I felt my mane prickle, seething with Saint Elmo's Fire as I seized control of the lightning at my back and pulled it toward me. A moment later it struck, and my frame was wrapped with blue-white energy that I refused to absorb. It crackled and flared across my steel scales, searching wildly for release. I gave it that release, and milliseconds later an incandescent bolt of power was pouring off of my talons and spearing downwards.
My target squawked in surprise and pain as the crag beneath him disintegrated with a blinding flash, the explosion hurling him skyward. I watched him as he struggled to right himself, my heart filling with contempt. Fool! Why didn't you hide? Did you actually think that I wouldn't come for you?
I waited until he'd gotten himself under control, then watched his head snap skyward and his eyes widen as I bellowed a battle roar with the blue torch of my flaming challenge across the sky. My mane crackled as I stabbed my right hand at him again, and sun-hot hellfire flowed about me to flash across the distance between us and wrap his left wing in a web of destruction. He screamed as feathers vaporized in puffs of electrical discharge, the lightning drawing a crazy-quilt pattern of carbonized ruin across his limb.
He staggered in the air, trying frantically to get away as I wielded the lightning as a man would a whip. The power arced from my talons again and again, striking him and all about him, flaying his back to smoldering ribbons.
My adversary began to out-distance me, but I would have none of it. I reached out: Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the sky ahead of us began to boil while the ends of the squall line began to sweep forwards like gargantuan wings, curving the front, swinging around to gather him in.
I heard his scream of despair as the way before him grew black with storm, and at last he swung to face me. Good: This began with fang and claw and thus it would also end.
If he were just another job, just another target, I would have simply stood off and pounded him to pieces with the lighting at my command. But this wasn't just another job: This time it was something personal, and I longed to feel my fangs sinking into his throat.
I screamed my rage at him, my flame gouging in a lurid sheet of blue as I folded my wings and dove.
We closed rapidly, each going for a raking pass. My talons sliced at his underbelly while his own claws glanced off my armor, but the follow-up blow with his tail stunned me momentarily. He twisted back in to take advantage, but squalled in pain as he received a face full of flame for his efforts. He twisted away, but not before I managed to get in a blow with my tail to his own midriff. But hitting him was like slapping at a piece of string and he danced away, undamaged.
Again, we circled each other, the storm lashing at us as we searched for another opening. Again, we came spearing in. He twisted to avoid my fiery breath and I hooked him with the talons of my right hand as he passed, but he merely used it for leverage.
Amazed, I felt loop after loop of his rangy body wrapping itself about my own. I struggled frantically, then flexed my dorsal spines. I felt his body shudder, and blood not my own cascaded down my scales. Then his grip redoubled itself and he began to SQUEEZE.
Like the constrictor he so resembled, he was slowly crushing the life out of me. I writhed in his grip, desperately trying to get hold of him as my breath whooshed out of me and my ribs began to ache. His head came back into view, jaws agape, and I was horrified to see long, thin fangs unfold. He struck, but the needle-like points skittered off my steel armor, leaving long thin trails of venom in their wake.
My pulse was pounding like a drum in my head, and my vision became rimmed with black. I felt him strike again and again, trying to find the fatal chink in my armor as my wings faltered and my struggles weakened…
You-- idiot!
I concentrated, and that old feeling of compression swept over me. Suddenly his coils had nothing to grip as I abruptly dropped to half- size and slipped free. He shrieked his baffled rage and confusion, losing track of me as he fought for balance.
Still gasping for breath, I swung up behind him, then abruptly swelled to almost double normal size. Before he could react, I'd wrapped my hands about his throat. Quickly I tightened my grip while my hind talons sank into his wings and back. Then my hands started to twist as I began to slowly wring his neck.
It was like trying to strangle a fire hose. Damn he was strong! He thrashed and clawed wildly, his hindquarters flailing about, his wings slamming against my sides with punishing force. I hung on grimly, my hands twisting, talons digging into flesh. Slowly, relentlessly I brought his head around to stare with his sad, mad eyes at my flame-wreathed fangs once again. I felt the burning in the back of my throat surge as I gaped my jaws to breathe my hatred directly into his face…
MY WINGS! HE'S FOULED MY WINGS!
God, no! His tail had whipped over my back and snared my right wing, and was now pulling it up and over, threatening to wrench it out of its socket. Control was destroyed, and the storm-wracked sky immediately began to tumble and spin sickeningly about us as the wind began a new, deadlier roar.
Let go! I twisted frantically, desperately trying to relieve the pull on my wing, trying to regain control as the ground rapidly swelled beneath us. I renewed my hold, but it wasn't going to work. He was too strong!
Let go! I attempted my size-changing trick again, but he was ready for it this time, using the shift to tighten his grip on my wing, wrenching it further. I hissed my agony as I felt tendons strain to the snapping point, and one of his hind legs started clawing at one of my inner webs, shredding the delicate skin. I shuddered, my hold loosening slightly, and he twisted in my grip and struck at my face, one venom-laden fang missing my eye by a talon's width.
LET GO! I was beginning to panic. The ground was expanding to fill all my vision, and still I couldn't get loose from this mad wyrm. Blood, this time my own, ran down my scales as he continued to rake at my wing. Again and again he struck at my face and throat as I let my hands slide into a slightly different but far deadlier grip, then TWIST. . . .
CRACK!
With a screech of pain, green-feathered coils shuddered violently, then relaxed. I wrenched my right wing back into position as they slid away, and I fought to right myself. Then I could see nothing but the ground reaching hungrily for me as I pulled up pulled up pulled up PULLED UP. . . .
The oblivion rushing to meet me hesitated, began to slide sideways slowly, then faster and faster. It blurred, then began to fall away, grudgingly giving way to an insane sky laced with lightning. My speed began to lessen, as did the agony in my red-trailing wing. A convection cell slid beneath me, cradled and lifted me, its moisture washing the blood from my armor as I soared; alone once again.
I looked down for my adversary. He had crashed into the canopy of the trees and happened to land on one that was big enough to support his weight. After only crashing a few meters into the tree, he had stopped and was dangling about 30-40 feet above the ground. He was moving slightly, as if trying to fly away, but couldn't.
I knew why. I had accidentally discovered it myself during my fledgling days. In the center of our backs is a bony protrusion that has a bundle of nerves the controls our wings motor functions. I had made a botched landing one day and had flipped over on my back and a tree stump had hit that nerve bundle and my wings instantly went slack and I couldn't move them. I had panicked then, thinking my flying days were over, but the feeling had started come back within 10 minutes and I was fully recovered in a few hours, to my relief.
He wouldn't be flying though. I landed and looked up at him. I had broken bone and in doing so, severed his nerves and making his wings useless. As I looked up at him, he turned a looked down at me and hissed quietly, probably thinking he was safe from me up there.
Not in the least.
I concentrated hard and the feeling of growth began. I only swelled a little before seeming coming up a against a mental block and started to slow. NO! I thought and, closing my eyes, I reached for the feeling with all I had. There was a moment of pause and I stared again, but pain began to build in my mind, more and more until at last I couldn't take it any longer and released the thought. I panted and staggered slightly from the pain until it lessened slightly and I opened my eyes.
His eyes were wide, frantic, as he tried to scale the tree like the snake he was, but he couldn't go up any further to escape my now monstrous body. Instead on him being 40 feet above me, I was now about 6 feet away. My head was bigger than a bus, my wings creating a roof as big as a concert hall, and my teeth were as long as grown man. He could easily fit into my mouth..…In fact,
I raised my now car-sized paw, gripped the tree, and began to apply power. The tree groaned and began the tilt as I pulled it toward me. The wyrm screeched in fear and hunched down, hanging on as I opened my mouth below him. I paused form a moment and then yanked on the tree. With a thunder-like crack to echo the storm around up, the trunk split and he lost his grip in the backlash.
As he disappeared beyond my muzzle. I looked into his eyes. I saw the pain, the fear, and the hopelessness. I hope he understood, somewhere in his animal brain, what he had done was the cause of this.
As he hit my jaw, I snapped my mouth closed and lowered it. I felt him, only slight bumps to me, slamming around inside, almost mad with desperation, trying to find any means of escape. I offered one. Gaping my mouth slightly, I let light in the front and felt his head pass between my teeth.
I then snapped them shut, threw back my head and swallowed as a spray blood and an object fell to earth.
The storm-lashed jungle surrounding the ragged little clearing heaved wildly in the dreary light of dawn as I slowly limped my way the last few meters to my mate's dark den, cradling with my forelegs the burden I carried. She was there, waiting for me. After my "meal", my bodies pain level kept rising until I was forced to shrink to my normal "double tonnage' size. Maybe I could be bigger, maybe it just takes practice, I didn't care at the moment. I kept shrinking to my normal size, retrieved the object and flew for the den.
I looked at her for a very long time as she lay there within her nest, then I gently nuzzled her feathers, feeling their texture, inhaling their scent once more. I lifted my head and gazed at what she had guarded so faithfully, at the three crushed and mangled newborns, and the shattered remains of a certain blue-gray egg.
I flinched away, then turned to look at my mate again, carefully setting my burden before her as one would an offering before an altar.
The head of her tormentor and murderer.
. . . .One last present, baby. . . .
Slowly I backed my way out, not stopping until I was well clear of the dark opening. I stared at it for I don't know how long, thinking of things that might have been. Then I arched my neck, gaped my jaws and flamed.
The huge old stone blocks above the opening slowly began to sizzle and crack from the heat. I kept on, a pounding beginning in my head and a dull ache in my chest as the stone glowed, slumped, then collapsed with a roar, bringing down most of the hillside with it, sealing the chamber.
I gazed at the wreckage at my feet for a moment, then closed my eyes and lifted my head skyward and let the rain and my tears run down my scales for a few minutes. Then I sighed and let my neck droop.
I guess some people just aren't allowed dreams.
A final glance at the ruins of my own little dream, then I slowly spread my battered wings and painfully labored my way into the sky; a sky beginning to fill with the gray light of a day that I wish I had not lived to see.
Tomas, the guy that ran the night shift at the package store, looked up from his newspaper and blinked as I set three bottles of Jack Daniels down on the counter. He glanced at me worriedly, then slowly began to ring them up. "Anything else?"
"No." I handed him my cash, then headed for the door with my purchase.
"Hey."
I turned, to find him looking at me with concern.
"You okay?"
I looked at him for a long moment, then shook my head as I turned away. "No."
I walked out of the store, the bottles quietly clinking in the bag under my arm. I looked up through a gap in the churning night sky, at what would very shortly be another full moon. A vision of golden eyes set in opalescent green slid into my thoughts, and I stood there, clenching my fists until both the vision and the stinging in my eyes faded. I sighed, then hugged the bottles more closely to me as I began the long walk home, wherever that is now.