Nothing happened then dinner came along

It isn't easy being a dragon

Laying her long jaw gently on the floor of the cavern, Earthquake sighed. She was bored. She'd been in this cavern for weeks now and every day that passed had been a repeat of the day before. Squirming and arching her head to get at the itch between her shoulder blades, she raked a broken tooth across the erect scales. Satisfied that she'd savaged the itch into submission, she rested her head back onto the sandy floor and went back to doing what she wanted to do.

Weeks of waiting had taken their toll. Once she'd had a full rounded belly; bloated on ripe maidens and plucky minstrels, but now all she could see was the clear outline of dragon ribs along the iridescent flanks. Looking beyond she could see the reason for her self-imposed abstinence. A slight bulge in her lower abdomen pinpointed the spot where months ago she had laid three blue eggs on the warm sand before immediately covering them with her huge body to keep them warm.

As a fledgling in the nest she had seen the mating flights of the older dragons, heard the female's calls, challenging the males to rise from their lairs and join them in their mid-air couplings. It was much later, when the mated females had grown almost too fat to fly that the bad-tempered snarling and growling had started. The nest would almost give a collective sigh of relief when the gravid females would finally take wing and fly south to the birthing caverns.

As the years passed, she grew from fledgling to youngling and from youngling to hunter. The mating flights were repeated each year, each time witnessed by a new batch of fledglings. During that time she had grown into one of the nest's best hunters, ignoring the mating calls, determined not to give in to such weakness, but that had been before she had met Red.

From opposite ends of the same valley they had both spotted the same human digging in an open field. Diving from above, talons extended to grab the first good meal she'd seen for a week, she had almost collided with the other dragon, who apparently had the same human in his sights. Startled, she had swung aside at the last moment, giving their prey an opportunity to race like a startled deer for the nearest trees. On the ground she had growled her displeasure at the other dragon, recognising him as a nest mate. He had made her lose her prey she snarled angrily at him. Ignoring her, he stamped up to the trees and opened his jaws, hurling out a long gobbet of white-hot flame. The nearest trees caught fire. With smoke billowing and twisting in the breeze, she almost missed the pale blur as her human, spooked by the flames, suddenly bolted from his hiding place. A snap of the huge red head and the creature was hanging limp in his jaws. Red then gallantly opened up the carcass and pushed the liver and and other organs to one side for her. He took the head. Afterwards he gripped the remaining the meat in his claws and flew back to the nest, dropping his prize in front of that year's fledglings.

That was why when the next mating season arrived and Red had called to her across the nest, she had taken to the skies and coupled. It was only afterwards, when she had gotten too heavy to be able to catch her own food, that she realised it was going to be an awfully long time until the next tasty mouthful. Since then feeling hungry had become a way of life. She woke hungry and went to sleep hungry and felt nagging hunger pangs at all the times in between.

A clanking sound suddenly caught her attention. Craning her long neck she managed to stretch it far enough so she could just see out of the cavern's entrance. In the late afternoon sunlight there was a human covered in a shiny grey skin clambering up the scree slope outside the cavern. He was heading her way. She withdrew her head and waited. She had heard about these humans. Most humans ran for cover when any of her kind appeared, but there were some, a rare few indeed, who ran out to meet them. Her nest mates had reported that these humans died as easily as the ones that ran away, but that their flesh was hidden behind a skin that was as hard as rock. The dragons who were too impatient to carefully crack the skin in half and tease out the flesh inside, complained that the hard skin got wedged between their teeth, sometime taking years to worm its way out. After weeks without food, Earthquake almost drooled at the prospect of fresh meat on its way. She counted the heartbeats as she waited, holding her breath until a grey shape stumbled across the threshold of the cavern.