Dragon’s Blood

If I’d ever taken the chance to contemplate how my life would end, I would have never pictured this.

The ogre raised its serrated stone dagger with both hands above my chest and finished its garbling chanting with one final triumphant proclamation, so loudly that I was caught in the spray of spittle. If they hadn’t tied me on my back to the crude altar (not table), I might have rolled over to puke from revulsion. But my last lingering instincts of self-preservation and the frozen apathy of fear combined to keep the burning bile from rising further than my throat.

Besides, my mind was a little more occupied by the terrifying silence that ensued as the ogre paused ominously and its gathered comrades waited with bated breath and literally burning eyes for the dagger to plunge into my heart.

My very last thought was of bewildered loss. Who is going to tuck Abby in tonight?

And then.…

A roar.

A deafening, ears-ringing, bone-chilling, muscle-jellifying roar that I could never, in my deepest, darkest nightmares have ever imagined. It was like a Tyrannosaurus rex had stolen a megaphone and somehow held it up to its mouth with its tiny arm and gave the loudest, most bestial bellow of its life.

For one tenth of a second, the ogres froze. Their blue flame-eyes barely had time to widen and turn purple at the edges before IT was upon us.

I saw only a blur of a maw so big it filled my entire field of vision and teeth longer than baseball bats—curved, ivory, deadly canine baseball bats—before the knife-wielding ogre priest was gone with a screech as grating as steel nails scraping a granite boulder. From the way the screech rapidly faded, I assumed it had been tossed and was flying away from us at what would have been a lethal height and velocity for any human.

I couldn’t ponder the ogre priest’s fate beyond that. I was much more occupied with my own. Because not a second later, I was staring at the scaly gold underside of the Thing.

Which was at least a story above me, and so massive I could see nothing else. All I got was the impression of a horizontal mass with four giant oak-sized legs from the curvature of its giant musculature, which looked taut and powerfully lean in proportion to its size. As it turned, I glimpsed a long, supple tail as thick as a small car and as devastating as a battering ram, and once I saw outspread, shimmering webbed wings as large as galleon sails.

Screeches began filling the air as the Thing agilely twisted its girth above me. If I’d been capable of more thought than abject terror, I might have noted the oddity of how it never moved from its position over me, no matter how it had to turn, shift, or twist to counter whatever insane resistance the ogres were putting up for losing their prize to the much bigger and deadlier predator.

If I had noticed, I would have assumed that the Thing was determined to keep me for itself. Which would have led me to question why a single human female would have been appealing enough to steal and then guard so determinedly. To a Thing so big, every step caused a tremor, I would have been just a morsel.

But my brain wasn’t capable of such detached philosophizing now. The only thought it had the capacity to support was thinking of how to get away.

I yanked at my bonds, expecting to feel their implacable resistance once again. But there was none. My arms and legs thrashed freely across the rough stone. I had been so frozen with terror that I hadn’t even realized that at some point between the roar and now, the ropes had simply…fallen off me, crude but tight knots undone.

That oddity was enough to register in my brain, but I didn’t take the time to guess why. I pushed myself up so quickly my head spun.

Just at that moment, I realized the screeching had stopped, and as I looked around, I saw the last of the ogres were fleeing into the woods. The Thing above me growled, a rumbling sound I felt as much as heard, being just beneath the enormous chest where it originated. Then it roared after them in a threat universally understood at the primordial level what it would do to them if they dared come back.