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“Kikoli! Wait!”

Kikoli glared venomously at her male counterpart cowering in the undergrowth. She strutted into the open flaunting her hips, just to spite. This should’ve blown their cover, but the dragons on the forest floor hadn’t seen either of them yet.

Fuming at the blindness of the dragons, Kikoli thwomped her tail and roared, “Little wyrms! Will you not look upon my magnificence?!” Her spine quills speared up. From behind her, fiery evening light caught the lining of her golden jewelry and pastel-red scales, giving her a menacing, regal look.

Down below, six young male dragons of brown hides had been taking turns offering a pair of dragonesses (Sera the Sapphire and Ezra the Emerald) a share of gold treasure. Coins and trinkets and bedazzling gems would join a glittering stash, and then another plunder-encumbered dragon would take the place of the previous. The dragons, young and malleable, did this in their dumb belief of a rumor circulated by the dragonesses themselves, that those who gave the dragonesses tribute would be “magically warded against thornskull dragons.” Neither Sera nor Ezra knew magic, however, and Ezra knew thornskulls were a scarce sight in the Heimlich region. But the two cons planned to “book it” to some faraway peninsula before the little runts ever suspected.

But fate served Sera and Ezra just when—wouldn’t you know—they heard the shouts of a female thornskull. Looking up, they saw her tromping towards them down a deep slope. She measured about fifteen foot from talon to skull: five feet taller than the young dragons and a couple of feet short of the dragonesses. Sera and Ezra—unlucky cons they were—stole looks at each other and gulped. The young dragons eyed them expectantly. So Ezra and Sera began nagging back and forth, Sera starting them off:

“You said thornskulls weren’t frequent here!”

“They aren’t!”

“Aren’t’s not ‘were’n’t,’ obviously!”

Fat from a myriad of previous dragons she'd eaten flowed across Kikoli’s rump, belly and thighs as she galloped down. How engorged! I mean, how gorgeous!

Charciko, her exasperated mate, pranced out of the undergrowth after her. If eighty-eight dragons had faced them, maybe she’d’ve heeded his words about an ambush, as opposed to a full-blown charge. But all Kikoli saw were a bunch of runts and their mothers. And needing to prepare for that would have been quite pathetic, she would have argued.

The Browns bared their fangs, but backpedaled toward the dragonesses. A couple of them broke their confident masks to glance over and see how the dragonesses would help them.

But the dragonesses were busy helping themselves. They bagged up all the loot they conned off of those little rascals. They each knotted up a huge leather sack full of however much they could haul in flight. Straining their forearms, they grunted and skipped a few steps on their haunches and then flogged their wings. Finally, flight-bound!

Bye bye, little rascals!

Young dragon voices chased after them. The dragons were disoriented, betrayed. But the dragonesses winged themselves speedily through the oaks, galumphing and weaving, and soon but a whistle of wind. At least, they'd've been if we’d’ve left the runts as their only pursuers.

A hound for the smell of gold, Kikoli sprang after the trail of treasure-scent. Her wings barreled fervently. Fingers of fire flashed from her lips as she snarled, “No one flaps off with MY prize and gets away.” She piloted through the oaks, demonstrating surprising agile.

Flamethrowers tailed the cursing dragonesses. If they’d’a just spilled some of the loot from the sacks, they could’ve lightened their load enough to lighten their pace enough to see the light of day the day next. But no.

Kikoli homing in on the dragonesses lowered her snout. Her venomous snout-horn gleamed in the blood sunbeams. She ambitiously thrust her wings then with the snout-horn drove home.

Pain needled through Sera's rump. She bleated. Numbness carved across her left wing, and she recklessly veered on her right shoulder. She went riposting to the darkness-engulfed floor.

“Sare!” Ezra screamed. She dove.

Kikoli jackknifed upward, her snout-horn tasting the second of the two. A stuttering gasp leapt out of Ezra. Her wide-eyed gaze became fixed, as if hot-glued. So too became the rest of her. She dropped from the sky, statuesque.

The sky-chase had just started when Charciko bulled after the young dragons (who we shall forthwith call “the Browns”). The Browns were slogging after the females, afoot, and just now unfurling their wings. The pum-pum-pum-pum-pum of rapid feet alerted one of them, who rounded dead in his tracks. Dirt smoked behind his braked hind-paws. His eyes shrank to the size of ants, showing in their shaking green irises a growing thornskull male. “Guys!”

Feral forepaws smashed his chest. He ripped to the forest floor like a piece of cardboard, then, bounded off of, gave a pulsed grunt. The moment Char sailed off him, his tail breezed by, and with one of its barbs nicked the Brown's ear membranes.

The venom froze the Brown's face with horror. His system shut down. Forepaws he’d raised in defense bedded uselessly on the ground.

“Don’t let your guard down.” Charciko tsked, blazing over the detritus. He had a funny gait but moved with a fast efficiency.

No one heard his advice.

Pum-pum-pum-pum-pum. This the remaining Browns did hear, in addition to a quick as lightning crackling of twig and leaf. What’s more, the hard breaths of a predator zoomed toward them. But none of them sensed it until, one by one, the thornskull dogged them down, leaving them but immobile masses of scale in a zigzagging curtain of dust licked by the waning mahogany sun.

The last of the Browns charged away as fast as he could but, by and by, wore out his little battery. Charciko sharply steered, herding him into a dead end of tree and thicket. Calmly, he prowled forward. “If you plan on putting up a fight, now’s the time,” he said, and gave a signaling tilt of his chin.

Survival blazed in his prey’s eyes. The Brown displayed canines that could gut an ox.

The dragons rounded on one another, silence knifed into by the crisp sounds of nature per footfall, by the sound of the wind whistling hollowly beneath their arced, flagged wings . . .

The Red sprang.

The Brown bounced back so abruptly, he gave his neck whiplash.

The Red rose on his haunches. He curled his forepaws. A brawler? Talons swiped forward. The Brown exclaimed and dipped fluidly enough to dodge the first two strikes but fell on his rear trying to elude the third. Charciko chuckled. He whirled, his tail spiking the Brown onto his back.

“Tag. You’re it.”

It wasn’t just that he had tagged the Brown with his tail: he had tagged the Brown with his venom.

All the males Charciko had envenomed reached almost above his neck—when they stood (though, they weren’t like to do that again). So he could’ve formed a pretty dapper pile of the keeled bodies. But the work wouldn’t’ve been worth the effort. And he asked himself, Would Kikoli form a pile for me? He shot himself a silly cross-eyed look.

The forest thundered twice.

Curiosity took Charciko through a dense cavity of trees toward the source of the sound. He exited seeing the Sapphire and the Emerald. Sera was crumpled flat on one flank, while Ezra was laid out like an animal rug (or a treasure map, whichever please you). Two glittering tails of gold trailed across the detritus to the spilled sacks of plunder overturned before their forepaws. Presently Kikoli alighted between the dragonesses. Not seeming to see her mate, she cried:

“The fools! Gold strewn everywhere . . .” Sulkily, she strode up to him and bumped her nose to his strong plates. “Charciko, do you see what they did?”

He nuzzled her, glancing at the gold transparently. “A little mess for us to clean up, my gem. Though, don’t worry about it now. I think someone’s getting cranky from not eating all day.”

She nodded then ran her nose to the top of his neck. “Starving . . .”

Telling her they’d save the dragonesses for last, Charciko led her to the path of paralyzed Browns. She laughed and teased him about his own little mess. He bashfully looked away, smiling, kicking his hindpaw in the dust.

Each of them spotted a Brown and stalked towards them, rumbling deliciously.

The male thornskull rounded his helpless prey, batting its sides with his tail. Though the Brown couldn’t squirm or plea, Charciko sensed the drumming panic of his heart; from slight twitches of his stagnant gaze, sensed the Brown grappling for mobility against the neurotoxin, despite how steadfast its effects.

The Brown saw forepaws plod down a foot from his nose then saw serpent-green eyes, a red snout, and a moist grin. The thornskull’s neck snaked forward. Flexing jaws engulfed his vision. Dragon’s breath . . . predator’s breath . . . Is this what it was like for my prey? The Brown tried to whine but couldn't. Please, no . . . I’m begging you . . . let me g-go . . . Imprisoned in his own flesh, he could only watch as the inside of the slimy throat insulated his vision; listen as wet glorks pounded heavy in his ears; feel as the tongue, that slick tongue, lapped under his under-plates and lathered him in sticky, stinky slather. Humidity siphoned away at his energy. His coherence became very drunkard, and whatever thoughts he did have surreal.

Charciko upended his jaws, slurping down the salty-savory haunches and the tip of the tail. The Brown dragon sank to the bottom of his belly, and his belly sank to his shins, warbling and wobbling before quickly settling.

A feeling of fullness set in, like a fist to his gut. Charciko burped, some of the taste returning to his mouth. His belly ballooned—not quite so low to the ground as Kikoli’s would. But soon he and she both would have to fly to move, period.

Not far away was Kikoli. Her craw was bloated pregnantly above her sapphire-studded necklace. Half a dragon hung in a headstand position from her jaws as her jaws scissored toward the forest canopy. Each flex of her throat tucked away more of what was rightfully hers. The necklace whimpered. It stretched as no ordinary necklace could as her prey filtered down. And soon her jaws clicked together.

“Groooaoahhhrrrwrp,” she burped. Her midriff sucked her prey into a tight fetal position.

She and Charciko crossed paths with ursine gaits. They focused not on each other, but on their next meal.

Charciko practically inhaled his seconds. He swallowed his meal by the tail, and his stomach soon shoved his feet off the ground. He waddled in inertia, chuckling and slurping down the the Brown’s head. His tongue tasted his lips before slipping into his sealing maw. Gulp. This second meal shared the cramped compartment with the first, whose scales had a glossy shine from the acids working away at them. The unparalleled armor of a dragon, of two dragons . . . “Beeeeeellluuuuurrrrrurwch!” . . . was, to Charciko’s favor, more supple now than it was when fully solid. So, as the belch vacuumed the air out of his gut, his meals curled compactly. Later tonight, they’d be naught but a blob of matter nurturing a fatter, healthier predator, supplying him some potent venom.

The gas expulsion placed his feet back on the forest floor. But he could only keep them flat if he tensed his gut muscles. After a few wing-flaps, he took off (though it was like lifting a boulder), and quickly alighted (not his decision). In this manner, he hop-flew to his third meal—the Brown he'd brawled earlier. The Brown was beginning to stir because the thornskull had measured his dosage.

He wanted him to squirm.

“How kind of you to wait for me,” the thornskull said, and descended.

The Brown could only see up to the Red’s ankles, but heard the serpentine rumble. Standing the Brown’s ears erect was the hot, ripe breath. It smelled of his friends. “Y-y-you won’t get me down without a f-fight.” Talking made the Brown realize how numb his throat and mouth were.

“Didn’t we already fight? And didn’t I already get you down? I’ll readily do it again, little one.” His jaws spread like a snake’s. They engulfed his prey’s head with a squelching wobble atop his gullet. Rumbling. As the venom wore off, The Brown lunged for his shoulders. Talons hooked into them, driving to his powerful chest. But Charciko simultaneously shrugged them off and yanked more of his meal down with a flex of throat muscles.

Dazed. Confused. Refusing to believe this was real. The prey’s paws shot up with sickling talons, the gesture someone makes when they say “boo.” His paws had meant to cleave down into the predator’s hide; but a wave of drowsiness fogged his mind, and they came over the Ruby instead in a sort of hug. The sort of hug the referee breaks up in a boxing match.

The predator was chortling.

Physical strength depleted. The Brown grumbled weakly. His paws slid from the predator’s back as he channeled his strength to his jaws. Squelches resounded in the surrounding esophagus as the Brown's jaws labored open. He took the deepest inhale of stagnant air he could. Eyes closed. Belly fires raged. Nostrils smoked. The Brown's neck recoiled as his suspended belly swelled, and then he let loose a fiery—

“BWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHAAWWWWRP.” Charciko burped in his face, stunning him out of an attack. And chortled—and chortled so hard, he could feel the hot humiliation seething off of his prey.

The prey’s limp arms felt moist predator jowls slide against them. Gulp. His shoulders became wet and hot. Glurrk. Then his wings. Glark, gulk, gulp, gulllp. And by the time all of him had become wet and hot, he reckoned it was a dream. Trying to prove he could brawl against the thornskull, but just wading harmlessly against a gooey bed of scales . . . His friends? And above him, a heavy, blanket of flesh seeming to chew on him . . .

“Burrroaaarrrp.” Charciko poked his gut with a teasing smile. “So, buddy. Where’s this ‘fight’ you said you were gonna—urp—put up?” To the music of gurgling, he let up a couple of effortless burps, smacked his lips. “Is it here?” He poked a claw somewhere. “Or is it here?” The claw tried again. “Or?” Charciko cocked his head, awaiting a response. His stomach answered, and he groaned out a deep belch that stopped the squirming for good. “Ope, I guess not.”

He rested his head on his belly. It was like being perched on a firm, gurgling nimbus cloud.

With the sunbeams turning to dark-fires, he summoned the strength to hop-fly some more. He backtracked through the woods but found Kikoli and the other Browns missing. Figuring she’d hastened to eat one of the dragonesses (and not entirely sure she’d save him the other if he moseyed), he fluttered urgently through the oaks. A couple of times, he got sequestered in the clusters before finding his way out.



Ezra blinked. The stiffness of her body ceased. She bolted away from the spilled gold with her breaths coming in abrupt jerks, gathering her surroundings. She saw Sera. A groan heaved from her stomach, and she at once dropped to her traveling partner’s side. She shook her. “Sare, speak! Please!”

The Emerald boasted natural resistance against venom, but she knew the Sapphire susceptible. She thought of administering her anti-venom, but then approaching footsteps laid thumps in her breast. She spun to a hissing of leaves, and into the fray returned Kikoli. Her belly dragged across the ground like a bloated wineskin. The way she entered was this: oblivious to Ezra and Sera, burping and burping the movement out of her third meal. For each belch, the clearing shuddered; birds chirped awake in their nests two stories up. The thornskull huffed and used her paw to fan the stink about, and did not excuse herself, for a Queen amongst dragonkind does no such thing. Then she saw Ezra.

“Well well, you’re just an eager thing, aren’t you? Couldn’t lay still, you’re so excited to become a pretty sight on my backend.”

Sharply glaring at her, “Never,” Ezra snarled. She rose. Both dragonesses circled.

Kikoli smelled fear. Her stomach rumbled for a quarter-turn, and she licked her lips cutely. “You say it as though you don’t want to, darling.” The sapphires on her necklace seemed to flash. She flaunted her juicy hips, whack, whack, rolls of fat jiggling down to her tail. “Alone, you’re nothing. For malachites, you see, are meant to be worn . . . by a Queen . . .”

As that rump sashayed by her nose, whirls were in Ezra’s eyes. She shook her head, tried to blink the spell away. A lump of words croaked up from her throat: “To have the gall to try to sway me to such a view. To sway a con-artist, of all creatures. I know all the tricks in the bag.”

Kikoli crooned, “I do not try. I do. You will want to become part of me, and you will forget yourself.” The dragonesses weren’t orbiting anymore. Kikoli made straight for the other, resiliently, as though nothing were in her path. “What do you want, little Malachite? What am I? What am I?”

Ezra backed away slower and slower. She tried to wrench her gaze free from those glittering pastel-red scales, those barreling hips: the work of hundreds of great dragonesses stuffed down the Ruby’s gullet, as always was the inevitable.

“What am I to you, little Malachite?”

It no longer registered to Ezra that she stood taller than Kikoli.

Kikoli was huge. Kikoli was . . . gorgeous. Ezra’s heart beat at the speed of hummingbird wings, her whole body hot and melting, like dribbling wax. She opened her mouth to speak again and again, but the words to describe the magnificent beast before her eluded her.

No. Inferior. All of those words. Unworthy of naming the thornskull dragoness. But one she tried a few, anyway:

“My Queen.

“My Queen, you are so gorgeous . . .”

Kikoli’s pink eyes gleamed crisply, chilling some subconscious half of Ezra. The Ruby drew a talon along Ezra's temple, and breathed, “Of course I am, darling. Now be a real darling and hop down your Queen’s throat, will you?” With a seductive flutter of her eyes, she yawned her maw open wide. Breathtaking.

The obedient Emerald sleepwalked toward her. Though, she had forgotten she was an Emerald. Now she was a Malachite. The Queen’s Malachite. “Let me join with you, my Queen.” Colorless. Without inflection.

The Sapphire could only watch blankly as the parts of Ezra she could see were leveled above her line-of-sight into, she supposed, the thornskull’s mouth. Above flexing, gold neck plates. Her travel partner was hypnotized!

Savory-sweetness oozed down Kikoli’s throat. The eyelashes of her keeling eyes fluttered heavenly, and she hummed gratefully. Malachite, I cannot WAIT for you to sculpt my rump. She was the hungry snake. The Emerald was the mere rodent. Every swallow reaffirmed this.

When her prey’s delicious shoulders slimed past her esophagus’ epicenter, Kikoli’s necklace blew up at least five belt sizes. What I can say is, it for sure exceeded the flexibility of your ordinary twenty-four karat gold.

Her bloated craw whimpered like a waist bound by a corset too tightly. She rapped her neck and GULPED. And all at once, the Emerald shot DOWN. The lewdest, most un-queenly slurp lasted the entirety of the disappearance of belly, haunches and wings. A gleam of her vanishing tail, then Ezra was gone.

The Ruby dragoness rose couple of feet higher on her belly, like a winner atop a pedestal. Proudly kicking the air with her feet, she bugled triumphantly. And her head-thorns inflated triumphantly. And her belly gurgled triumphantly. And the loser kicked and screamed.

Kikoli moaned happily. Her nerve-clusters exploded. The pressure packed behind her sphincter grew from the size of a picket protest to a marching mob, and presently she gave in. She hammered out a belch that could rattle your head with a hard hat on top: “HRA-A-A-A-A-H-A-P!” Her belly thumped down a few inches. All the rest of her prey had long gone limp; the Emerald was the only one still wriggling—wriggling in delight, of all things! But the thornskull kicked the can on her with a deep uurrrrrrurururrrrroooaaaauuurp. Some of the essence from her previous meals gushed out of her mouth, tasting slightly acidic.

With a beleaguered groan, she glanced up and saw Charciko hop-flying through the threshold.

“These runts’ll make a thick layer of fat and a fine batch of venom, oof. Charciko, love, would you rub my belly?” She rolled onto her back, her huge mound of belly jutting toward the canopy.

Her mate looked at her from the edge of his eye, as if afraid of becoming hypnotized by her glamour himself. He chuckled. “Later, my jewel. I take it you saved me the Sapphire?”

“N-no,” she hiccuped and rubbed her belly, “but I can’t fit any more, so you can have her.”

Charciko hop-flew past her, kissing her cheek on the way to the Sapphire. “How sweet of you.”

Slurred sounds slogged from Sera’s throat. She could budge enough to shimmer, but not enough to look away when Charciko lowered his neck to look into her eyes.

“Hello!” He beamed handsomely. The Sapphire stared. “Goodbye,” he said.

Sorrow uncoiled in her heart as warm jaws closed on her tail. Per swallow, her talons slid backward, leaving scars in the detritus. Tingles shot up her spines; the thornskull was humming and suckling over them. Down the throat they laddered. Shwrl . . . shwrl . . . shwrl, the saliva said every time the thornskull gulped. It trickled down Sera's scales. Once his jaws scissored past the base of her tail, her rump shuddered from being so ticklish. Ticklish, of all things! She wanted to whimper, but some numb noise reverberated from her throat instead. Her hind-legs hugged her underbelly. Salivating jowls curtained across her hind-legs then ventured up, up, up to the apex of her belly.

Charciko’s gut jutted out behind his haunches, the end of an ovular trailer. His jaws ached, but he concentrated on the point of his snout-horn to dull the pain. Schwrl . . . shwrl . . . schwrl. Because the Sapphire’s wings were sprawled out, he had to pause to reach out and yank them taut against her flanks. Then the swallowing continued. The Red reddened in the face. Smoke fumed from his nose, the pressure behind his abdomen a leviathan.

If Sera had the power to do anything, she would have begged. Too wistful for her own good. Even now, teeth nibbled over her neck-spines and under her neck-plates. Quiet snorts drew over her ears. The upper jaw hooded her head with rows of teeth. The lower jaw met with the other, masking her face with frightening zags of white only distinguishable because of the blue glows of her eyes. The slimy appendage toyed with her, teased her. A dizzying belch thundered up through the gullet, spittle flying over her the back of her skull. She tried to whimper.

Then Charciko tired of entertaining himself. He gulped, and gravity thrust her down. A long squelch poured out of the sphincter. Charciko’s feet rose so far off the ground, humans would have to look up to see the bottoms of them. The feeling of fullness hit the bottom of his gut like an anchor hitting the ocean floor. “Oh, oh, I’m beached,” he grumbled. Big acid bubbles pecked at his belly walls. He hiccuped. The hiccup shook his stomach, triggering more burbling, more fizzing. The unbearable pressure broke free.

He burped; and leaves rustled and branches crackled, and foliage fell to the forest floor. An unburdening moan sounded. And the dragon jostled his gut, preparing to outdo himself. He belched; and leaves clattered and oaks cracked, and the roots of the oaks went rrr-r-ut-ut-ut-ut-ut-k. A delectable moan sounded. And the dragon jostled his gut and inhaled hugely, preparing to outdo himself. He belched; and a whole bed of leaves crashed, and squirrels and owls and jays and nests of jays showered down onto the forest floor, and the forest floor itself went throo-woob-wub-wub-woom-wub-wub-wum-thum.

So heavy was the belch, he landed on his back beside his love. And they looked into each other’s eyes, their gazes fierce. Not battle fierce, but fierce the way belly-fires are. And this got so intense that the curious critters who’d stopped to watch it scrammed, saying such things as “ew!” and “icky!”

The thornskulls gazed into each other’s eyes for a long time—long enough for them to press moist snouts together and exchange throat music. But then Kikoli’s gaze wavered and glazed over, and an unhappy harrumph came from her. For her mate had challenged her to burp louder, but she was too sleepy to triumph against him now. Let him have it this time, she thought. She pulled his head close, burped softly into his ear, and said, “You win.”

Charciko blushed, grinning at her goofily.

Thus Charciko and Kikoli: big-bellied and surrounded by riches, richly in love with one another. Red slivers of sunlight dimmed until they died. The night went finally and completely blaushwarz—a snazzy way of saying blue-black—and the two dragons fell to slumber with their wings and their limbs tangled, their breaths joined in exhalation and hearts in eternity.

The acids of their stomachs ground against their stomach walls noisily, and were like to stay up late; but by and by, they gave it a rest. With calm efficiency, the meal-digesting bellies kept them warm, warm as their cave would’ve.

Late night rumors circulated within the dragon community: rumors of thornskulls, known dragon-eaters. They had accumulated great gold hoards not far north, but no one dared steal from them. For those who attempted would much likely become part of a different hoard: a belly hoard. And no matter how much a dragon loves to have a hoard, no dragon loves to be a hoard.

So the two mates slept, ever unbothered.



Morning dragged her dragon-fires across the woods. Critter sounds distantly proliferated. First to stir was Charciko. Soon as he groaned and turned from his mate onto his back, Kikoli shifted awake, and yawned, and pawed at him and smacked her lips. Half-asleep she gave him three meaty smacks on his belly that rang clear through the ambient quiet. Charciko rumbled, smacked it with his right, then felt in it a tremor.

Hrrrurruuuuuaauauauauauauaawrr-r-r-r-u-r-u-r-k!

Out of his maw spewed a current of bones lathered with drool and digestive juices, now strewn about the ground. At the end of the burp, three dragon skulls flew and clacked down on the forest floor harshly. Another pressure bubbled in his belly still, and he let it up deeply and held his paw out.

GAaAAAaAAOWWWUUURrRrRP!

The giant skull of the Sapphire dragoness wetly slapped into his paw, larger than his own skull. “Better luck next time. Or not.” He tsked and shook his head then tossed the skull with the rest.

Kikoli’s tail intertwined with his. She braced for her own self-purging, her stomach beginning to grumble. “Oof,” she said, and slung herself over Charciko, and went:

BRAHAOuuurrrRuUUrp, hROARp, GWEeEEAAAaAAHHHHWWRRrRRrRRrRCH.

The bone carcasses of two dragons, one dragon, and the Emerald dragoness respectively. Skulls topped the rug of marrow coated in filthy, membranous fluids. Kikoli covered her mouth with a paw. The two watched the pile, admiring their work.

Wakened by their belching, they became aware of the work their bodies had done overnight.

The thornskull male’s belly was a fluffy mattress of fat. No doubt, the larger Sapphire had spoiled him rotten. Three winter-fleeces’ worth of pudge had puffed up his tail; possibly, an entire Brown had melted away to meld with just that tail. His plump rump and packed thighs were enough to make pre-meal Kikoli appear anorexic.

But here lay post-meal Kikoli. Her belly was like a big, pillowy airbag. The majority of the dragons after being digested had toured straight into her hips. Her caravan backend could block the views of a pair of dragons her size in concert. Layer upon layer of her previous meals sculpted her frame, rear-central. And the refined sheen of her pastel-red scales wonderfully complimented her gold head-thorn rings, her sapphire-studded necklace and forepaw bracelets. Truly none other than the engorged, gorgeous Kikoli was worthy of the title Kinslayer. Except maybe her mate.

“My jewel,” she breathed venomously into his ear, embracing him with her pudgy warmth.

Charciko smiled and embraced her too, and basked in her warmth and breath on his chest, and in her natural scent. “My jewel,” he whispered back.

For who, or what, but her would he greed for?

Later that day, once they had burnt off the adequate pudge to move, they took the leather sacks and rounded up the spilled plunder, and not a lick of it they left behind—Kikoli ensured this. And they flew off with it to the cave they’d been calling home, and arranged all the resplendent spoils as they would furniture, and as if they had taken much consideration into Feng Shui. And when all the labor was done, Kikoli plopped onto a heaping pile of gold because it was precious to her, and she prided in it very much.

And what did Chariko do?

He said, “Cannonball!” and plopped onto Kikoli.