Julian's bolberry canoe paddle was no match for the water dragon's fetid maw. Splintered wood met cracked, blackening draga teeth with a jolt that was electric. In less than a heart-beat's length of time, the Hidden Well refugees' canoes found themselves upside down, dashed to pieces beneath the frigid waters of the Great Rush Lake.
I can't breathe. I can't breathe!
Julian, his brain overrun by panick, clawed wretchedly for the surface and was instantly battered against jutting crags of granite.
His eyes popped open, but could see absolutely nothing in the water's inky blackness. He couldn't even orient himself; as the frothing draga churned its surroundings with a tail as thick as a snow-tree's root, Julian could discern neither which direction was up nor which led further down into the stark gloom.
Julian was tossed, flipped, and rotated like weak reed doll. It was akin to being trapped in one of those centuries-old clothes washing machines, which he'd seen once in a museum as a child...but the strenuous power of the water was almost incomprehensible.
Somewhere in the lake, he could hear muffled screams. The water beast boomed her wrath with a force so strong that it burst Julian's ear-drums... but that was the least of his problems.
Air. Air!
Mightily, he struggled. At one point his head breached the surface, and his famished lungs were able to suck in a brief whoosh of salty air before a foam-capped wave overtook him. Underneath, Julian was surrounded by bits of ragged wood and sloshing debris: a sandal here, an abandoned oar there, and the soft, broken bodies of what he realized were tiny children.
Dear God-- the kids. The kids are gone!
Julian pivoted and was able to once again strain toward the surface. He needed air. He needed life. And the children, he realized with a raw pang, were probably all dead.
Vanished. Sucked into the belly of a ferocious aquatic predator, along with their canoes, supplies, mountain guides, and all of the Hidden Well refugees, most of whom didn't know how to swim. The relentless beating of the frosty waves would have daunted even an accomplished Olympic swimmer.
With the incensed water-dragon streaking back and forth through the narrow bends of the lake and ravaging everything she came across, Julian fancied that they'd all have been safer in an aquarium full of Megalodon sharks. And God, but she was ugly: all four fins were barnacle-encrusted and scarred, which whispered of secret battles encountered with over-enthusiastic mates or young bulls seeking to assert themselves by claiming her territory. The beast's eyes, easily twice as large as standard eating plates, bulged in their madness. And her teeth were in a terrifying, five-inch league of their own.
Julian's lungs screamed. He broke the surface. He gulped in one breath, and then another. He was half-way through a third when an object of formidable force slammed into his back and sent him flying. Out of the lake he was hurled, with limbs pinwheeling this way and that, until finally being plastered face-first into the icy wall of the east mountain face. The impact knocked Julian out of consciousness immediately. His embattled body slid down and crumpled on the frigid bank, twenty feet from the water's edge.
And still, the monster raged, in a frantic and furious search for the ova which she had been nursing with so much care. It was her only ova, and she would likely never have another.
Bits of canoe bobbed on the lake surface, like the twisted bodies of sea-fowl from another world, but the area was now bereft of any other form of life.
No other stragglers reached for the shore. Only the lead canoe had been able to escape the fray, but unless the water-dragon was able to find her precious cargo, she would follow that canoe as far as she could go, or at least until the waters became to shallow to support her.
Unless she found that ova, no refugee was safe.
Julian would not realize until after regaining consciousness that all of his teeth had been blasted from their sockets.
______________________________________
Ample hips juggled fat babies as their mothers congregated for the morning well-water.
The Elders had long been trying to introduce a lighter livelihood in Looks Thrice Village by stimulating bartering, commerce, harvesting, and creating more advanced curricula for school-children. Malaraq and the Village Matron, Amiechek, had been at the forefront of these plans, particularly in trying to quell the rumored talk that serious things were amiss in the near-by village of Hidden Well.
But rumors, of course, were exactly that. One could try to quash the whispers, but there would always be those few which evaded censorship, thus snaking their way through the lodges, the wash houses, and even the birthing cabins.
Looks Thrice women in particular knew their way around the Matron's futile efforts. Little escaped their sharp hearing. Sharing what they knew around the village well and later at their looms was the satisfaction teen girls and young mothers lived for.
"You!" A burly, pink-cheeked woman balanced her chubby toddler on one hip, using her free hand to drop a bucket into the well-- plishhh-- and jerked her chin at a slender girl whose belly looked as if it bore two fully grown water fruits. "Barely six months ago you gave that husband of yours, twins, eh? Now look at your belly! By the looks of it you'll have two more in another two weeks!"
Cackles all around as the other women simpered, exchanging knowing looks while the twin mother blushed profusely.
"Twins or not, my babies are always healthy," Twin Woman managed, taking care to obscure her mild embarrassment. "And besides, isn't it much more important that the environment in Looks Thrice is the best for young children?"
"She speaks the truth," aquiesced a lithe woman with blue ribbons woven into her shining braids. She looked on as Pink Cheeks dipped and filled the bucket, afterwards using the pulley to bring it up again. "When was the last time Dragura claimed a sacrifice from us? We have better grain, fortified rice, and a new palisade reinforced with bars of steel--"
"St- steel?" The other women looked at one another, trying the foreign word out on their tongues. "And what exactly is--"
"It is a fabled substance harder than any Rock," pressed Blue Ribbons, determined not to be out-done: "and rumor has it that it was bartered for at Star-Flower Village!"
"Aaaaahhh!" The women at the well clutched their babies and listened raptly, painted mouths slightly agape.
"Star Flower Village?" queried Twin Woman. "Isn't that only a mythical place we learned about from the stories our mothers used to try and put us to sleep?"
Blue Ribbons shook her resplendent braids. "Star Flower Village is as real as I am standing here before you," she chirped, pleased at the attention. "Our very own men have travelled a great distance to harvest the Star Flower steel for our Matron--"
"...no doubt in exchange for several of our virginal maidens to keep as wives," interjected Pink Cheeks with satisfaction. She was the oldest at the gathering, which meant that her word carried heavier weight (or so she thought).
"What does that matter?" queried Twin Mother.
"You can't guess the reason why?" Pink Cheeks lifted a skeptical eyebrow at her and shifted her baby from the right hip to the left. "I'd think you in particular would be displeased at such a thing, given your shyness and prudishness and eager-to-please--"
"I won't be spoken of in that way!" Twin Mother shot back hotly. Immediately the other girls at the well fell silent, slowly aggregating into their own groups and covering the cries of frustrated toddlers with eager hands. A fight...and for the first time in so many months! This was what they'd secretly all been waiting for. Having forgotten the terror of Dragura's sacrifices, the younger members of Looks Thrice had fallen into a comfortable complacency. Toddlers were now coming of age without ever having seen or heard such a thing as a dragon, and that was how they and the Elders wished to keep it. Dragura's name was not to be mentioned in the wake of her embarrassing decline.
Now, at the peak of noon and with scant poultry scratching for seed at their feet, the hungry Looks Thrice women prepared themselves for the highest form of entertainment.
No-one spoke back to Pink Cheeks in such fashion, let alone a skinny wallflower like Twin Mother. Would there be profanities or slapped faces? They would wait and see.
"I'll speak to you in any way I please," snapped Pink Cheeks, who by this time had shed her water-bucket and shoved her infant into the arms of an elderly grandmother. "Do you really think you're so special, married to a hard-working man and lying with him so faithfully on the sleeping bench that you have as many children as there are chicken here in this village? Do you really think you're the model wife, the supreme example, the highest ideal?"
Twin Mother lifted her chin. "I am."
At once their were gasps and shocked countenances. How dare she!
"If the Elders are sending our women as gifts to an imaginary settlement, they must be whores," declared Pink Cheeks, cutting her eyes at her rival's fresh defense. "Looks Thrice wouldn't send respectable women for that kind of thing; they'd choose the rubbish in the streets. Which means you... are trash." Pink Cheeks gesticulated wildly, as if to wash her hands of something filthy. She had made her declaration; she had won. No-one usurped her role when it came to relevance in Looks Thrice.
In one motion, she both hefted her water-bucket and snatched her infant from the grandmother's arms. Pink Cheeks swiftly turned her back, but had hardly taken two steps before the following:
"I am an idol," Twin Mother stated.
Their spectators exchanged delighted glances. By this time, bartering shells had quietly begun to change hands.
"Why do you think the women they'd send are meek and good child-bearers? It's because the village of Looks Thrice is a proud village. Its women are pure and undefiled, serving as excellent examples to foreigners of proof that we have been, and are now, and always will be a village of honor!"
Pink Cheeks had turned to stare, positioned as if rooted. The littlest children stuffed fists into their mouths as their mothers looked expectantly at each rival for the climax.
For nearly the time it took for an incense stick to burn, Twin Mother and Pink Cheeks glowered one other. But the bets in the crowd would be worthless this day, and there would be no unofficial winner or loser where this incident was concerned.
Gasping and panting, having run from the palisade gate to the village center, a young runner stopped in front of the well and rested his hand on his knees.
"There-- there is a maiden-- at the gate," he puffed, wheezing all the while.
The gathering swarmed the poor boy at once.
"A maiden--? Who?"
"What woman comes to the gate without an escort?"
"Has someone died?"
Assailed with the barrage of inquiries, the young man finally stood and held out his hands. "I'm not sure who she is," he admitted, "but she has an infant in a sling on her back."
"Ha! Some girl who snuck out of the village last night for a late night romp, no doubt," scoffed Pink Cheeks, eager to save face.
"That isn't all," the runner proffered ominously. "...she has a-- a dragonling in her arms, and she comes with three escorts." Wearily, he took another breath. "Those escorts are all Draca."
The silence that followed was complete and total.
With no-one moving, he waved for a young chief to come to his aid. "I think we need to notify the Elders for this," he said, and while the two turned to confer, the crowd shifted uneasily.
A thin sliver of fear-- so slight that none could have guessed where it came from-- slipped into the minds of the most impressionable. The young women with children forgot their 'entertainment' and hugged their babies closer.
The Draca were here.
At the palisade gate...at Looks Thrice.
And with them came the maiden whose presence and identity would change it all, forevermore.