A Match of Monsters

Chapter Five

Nothing was more relaxing – or exhilarating – than flying.

The slow burn of muscles from the wingtips to the shoulders as the thick hide filling the space between each claw snapped and pulled taut with the tension of holding up a tonne of lean, scaled mass in the sky, being all there was to stop her body from plummeting against the crested stone below. The feel of once calm air currents forced into turmoil as they made new paths around her body. And the sight of inferior creatures going about their insignificant business like ants underneath her, none the wiser that something as powerful as she was travelling just above them, easily visible in the unlikely event that any of them possessed the intelligence to look up.

The feeling of the power she had within the domain was like nothing else. With every inhale and exhale, she could feel the prestige she had over all others resting obliviously under her.

But despite the wonderful sense of fulfilment brought to her, it was not the reason she had been enjoying the bright sky.

She was hunting.

Not for criminals or insurgents as she often did, but more simply for food.

Rarely in the recent decades did she require or desire to hunt her own prey, but with how quiet it had been recently with so few laws to enforce in the fiefdom as the rate of crimes continued to decrease, there had been equally decreasing excuses to leave the secure serenity of her lair. Although all dragons enjoyed the company of only complete silence, recently she had been enduring such concentrations of it, that she had felt she had been beginning to go stir crazy.

Not in almost a century had the fiefdom been so peaceful and successful that it had needed so little attention. All the free time suddenly in her claws was overwhelming, and she did not know what to do with it.

Unlike some others of her kind, the prey she searched for was not a human of Shadow – what dragons and the monsters allied to them called enemy immortals – but rather a simple Mindless; a mortal creature below even humans that contained too little intelligence to be considered sentient.

On the ridge underneath her, a small pack of wolves was conducting a hunt of their own. There were only an even half dozen – six – and just two would be enough to satisfy the hunger. But she wouldn't take them, as both that mortal wolves were not as stupid as humans thought them to be, and also that she had discovered that they proved also to be useful allies as they despised the werewolves that enslaved them and other Shadowcast creatures as her own ilk did.

Nor would she take the female great brown bear with a cub that looked just matured enough to begin surviving on its own. This time the reason was not political but instead personal, out of respect for the lone great brown grizzly that protected the local human village just outside of her lair from other mortal threats, despite being considered only a Mindless animal with no apparent reason to do so by the humans it protected.

But only a further four minutes flying away, she had found the perfect prey; a lone deer. There were no other large predators or prey near the grazing bull – male judging by the great horns rising either side of his head and spanning from tip to tip almost the length of his body. The powerful body and thick, shaggy fur coat looked almost too much for his thinner, more calf-like legs to support.

The antlers looked dangerous enough to easily gore some other animal, and with the velvet dripping from them, it looked like the bull had been recently.

There was a large patch of loose skin hanging from the bull's throat, and she couldn't help but watch the dewlap swing as the bull moved his head from side and lipped food as he found it.

Already the dragoness was thinking of what a prize those antlers and that pelt would be to add to her hoard.

For some time, she had been aware of the tan mountain lion also stalking her prey from upwind, but had hoped it would come to its limited senses and go search for something else to kill.

But it seemed it was too stupid, and its instincts too under-developed to do so. It couldn't even hunt right, and just then the moose caught its scent, raising his head and bellowing in alarm as he turned around – charging straight towards where she was hiding.

One tidy swipe at the jugular was all it took to down the frightened bull, and just one more to take care of the pursuing lion.

Although she felt a little – very little – upset that she had killed more prey than she could comfortably eat in a single sitting, she comforted herself at the thoughts that the young mountain lion was too stupid to have lived long anyway, as well as appealing to her more greedy, kleptomaniac nature with the thought of what two such wonderful pelts – still thick and glossy from winter's bite – and a set of antlers would do to her trove.

Soon, the silly little emotion of guilt had left her mind once again. Such feelings as regret, shame and guilt were for the inferior mortals of the world – not the all powerful dragons such as herself.

She knew that, as did all other immortals.

But now it was time to put an end to the strange self-reflection she had somehow begun, because now it was time for her to eat.

The meal was perfect, with the bull's life blood still heated enough that it melted the snow underneath the gaping wound in the moose's throat, just below the dewlap. As the animal was dead, the life was slow to leave the body, only a little of it oozing into the outer world as gravity forced the blood to move.

She took her time skinning the moose, slowly unattaching the underside of the skin from the lean muscles and thin layer of fat. From nose to hooves she went, careful not to tear the pelt in any way.

Just as she had completed the removal process of pelts, claws, hooves and antlers, a sensation ran down her spine from the base of her skull to the tip of her tail. The feeling had been unexpected, and she's gone rigid at the experience.

She had not felt it in over a decade, and as such it was a long moment before she could recall what it meant.

The ward had been triggered. Being an ancient and powerful spell that had been created before even the time of the riders millennia ago, the ward was just as complicated and intelligent as a dragon. Now it had contacted her far from her lair, to alert her something sentient had entered her cavers and displayed no obvious signs of either malicious or good intent.

She gave a gasp – her clutch!

The dragoness leapt powerfully from the forest floor, leaving her prey and the prizes she had so carefully prepared lying in the snow as she began the long flight home.

A/N

 - I'm so sorry this chapter is so late! I've got another 6 chapters completed on paper that I just need to type up for y'all. I'll be as quick as I can - I promise!!!

 - As always, please vote, comment and share the story. I love it when I get new readers and enjoy looking at you're comments.