Beyond the Skyline

METAL FOR DRAGONS PT. 2

It was hot. Unusual for a day that was moving away from winter. But it must have been normal for the number of people missing from the streets and houses of Visithug and they was now huddled shoulder to shoulder in the now seemingly tiny Great Hall. 

The unusual hot along with the few torches that lit up the room plus the whispering, shouting, and confused complaints from the villagers made it an uncomfortable place indeed. More for a seven-year-old kid.

Astrid watched the villagers occupying the entire space from her hiding place. She recognized some faces among the sea of people but most were just blurry memories in her mind, but of course, she noticed that there were no children in the Great Hall.

All the children were excluded from whatever was going on, and as the only kid in the place, she felt a mixture of pride and regret for what was to happen.

She managed to get in through a small window atop a log wall in the Hall thanks to a strategically stacked hay wagon before the adults entered the meeting, and some scraped knees and red hands later, she got climb with her agility and small size to one of the old beams of the ceiling buttresses, giving her a perfect perspective of the scene.

The girl pressed herself against the beam praying to the few gods she knew not to see her. That situation would be difficult to explain to the ladies of the orphanage, and she also didn't want to add one more thing to her already long list of antics.

Spending several minutes in which nothing happened, the intermingled words of the town making them difficult to understand distracted her for a while, but after two minutes she was already swinging her legs on the sides of the rafters, terribly bored looking at the window through which she had walked in, wondering if she was wrong to think something cool and different was going to happen and if she should've gone straight home, maybe to get some apple pie from the kitchen, when suddenly the whole room fell into a deep quiet.

Astrid peeked out a bit, straightening up to see what had caused that change. Chief Birger had entered the Great Hall. No air of self-sufficiency or grandeur, no air of drama, just a serious look on his unnaturally pale face.

The girl raised a curious eyebrow. It was not the first time she had seen her village chief. Astrid seen him only from afar and in passing, but she had liked his humble gesture and his normality. She had seen more villagers with pretense of grandeur than him, a chief himself. Astrid didn't like fake people.

The man's footsteps echoed in the room thanks to the silence that hung over the air like thick fog as he approached the center table to his usual position with the Council. 

Astrid could not make out from the distance and height of her the sad and tired faces of the Council members already seated at the head.

The slightly lower, more sneaky whispers returned as the man sat down in his well-carved chair.

"What's up chief?"

"What are we doing here?"

"I have work to do!"

"What are those cages out there?"

"They were for dragons, dumb yak, what were they going to be for!"

"Dragons? There're no dragons in Visithug!"

"It sure has to do with that man from the port from a few days ago"

"Must be"

"What's going on Chief Birger?"

The last demanding comment filled the room and turned off the others as if supporting it.