Metal Men

Silverwing startled awake at her mate’s roar. She didn’t need their linked minds to know how wrong he perceived everything. Despite the urgency of his call, Silverwing struggled to come to his aid. She wanted to, every ounce of energy demanded she did, but she had just spent weeks gathering enough food to lay his clutch of eggs and she had only nodded off briefly after finishing the last lay. She grumbled and shook her body, starting from head to tail tip. The leathery membrane of her wings brushed against each other as she tried to shake herself awake. No, it was too much. Too much of her energy had been sapped gestating and laying the eggs she now laid atop keeping warm. 

Silverwing readjusted atop her nest, shifting sand warmed by her body heat from one side to the other. Razorfang was an apex male to guard her brood. He had proven himself over a half-dozen competitors, maiming and killing all the others that wished to mate with her. Despite his roars, Silverwing knew the benefit of a strong mate was his ability to defend her in this most vulnerable time. She closed her eyes as Razorfang’s voice penetrated her mind. 

Men, but not bone ones. They are metal men. So many metal men. 

Metal men? The thought spiked fear and worry in Silverwing’s heart. Bone men sometimes came to try and take what shouldn’t belong to them: prey, mates, eggs… But metal men? For metal men to gather, outfit themselves, and decide upon something together meant they really wanted something. Silverwing cast her gaze toward the tip of one of the eggs peeking from the sand. Metal was rare and men loved metal. If they came here with what they loved, then they meant to take something equally loved. The only thing Silverwing cherished as much as men coveted metal were the eggs that were warming beneath her. 

Silverwing stared at the tip of one egg. If she or Razorfang had noticed the metal men in the area, she would have eaten the eggs to regain the expended energy and left to nest elsewhere. Now eating or not eating the eggs was questionable. Did she leave and join Razorfang in defending the nest now, her desire to protect the eggs strongest, or did she eat them, hoping Razorfang would hold off the metal men long enough for her to recover and flee? 

Silverwing’s mouth salivated as she looked back at the egg peeking from the sand. The idea of eating her brood was abhorrent, but the lost energy being reclaimed, the idea of escaping to make another brood, the prospect of continuing her line later, that was mouthwatering. She had half opened her jaw to coax the first egg in when light flashed from the mouth of her cave. An involuntary aggressive snarl curled along her lips as she turned to see light glint off not one, but two metal men’s torches. The saliva of hunger quickly gave way to a second type, the saliva of an impending retch. Silverwing opened her maw as her stomach clenched and her bile exploded from her jaw in a stream toward the metal man on the right. His torch sputtered out before the scream echoed off the sandstone cave’s walls. 

“There’s a second,” the left metal man yelled as he retreated from the mouth’s cave. 

Razorfang’s thoughts were resigned. Run Silverwing. Run. 

I will not abandon my brood. Silverwing pitched forward onto her two winged forelimbs then started to bound toward the desert outside. She couldn’t fly in the close confines of her lair, but would need speed to gain air quickly once she was free. The metal man soaked in her strongly acidic vomit was still twitching as she passed him and exploded into flight, knocking three metal men off their feet with the force of her wings’ downbeat. 

Three powerful flaps of her wings allowed her enough altitude to see the battle beneath. There were more metal men than Silverwing had teeth in her head, maybe almost as many as Silverwing and Razorfang’s teeth combined. Razorfang had killed few of the metal men. A stream of acid scarred the sand and two metal men lay in that scar, not moving. Two more were ripped in two, their blood leaking into the ground. Razorfang had proved an insufficient mate to have killed so few. 

Razorfang lay on the ground, writhing beneath metal men’s tentacles. Several of their teeth and talons had pierced his scale, but the wounds did not account for his inability to fight them off. 

Silverwing swooped at the outskirts of the metal men’s herd, trying to grab one in her talons. The metal men were striped, but not like the jungle predators who wished to hide. Instead, their stripes were like the herd-beasts that sought to confuse the eye. Her left hindlimb grasped at the stripes but failed to catch hold of one of the metal men. Her right found purchase. With the intruder trapped in her powerful paw, she rose dramatically into the air. 

The metal man thrashed, trying to pull himself free and Silverwing squeezed harder. Metal men’s skin was tough and rigid but it could be crushed. 

Pain shot up Silverwing’s foot as she rose high enough for the moon to silhouette her form. Metal men had talons and teeth that could be thrown or carried on long limbs they could separate from their body and re-attach. This metal man jabbed with his talon, a metal one, not the bone or sharpened rock they normally used. 

Silverwing pitched toward the desert, rotating the metal man to her jaw as she did. Her teeth found the gap between his metal head and his metal torso. Blood exploded into her mouth, wetting an insatiable thirst. Their metal was hard, but their bones were weak. Muscle, bone, and sinew ripped from his metal chest as Silverwing pulled. Although the blood was tasty, one should never swallow a metal man with the skin still attached. Without time to pry the tasty meat free, Silverwing flung his headless body at the confusing shapeless herd below. It scattered. 

Still in her swoop, the metal head fell from Silverwing’s mouth as she spit her bile upon them. Having wasted so much on a single metal man, it came out in a dissatisfying glob. Still, metal men’s cries filled the night sky. 

With all her talons outstretched, Silverwing crashed to the desert floor, right into the herd of metal men. One was crushed underneath, squarely in the palm of her paw. No scream issued from his mouth as his body went limp under Silverwing’s weight. Her other talons found pierced limbs and not the re-attachable ones of wood and hide. Two metal men tried to pull arm and leg free of Silverwing’s might. 

Pitching her head toward one mass of stripes, Silverwing swept her tail in the opposite direction. Her fangs met nothing but her spiked tail struck firmly and sent metal men sprawling. A second bite to the other side swung the tail the opposite direction. Still her talons found nothing. But the metal men’s fangs were on display and struck out at her maw. Most glanced off her hard scale, but one slipped into her nostril, cutting through and to the inside. 

Silverwing jerked back, letting the two metal men underneath foot the chance to crawl away. She roared in pain as she tried to shake the metal man’s talon free of her nose by brushing her head against the ground. 

Fire fell from metal men’s hands as Silverwing fought. It would not grow in the desert like it did in the forest. Metal men stuck their fangs into the hot glow and pointed them in Silverwing’s direction. Flame sailed above Silverwing. Metal men saw poorly in the dark. The first volley of fangs lit up the sky and was followed by a second volley bouncing off the scales of her side and back. A few found their way to the scales of her belly. 

Silverwing snarled and tried to bring her hindleg up to scratch the fangs free. It was too heavy to lift. She went to roar in anger but it came out as a wet cough. The fangs and talons had stung like fire when they struck her, but now she could no longer feel the blood trickling from the wounds. 

Men like to dip their fangs and talons in the secretions of toads and bugs. 

Silverwing stepped forward but stumbled on her useless hindlimb. With her tail not numbed, she swung it toward the metal men. Then they brought their tentacles, tossing them in the air. Silverwing tried to thrash away, but with the confusion of herd stripes and the way the tentacles moved, she found them soon wrapped around her tail, neck, and useless leg. The metal men wrapped the other end around big rocks and rolled them away. Tentacles pulled and forced Silverwing to the ground. 

She had fought much more viciously than Razorfang, but now she was pinned as futilely as him. Razorfang had stilled during her assault. Breath still came and went, but he had joined the sleep of predators that ate the bright frogs. Herd stripes moved, but the white darkened and the torches went out until all that remained was stillness. 

Author Note: I am intrigued by writing from non-human POVs. It’s fun to think of how an animal (or in this case a wyvern) would describe things about humanity since they are so far from the natural world that animals would be used to. Metal men is set in a world I’m working on in which metal is rare. Magic will be sparse if present at all in this world. Humanity has survived through ingenuity. Humanity took all of the adaptions that the natural world created and adapted them to their own needs.

People live in giant cities constructed to look like animals to deter predators from coming close and becoming a meal. People wear bright colors, camouflage, or stripes depending on the predators active in their region. Weapons are made of stone, bone, or wood. Armor is constructed of scale, carapace, bone, and wood. Only five cities have meeked out an existence in this world. Each of these cities is situated near a major good that must be traded within cities for them to exist. Caravans travel from the five cities year round. Those caravans, like the cities are constructed to look like giant animals.