Lord Gretrus Short Story

Lord Gretrus hovered over the freezing mountains that comprised the kingdom of Dragana, home to the Dragans. The place was completely filled. They happened to have been taken to a part of their Realm, which was, if he didn’t miss his guess, bigger than the whole of Jora. The pale, sea-like barbarians went about their daily business, carving edges of stone into spears, turning wood into large arrows. They were dressed in animal skin, barely covering some parts of their bodies. Their females tended to cooking what looked like bloated pieces of meat and nursing several children. They couldn’t be called children, thought Lord Gretrus. They were broken into groups of approximately ten thousand each, and there were dozens of such camps in view. The things were almost as fully grown as their parents, only that their skin looked fresher and generally looked younger than the average Dragan. Here and there, fights broke out between groups which almost always ended in a slaughter as the other barbarians cheered. He watched with revulsion as a particular male who was killed, was taken to the killer’s wife, who jumped in glee at the new source of meat. She began removing his skin until it was only meat left. Then she dumped

They flew over the mountains where the Dragans were cramped, fighting for the right to caves. One unfortunate Dragan who rushed into the cave was smashed to fodder by an enormous cudgel. Another Dragan bit its sharp, yellow teeth hard into the throat of a Dragan who kept howling something in their language. A roar of a great beast came from inside the cave and all the Dragans around cleared the way for one particular Dragan. It rode on an enormous creature and had a huge following around it. It was draped in clothing-something the barbarians never wore-the cloak flowing to cover his thighs. Lord Gretrus signaled the group to