[piosenniel]

Angara’s eyes went wide in disbelief, a half-chewed rib-bone dropping from her mouth. A flaming missile had launched itself in her direction. Had that pretender-wyrm gone suddenly mad!

I thought you said she had mastered the form! Pio’s words beat a loud tattoo in Angara’s mind.

With barely a heartbeat between the sighting of flames and the hammering of words in her head, Angara grew larger in size and knocked the Elf down, sweeping her beneath a table, far to the left of the fiery winged arrow headed their way. The flames would barely register against her own scaled hide and she intended her larger mass to be a cushion for the smaller dragon to bump into – and hopefully just fall to the floor.

In the rushed action she had not taken into account a fundamental old M-E axiom – Best laid plans etc. etc. . . .

Bird’s swift, flaming-snouted, densely compact body hit the larger Wyrm’s belly with considerable force. All equations, and vector diagrams, and complicated physics-maths aside – the two muscled and strong-boned, steely tendoned creatures went crashing against the back wall of the ballroom.

And through it . . .

Pio crawled out from beneath the table and clambered over the wreckage of wood and plaster and rent tapestry hangings. Kicking a once elegantly wrought sconce out of the way, she approached the final landing area of the dragons.

‘Well, isn’t this just a fine kettle of wyrms!’ she snorted, shaking her head. But where she had expected to see two dragons, there was now only one smallish gold one. ‘Lord & Lady! Angara – tell me you didn’t swallow her whole!” Angara puffed out her cheeks and spit out a sodden and bedraggled looking largish cricket. “Nope, I didn’t swallow her, now did I?”

neek-breek breek-neek neek-breek . . . came the irritated outcry from the pile of rubble where the Neekerbreeker now perched. In less than the time it takes to draw a breath, a slender woman clothed in leather breeches and a cotton tunic now stood face to face with Pio. Bird laughed, wiping a gob of dragon spittle from her cheek, and winked at her old friend.

“So, how’d you like that entrance?”