died out millions of years before. We called them Dinosaurs. We dug up fossils of them and managed to piece together best guesses of what they were like based on their remains." Kay squeezed his eyes shut as he let out a deep, painful breath. "I was a dinosaur kid once upon a time. Although, technically, the flying ones weren't dinosaurs, but that's not important."

Halloway looked at him with a little bit of concern. "Okay… Well, we call them Ancients. Giant lizards, all different kinds, that some of the older peoples say have been around for all of time. There aren't huge numbers of them, and they mostly live up in some wild places in Kementa. Occasionally the flying ones show up in different places, or a Dungeon breaks open, and a small population of them pops out, so you can occasionally find them in other places. There's some fairly peaceful plant-eating ones somewhere in the Bannerthrust Empire, apparently."

"There are dinosaurs on Torotia," Kay muttered to himself in shock, "And I just got my ribs broken by a quetzalcoatlus with wind magic."

"What?"

"That's what someone named that kind of creature back home. Or at least something like it."

"We just call them Ancient Fliers."

"Whatever. Is there anything I can do right now to be useful?"

"No, we're waiting for the people I sent out to report back."

"Then grab me a bedroll to use as a pillow, please. I'm going to join Lauren and take a nap."

What felt like a second later, someone gently shook Kay's shoulder.

"I'm up!"

"You said those things could stay in the air for a long time?" Halloway asked immediately.

"Estimates said they could probably stay up for a week or more; why?"

He scowled, "With wind magic, it's probably even longer. The scouts I sent found another path that might lead us away from here."

"What's the problem with it? You wouldn't be asking about the creatures if we thought it was a great idea."

"They're pretty sure it's a Dungeon."

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