She lays curled atop a pile of glittering diamonds, caught between the roaring surf and a five-hundred-foot cliff that forms a semicircle around her. Her massive body heaves in slow, rhythmic waves, her sleep echoing the ocean.
She wakes, unfurling her length, stretching her serpentine tail and mighty neck. Righting herself, she shakes her torso and stretches her clipped, leathery wings.
She thirsts. There is no fresh water in this cage. She reaches her long neck to the breakers and drinks the salty liquid of her barricade. Her deceptively strong muscles work the fluid in gulps down her throat until she wants no more, licking the crust of saline from the edges of her mouth. The brine leaves her unsatisfied.
She hungers. Captured here, she cannot hunt her own food. Slowly, unwillingly, she turns her attention to the immense fence that encages her. Above her, a tiny figure hangs suspended against the cliff. Two chains hang from the unreachable top—the unknown edge—ending in the tight, thick manacles that the creature dangles from by the wrists.
It is one of them: one of the kinds of her captors. Its head droops to its chest. It is well out of her reach, the thing, almost at the top. It has been suspended there, still, so long. Her stomach rumbles painfully, and her taste buds salivate. She shifts uneasily, waiting.
Finally, the thing falls, breaking apart where the shackles held it up. Instinctively, she lurches forward to catch the thing in her mouth before it hits the sand. As it falls, she lets forth a blast of fire from her nostrils, flash cooking the thing before it lands in her open jaws. Above, the hands are left in their fetters, sticking out the top like tiny white specs.
She holds the warm, limp thing between her beak-like lips for a moment, battling hunger, disgust, and regret. She knows her eventual decision, so she does not bother to dirty her meal by setting it on the beach in the meantime.
She tosses it in the air, catching it with her teeth in a better position. With a few quick jerks of her head, it’s gone. She’s sated. With the grace of a leopard, she circles to adjust herself atop her bed of jewels. She lies down, craning her neck to place her chin on her shoulder.
She closes her lids, as if to sleep, but a small tear seeps from the corner of her eye. The drop has so much salt—so many minerals from the ocean water—that it hardens before it rolls off her face, crystallizing into a sparkling diamond before it hits the pile of its kin. She rolls her eyes upward in time to see the chains attached to the cuffs with the hands being dragged over the edge of the cliff. She sighs, a puff of smoke, and three more gems fall onto the mound before she sleeps.
[ About the Author: Annie Neugebauer is a two-time Bram Stoker Award-nominated author with work appearing and forthcoming in more than a hundred publications, including magazines such as Cemetery Dance, Apex, and Black Static, and anthologies such as Year’s Best Hardcore Horror Volumes 3 and 4 and #1 Amazon bestsellers Killing It Softly and Fire. She’s a columnist for Writer Unboxed and LitReactor. You can visit her at www.AnnieNeugebauer.com. ]
Wonderful writing… The image of the two hands left in the shackles *shivers*. Thank you for sharing, Steph:)
Yes, this one really made me shiver! 🙂