Everything
seemed to happen at once. The other dragons pushed their boulders down from the
rim. Men dropped the leads on their gryphon captives and scrambled from the
avalanches created by the huge rolling stones.
As soon
as Farloft reached the cage he wrapped his paws around the upper bars and
flapped his wings to hover over the hatchlings protectively until Melozzo arrived.
The
group of men who had gathered to discuss the problem of getting the hatchling
cage around the impediment were regrouping and trying to arm themselves with
weapons strapped to the packs on the backs of the their gryphon prisoners - the
gryphon were having none of it. They were fearlessly bucking and kicking. The
heavy weighted boots on their paws were lethal if they impacted a man’s head or
chest.
The
other dragons descended following the tumble of rock. They grasp men with claws
and teeth and flung them against rock and hard packed trail.
Timenall
landed among the gryphon near the caged wagon just as Farloft and Melozzo lifted
it from the ground. Running toward Weirim he reached her just as she slammed a
booted foot into the shoulder of a Varda. The man went reeling away from her.
She followed with a fury he had never seen, nor thought she possessed. With the
man on the ground from the first blow she proceeded to relentlessly stomp on
him. She left nothing but a bloody corpse when she was finished.
“Get me
out of this,” she yelled and shook her head at Timenall leaped to her side.
“Lean
your head down,” he shouted over the den of fighting around them.
When
Weirim leaned over he grasped the leather strap at the back of her head holding
the wire muzzle over her beak and bit through it. He started to work on getting
her wings free of their burden. She leaned forward and snapped the straps of
the boots on her feet with her beak. It was slow going - much slower than
Timenall planned.
The
Varda were not going to give up so easy. They were regrouping. Some had been
carrying their weapons strapped across their backs. These men wheeled their
whips and laid into their gryphon captives with their metal barbed prods. They started
to put bolt to crossbow and the lethal projectiles began to fly.
Farloft
had just set cage safely down, with Melozzo’s help, back from the rim of the canyon
when he heard a cry from Jozwik. An arrow hit her in the hindquarter.
“Stay
here,” Farloft ordered. “Get them free.” He leaped back up into the sky and
circled to join the fight.
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