BURN
BRIGHT

Mud squelched between Ninazu’s toes as the Utahraptor stalked through the cold hunting grounds. In the southern areas of the boreal forest, the melted snow softened the ground into slippery muck. She hated it. But the deliciousness of the caribou alone made up for the temporary annoyance.

However, she couldn’t smell a herd nearby. Only hear a low snarl in the distance.

But she smelled something else; fire and charred wood, from various trees which’d burned. She would’ve guessed a lightning strike, but she saw a burned husk of a tree every ten paces. A fire elemental—likely a mindless beast, by the destruction and lack of common sense.

The wildfire destroyed the animal’s scent trail, but the destruction was easy enough to follow. So she followed it with green flames in her feathers and an excited glow in her neon eyes.

After three hours of tracking, she found its den within one of the flooded caves. Three giant eggs… well, they’d be delicious hardboiled in firebreath and lightly dipped in saltwater. But so would the egg layer.

The warlord hunkered down to wait in another cave, further into the forest. Hunting required patience, and, once again, she had to wait for several hours; it was only once the sun dipped into the horizon that the wyvern landed near its cave.

Ninazu won the advantage of surprise by shooting lightning at its head. But the beast didn’t go down easily; no, it spewed fire in return. The dragon and dinosaur traded elemental blows, until Ninazu landed a cheap shot: flinging a baseball-sized rock into its roaring maw.

But harvesting materials from the dragon’s body all the way back to the village? Ninazu decided to save that for the morning. She’d sleep in its den and cook up an eggggggggg-cellent breakfast before dragging its corpse home.

© MADI