Anaemicas' Return

Anaemicas’ Return

The ground burned underneath her feet, super-heated by the overly bright sun above.
The sands of the path were unbearable in temperature and yet, Anaemica continued.

She was in the desert now, as she had been for almost a week.
Her wings still hadn’t healed enough to allow them to lift her weight, grounding her.
Encrusted blood along her hide cracked as her lithe body flexed, muscles dragging her stiff body ever onwards under the blistering sun. Up above, a few dozen vultures circled, waiting for her to give up and offer them a free meal. Anaemica longed to snap at them, to taste their feathery hides in her jaws, but she was weak. Even hunting normal prey was beyond her current strength.

The gusting winds consistently tossed up granules of sand from the surface, abrading her scales and ruining their once slick sheen. It was her fault she was in this mess, she knew it.
If she had simply stayed at home she would never have been attacked by those creatures.
The mere thought of home almost brought tears to her eyes. She could never go back there. It belonged to them now.

Anaemica was going to give up her trek and collapse onto the burning sands when she saw a glimmer of hope on the horizon; the faint smudge of green hills.
It wouldn’t have looked like much before this trek but now it looked to her like heaven on earth. If it were possible for dragons to pour on steam, she was doing it now, urging her reluctant body forward ever more.

Dehydration was taking its toll on her. Her neck sagged low to the earth, not the proud arch it had once been. Her tongue lolled to the side, tasting like sand. Everything tasted like sand in this god forsaken place.




By nightfall, the green smudge of hills on the horizon had transformed into the detail of forests and gullies. Anaemica longed to be among the greenery of the forest, to be under the shade of those mighty guardian trees.
The thought stirred her memories of beauty and glamour but those hills were just beyond reach. Her exhausted body demanded sleep.
Sulking low to the ground until she reached a narrow dip in the sands sheltered by rocks, curled up, and closed her eyes.

                 *                                          *                                        *

The feeling of something sharp pushing up her scales and poking her soft parts awoke Anaemica. She yawned and blinked with bleary eyes while trying to identify the source of the sharp prodding’s.

They were men
Humans

The humans were prodding her body with their spears.
Each spear had a lethal looking iron tip.
The men were garbed in odd, runic clothing. They had long grey beards and hair, each braided and banded together.
A few of the men carried iron shields with runes around the rim;

The spirit, the moon, the dragon, victory for the norse

They spoke in an un-intelligible tongue of sounds Anaemica could not identify. As she moved to get up, the men started shouting and poked their spears into her hide. Before she could respond, two of the men pinned her neck to the ground and another man bound her muzzle shut.

Big, iron chains bound her fore and hind limbs together and big weights pinned her tattered wings and tail to the ground. Another man draped a fabric of some description over her eyes and bound it with a rope around her head to keep Anaemica in the dark.




Without vision, Anaemica could only feel when the men surrounded her and lifted her body up onto a wooden cart tail-first. The mysterious short men scrambled up onto the cart beside her and the team of five oxen-like creatures dragged the cart off down the dirt trail, the men laughing in victory.

                 *                                          *                                        *

Hours passed, days passed, time passed.
Anaemica had no way of telling the time of day or night as the men kept the fabric covering her eyes.
Apart from their initial joyous behavior, the men had been silent for the trip.
Every groove and hole in the road tossed the cart from one position to another, giving Anaemica uncomfortably sore bruises.

After what to her seemed like a month, the cart finally stopped and the men started shouting as she was lifted off of the cart and onto a cobble-stone road.
Her bindings were removed and the fabric concealing her eyes was the final piece to be removed.

Her eyes burned at the un-accustomed light now shining into them.
She was in a sandstone city surrounded by men, women and children all wearing those strange garments.

And they did not look happy