"The Last Battle" by Charity ´Leiko´ Koone

The Last Battle

       The Black Gryffin perched high on the stone mountainside. Her green eyes ever alert for movement amongst the trees. The enemy was near. All felt it. Every creature living in the great mountain knew that the armies of Man were closer than they had ever been. War had been declared since the discovery of those in the mountain, and many humans, afraid of what they did not understand, had taken up arms to eradicate the “threat”.
       This was not the first time the Guild had been under attack. Five hundred years ago it would not have been the problem it was now. Humans were still dependant on swords and bows. True, a few knew of black powder and its uses in firearms, but not enough to matter. The creatures of the Guild had been able to fend off human attacks with beak and claw and magic.
       But now things were different. Man had advanced, firearms were widespread and more powerful than anyone had dared conceive they could be. Technology of war had run rampant and bombs of immense destructive capabilities were easily got by those with enough money. These new weapons could kill at great distances without there ever being risk to the operator.
       It was weapons like these that put fear into the hearts of the Guilders. The army that marched toward them carried such things of destruction and those not blessed with immortality feared for their lives. The immortal feared for their friends. All were waiting anxiously for the humans to attack.
       The green eyes blinked. Thoughts of what might be vanished as she caught sight of what looked like a bush crawling slowly towards the mountain. A pair of huge red-tipped wings spread like a patch of midnight sky as the gryphon took flight. Yes, humans were in the woods. They thought themselves camouflaged but their presence was all to obvious to the powerful eagle eyes of the black gryphoness.
       She turned toward the mountain to report the approaching forces when the bang of a gun being fired came to her ears. Pain ripped through her left wing and she felt herself falling. Her beak opened in a scream that paralyzed the humans below. As she fell, she heard an answering scream…a cry of alarm that was soon echoed throughout the valley. Gryphons, dragons, unicorns, and all manner of strange beasts came running.
       The humans, alarmed and frightened by the deafening cries, stood and ran towards the creatures, firing their weapons and screaming. The “mythical” creatures ignored the shouts and attacked. Those who could fly swooped down on individuals. The smaller ones clawed the soft human faces while those large enough grasped their target, flew high into the air, and dropped the attacker to the ground.
       The dragons sent torrents of flame at the enemy, as well as crushing them with their great jaws. The unicorns impaled men on their horns and they, as well as the other equines, trampled all they could beneath their hooves. The other beasts fought in their own ways. Scratching, biting, flame and venom. Those possessing magic used it to its full extent.
       Many humans fell in those first few minutes. It looked as though the Guilders would win after all, despite their earlier fears. Their dampened spirits began to rise, but all too soon were crushed yet again. The humans brought in the heavy artillery. Tanks and halftracks began rumbling through the forest. They crushed bushes and wounded alike, killing those not already dead. Their powerful guns fired at the larger beasts, dragons mostly, while a fresh group of armed humans shot at the smaller ones.

       The green eyed gryphon came to and tried to stand as a tank rolled by her. Her wing hurt, her legs were sore, and the tip of her tail had been crushed by the treads of the steel war machine. She screamed in anger and leapt atop the human-made contraption. Her powerful talons ripped into it, scratching the armour but failing to pierce through to the inside. A human ran up on foot and took aim at her, hitting her right hind leg below the knee. The bones were shattered, but her anger grew. A dark purple mist rose from her black feathers as the green eyes faded to red. The Guardian had taken control, the Dark Light had risen to help her fight.
       The mist encircled the human and he cried out in pain, then collapsed as his flesh seemed to melt off the bones. The gryphon turned her attention back to the tank. The mist entered through small openings and soon the feathered ears heard screaming, then silence. The tank stopped moving. The crew was dead.
       The Guardian limped toward a machine gun nest that five humans had just set up. They saw her coming and swung the gun around to shoot, but her fanged beak reached them first, ripping the barrel off the gun as the first shots were fired. Bullets went through the bone, but she didn’t care. Her beak was now useless, part of it blown away, but her talons quickly dispatched the five humans.
       Howls of agony reached her ears and she turned to see a human slashing at a small gryphon with the bayonet on the end of his rifle. The gryphon was badly hurt, probably dieing, but the human continued to slash. The Guardian hissed through her broken beak and limped towards them. She was about to swipe at the man when he turned and fired several rounds into the left side of her face. She screamed and tried to fly, her right wing catching the human just below the jaw, breaking his neck with the force of its movement.
       Blinded, lame and flightless, the Guardian searched for another to fight. These humans had hurt her, but were not a threat without their guns. She saw yet another tank headed for the Guild. She dragged herself towards it and had almost reached the machine when a halftrack appeared and shot at her outreached talon. The force and number of the rounds almost severed her left foreleg and mutilated her wings. She watched the purple mist encase that halftrack, watched as the humans died horrible deaths, and then collapsed.
      Her red eyes reverted back to green as the mist faded into nothing. Her breathing grew shallow and her eyesight began to fail. The forest became a blur of brown and red. She clung to life as the sounds of battle began to wane. It hurt to move, to think, her heart’s beating sent waves of pain through her body. Soon all sound had vanished save the beating of that heart. The beating slowed, became erratic, and stopped. Leiko, the Gryffin Noir, was dead.
       Ships came from above. Never before had such a thing been witnessed. The humans ran in fear as the Guilders retreated into their mountain. The dead of both sides lay in the valley, in the fields and the forest. Charred corpses, mutilated mounds of flesh, dismembered limbs. Blood stained the land, trees and earth alike. Only the blue sky was untainted by the carnage. That sky, instead, was filled with metallic ships from an alien world. Those ships gathered the bodies of the dead, the ones that had not been too badly mutilated, and left as silently as they had come.