There have been rumours around the foot of Veneror Peak. Those who live in its shadow have spent a night and day and further night with their eyes wide, too afraid to sleep.

The first night there was howling and keening and roaring. The noises rose like a wave and crashed around the stone of the mountain with terrible vigour. And when the light of dawn began to rise, they saw a shadow upon the mountainside and all made sense.

A new beast.

They trembled as they stood and stared at the creature that spread its great wings only a few hours later and soared out across the mountain’s valley. It swooped down into the small village and how they scurried like ants into their houses and snapped their doors and windows closed tight!

The monster circled for a while and then landed in their gardens. It went from one into the next and plucked a dozen of the villagers’ finest flowers up. In their place she left a wilting one, similar to that which she had plucked, yet dead or dying.

With her flowers in her beak - held so carefully! they declared – she flew back up onto the mountain and was silent, until the evening. Then came those terrible screams again – anguish and fury they sounded like. The whole of Veneror shook and as the dawn crested one brave villager declared he would go and send the beast away, that their flowers might be safe and their nights terror-free. 

Up and up the bold man climbed. Up and up he went with his torchlight in his grasp, until he found the beast at rest. A dragon! He said aloud. No a bird. No! He realized at last: a wyvern is what it was. But already she had heard him and opened one red-blue eye. She lifted her head from her nest of flowers and looked down her beak at the man who stood with his torch aloft.

Tap, tap, tap begins the tip of her barbed tail upon the stone. Scrape, scrape, scrape, begins her talons on the rubble. The brave man swallows, no longer brave at all. Fearfully he steps back and the wyvern angers all the more. She rises, unfurling from her flowered seat and reaches her long neck toward him, irritated but not yet stirred.

Until that is, the scared man accidentally drops his torch upon the ground. It sparks and flares and sets her flowers alight and oh, then he knows the ire of a wyvern! She screams into the air and plucks the man from where he stands. Her breakfast was a merry one that day though her nest is wet with tears for the ashes of her flowers.

In spite she swoops down into the village once again and plucks from their garden every lovely flower that they own and with the foolish man’s feet within her grasp she flies off to make herself a new nest and settles this time upon a wood. She lands abruptly in a clearing and begins to make her nest, of beautiful flowers from the village. Once done she begins to pull the horse shoes from the foolish man’s feet. She is upon the third and working very diligently when she hears another stray across her path and with an irritated huff she looked up toward the next strange man and then down toward his feet. 

“Do you wear nice shoes too?” She wonders of him but does not think that he might hear her. Then lower, with warning and ire and mistrust, “Touch my wonderful flowers and I will soon find out!”

Perhaps @Torstein heard the rumors of the strange beast in the mountains. Maybe he only heard her crying, and howling on the summer wind. Either way each time she cries might make him more, and more curious to discover what sort of beast makes sounds such as those. When he finds her it is with death and flower surrounding her. And are those horseshoes piled up around her? Strange things, strange things indeed---

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This quest was written by the lovely @Obsidian

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