Waxear village was under siege by Thor himself, and Aldir worried that the answer he had prepared would not be nearly enough. If it was not, his village would be obliterated beyond repair, the worst-case scenario.
Lightning scattered out through the sky like cracks in ice, flowing in seemingly endless waves. A heavy rainstorm pounded his village, hail fell with deadly force, and the sky was bright, a ceaseless stream of white light casting an eerie glow.
Aldir ran through the village, the shield above his head taking the abuse from the hail, his eyes on the dark green storm clouds and flashing light.
He had been warned by his predecessor, prepared, and hardened by the stories. A true strike of the gods, as they called it, had not happened since he was a young child, but everyone knew it was coming, and he had prepared.
But he had not prepared for what was happening, because it was not going as it was supposed to.
Where, he wondered as he ran, were the many strikes of lightning claiming lives and destroying huts and scorching the earth itself, setting trees aflame and blasting rock off the mountainside? The lightning was not supposed to confine itself to the heavens, whether it was Thor in his wrath or Skrill seeking to reclaim breeding grounds, as Maour had said.
Where were the unearthly floating balls of electricity which moved randomly and passed through walls at will before exploding? Where was the inexplicable tingle in the air, the small shocks, all of the other little things that marked such an event?
He almost thought that this was not Skrill at all, it was so different compared to what he had expected.
Almost.
But there was no thunder. A thousand bolts flashing through and below the clouds, but no rumble over the cacophony of rain and hail. The lack was louder than thunder would be, in its own way. That same lack had heralded the wrath of Thor, and Maour had identified it as a definitive sign of Skrill, for they did not create thunder with their lightning.
Aldir swerved past an abandoned cart, leaped a deep puddle, and ran to a relatively new passage carved into the base of one of the two mountains next to his village. The door was wood and iron interlaced, stronger than the door of his own hut.
He fumbled in his pocket for the key he always carried, since the day his men had completed the construction and what lay beyond. It was excessively precautious, to have such security, but that had been part of the deal, and he was an honorable man.
The rain and hail made it hard to even hold the key once he found it, but he slotted it into the door with an accuracy borne of urgency, his hands steady. They were always steady; he was the best shot in the village.
The door opened with a thud, slammed outward by a timely gust of wind, and he fought to pull it closed after himself. There was nobody outside to leave it open to; everyone had fled to underground shelters hewn into the rock of the island itself.
There was no torch, the passage beyond the door was pitch black, but Aldir put a hand on the wall and moved forward with confidence, climbing the painstakingly carved stairs as fast as he could. His legs burned, and the darkness was stifling, and it seemed to go on forever. The lack of thunder became even more pronounced as he moved upward and deeper into the mountainside, and the sound of the rain and hail died away, leaving a quiet void.
The climb up the mountainside was so long that he had to stop and rest twice despite being in good shape. Carving the passage out of the rock had taken months, even with their skill in removing stone.
All for a good cause. A tower would be vulnerable and prone to failing, but a passage in stone was as unyielding as the island itself. No Skrill would smite his perch down, not with any number of lightning bolts. Such would kill him, destroy his goal, but it would not remove the passage, the way up the mountain from the inside.
Aldir emerged into the fell light of the Skrill's storm, breathed in clean, open air, held his shield up once more as the elements assaulted him, and quickly began to remove the weights holding a tarp in place over a certain object, one Maour had made him pay dearly for, not in valuables, but in precautions and oaths.
Oaths Aldir fully intended to keep, whether or not this weapon actually worked as promised. He had no desire to betray the Isle of Night, both out of personal honor and seeing first hand the devastation they could visit upon him if he were foolish enough to invite it. His tribe had enough problems with powerful dragons as it was.
The device was a strange one, metal and wood combined in complex structures that radiated out from a central shaft, ropes and thinner lines hanging limp, chains connecting pieces in a few places. It was not a sleek, minimalistic device, and he had been told that was part of the many precautions put into place.
First came unhooking certain chains; Aldir found himself referring to etchings on the stone below his feet, though the strobing light and driving weather forced him to squint and double check himself. Without the shorthand runes left to remind himself of the exact order, he would have forgotten.
Chains unhooked and rehooked in other places, he began folding pieces of wood out of the way, moving them on hidden hinges. Finally, he withdrew a chunk of iron from the hollow opening in the now somewhat less obscured center of the device, throwing it aside.
All done just to make it operational in any capacity; anyone unaware of the many steps required to set the device up would be baffled by it, and far more likely to hurt themselves than anyone else. Maour had also mentioned that he had built it with the intent of shattering the ground below upon use, unless that ground was solid rock, so as to prevent it being usable on any sort of ship.
Aldir understood the lengths Maour had gone to, and the reason, but he still thought it was more than a little excessive. Still, beggars could not be choosers, and he knew it worked.
Lightning continued to flash in the sky, and Aldir forced himself to look as close to directly at it as he could manage. His hands were on the clandestine controls, and he could feel the tension under his fingers.
It was already loaded, he could aim it in an instant now that it had been secured correctly and unshackled, and all that was left was to find a target.
The flashing lights provided a backdrop, illuminating the otherwise dark clouds, and as Aldir looked, his eyes narrow and his head aching with the beginnings of a headache, he could see that some of the lightning was flashing in a different pattern. Most followed a single beat, like the hammering heartbeat that came with the rush of battle, but some of it lanced out against that beat, always flowing from one spot.
He followed the erratic strikes back to their source, moving the device with him, and saw the Skrill, a figure so wreathed in lightning that one had to be looking directly at it to even notice it against the rest of the white-hot power filling the air.
"Thor, forgive me," he muttered. It was close enough to fire on, he wouldn't get another shot. He clenched his hands, triggering-
The crack that resounded in front of his face sounded like a small version of the thunder absent from this storm, and he staggered back. A projectile, outlined against the lightning, shot forward and up. It split into a net that whirled through the air with far more speed and accuracy than any net launcher he had ever witnessed, even from the immense range he was firing at. It lacked the heavy weights at the corners that such nets usually had, and it looked different in a way he knew was more of Maour's work, and it struck the Skrill straight on, wrapping around the crackling body and throwing it out of the sky.
Some of the lightning stopped, and in its place a wave of pure power blasted out of the falling Skrill, doing nothing at all.
But the air was still crowded with flashes of white-hot light, even as the Skrill he had shot down splashed into the shallows by the docks. It went dark, either dead, unconscious, or for some reason not using its power, but the unholy storm continued.
Aldir found himself rushing for the barrel set into the stone wall of the small outcropping, frantically tearing off the lid and removing a bundle of heavy netting and tiny weights interwoven throughout it. He loaded the net-ball into the device, trembling all the while, and turned back to the sky, searching frantically for the next one. There had to be more than one Skrill.
But this one wasn't so easy to spot. He couldn't see any telltale bodies with lightning wreathing them, not like before, the lightning in the sky was dying down and making it harder to see anything-
A shadow flitted across the village, flying low, and Aldir fired the moment he could whip the device around to point that direction. His aim was off, but the dragon flew right into the net, and was struck down, slamming to a halt in the middle of the village.
The sky went mercifully dark, and he lost sight of the second Skrill. There was no more lightning, just steady rain and hail pelting his face and shaking hands.
He allowed himself a few moments to relax, absently gathering up the tarp and pulling it back over the device. He'd have to reset the device with all of its precautions, and that promised to be a long, laborious struggle, unlike removing them had been.
But there was a downed Skrill in the middle of his village, and his people were waiting for word that either the storm has cleared or the Skrill has been shot down. One of those had happened, and he needed to assemble a group of soldiers to kill the Skrill before they escaped.
A relatively short time later, Aldir was heading a group of heavily armed and armored Vikings, leading them through the streets of the village, toward the second Skrill, which was the more immediate danger. He had avoided going anywhere near it in seeking out the shelters and alerting his most trusted warriors.
Which would explain why he was only now going to see a Skrill up close, despite shooting two out of the sky. He stopped at the edge of a cooper's hut, just out of sight of the main plaza, where the Skrill had hit the ground, and readied a borrowed mace. They would strike hard and fast the moment it showed any signs of life; it was brutal, but so was the destruction of their village that such creatures usually dealt out.
Aldir stepped out into the open, raised his mace, and faltered.
It was not a Skrill that was enmeshed in the heavy ropes and myriad of small weights, hopelessly tangled and motionless in the plaza. He didn't know what Skrill looked like, but he knew they were larger than this…
More importantly, he did know what Night Furies looked like, and the dragon he had just shot down was clearly a Night Fury, not a Skrill.
With that realization came confusion, and a moment of doubt about everything. Were Skrill really the cause of the storms? Had he actually shot down any Skrill, or had he shot down something else entirely? Had Maour lied about something?
"Tha's a Night Fury," one of his men remarked. They saw his hesitation and stepped out to look for themselves.
"Yes, I know," he said numbly, trying to make sense of it. He had shot down a dragon wreathed in lightning, one that directed it, that was the dragon by the docks. He had then assumed there was another, and shot at the first dragon he saw in the sky… In a storm that was different than usual.
"Gods damn it," he exclaimed bitterly. "Go to the docks, secure the Skrill there. I shot down an ally." He had no clue why there was a Fury here, but the Isle of Night must have sent someone. Maybe they were just a messenger who had gotten caught up in the fight upon arriving, struck as much by bad luck and bad timing as by his itchy trigger finger.
Most of his men ran off, driven by the urgency he had put into his orders. A few stayed, but he didn't have the heart to reprimand them.
"It doesn' look so good," one said. "If it's an ally, should we get it out?"
"Carefully," Aldir requested. He led his men forward, out into the plaza, and got a good look at the friend he had ripped from the sky.
His first thought was to check the dragon for a saddle and rider, but thankfully it was bare under the net. His second thought was to wonder about its grey mottling.
His third thought was a realization, one some of his men came to as they began cutting at the net, judging by grunts of amazement.
The Night Fury was covered from head to tail in grey fractal patterns, like the shadows of a tree in the middle of Winter, branching dramatically and covering every inch of it. Some of the grey scars passed over scales, and some under, and there were patches of bare skin that seemed to be missing the scales that should be there. It was scarred more than the most battle-hardened man Aldir had ever seen, and by a fair margin. A man taking such wounds would have died a thousand times over from blood loss alone.
If they were cuts, that was. The pattern reminded him of lightning strikes, and the correlation was obvious, though he didn't know what to make of it. He hadn't seen such a scarred dragon during the battles against the Berserkers, but he knew the Isle had kept some in reserve to defend their elderly and children, and it stood to reason he had not seen them all…
"Still breathin'," came the awed report from the man by its chest as he sawed through ropes with his sword, taking care not to jab the dragon underneath. "Look at all these scars…"
"Most of 'em are puny," another man grunted, roughly tossing a limp and now unrestrained tail aside to reach for the next set of ropes. "'Cept for the ones on the wings, those are alright. Proper ones, those are."
Aldir quickly saw what his men were talking about; while the vast majority of the scars were thin and spindly, the dragon's wings each sported a band of grey around the midsection of the leading edge, a thorough scattering of puncture wounds and slashes healed long ago.
Healed, he noticed, but maybe not healed properly. The wings were crooked around those scars, as if broken and set wrong in addition to all of the other injuries that had left marks, but not wrong enough to prevent flight.
His men continued to work, and soon the dragon was roughly rolled over. Its eyelids drifted open, as if not quite held shut.
Aldir moved forward to help, only briefly looking into pale orange eyes before putting his weight and his belt knife into the task of removing the remains of the net. He had shot down one of the Isle's own dragons with the gift Maour had given, and there would probably be Hel to pay for that. The least he could do was see that it was cared for and taken back to the Isle in the meantime, and this was the first step of that.
The dragon's eyelids drifted closed again as it was rolled onto its side, still very much unconscious.
"Sir, we found the other net, but there's nothing in it!"
Aldir looked to the skies, and upon seeing that there were no Skrill flying down to obliterate him, sighed heavily. At best he had driven his island's recurring tormentor away for the time being. At worst, he had invited retribution, both from them and from the Isle of Night. As it turned out, when he had been thinking of a worst-case scenario, he hadn't been thinking pessimistically enough.
Author's Note: A disclaimer: This is not what it looks like, in terms of where I could be going from here. It's also not what your next guess was, or the one after that. I wouldn't call it a teaser if it gave any solid information. That's reserved for the actual prologue, which, I repeat, is coming early September.