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Amongst Dragons
Salma landed heavily in the clearing and for a long moment her hind legs holds the entirety of her considerable weight, the horns and spines upon her body rattle briefly as warning while Salma checks to see if anyone had invaded the clearing she’d claimed until, satisfied that none had come near, she dropped down onto all fours. The dragoness' mouth opens for the first time since entering the clearing to deposit the small hoard of stones she had been keeping there onto the pile she had been collecting over the last three months; the majority of the are black or a dark grey color but there are some splashes of color in reddish or blue-tinged rocks, regardless of the color or shape the stones are all smooth with no sharp edges.
The Horntail is remarkably large at nearly seventeen meters as apposed to the average fifteen meters in length and, normally, her weight would be over one-thousand two-hundred kilograms. Salma, in her first year of sexual maturity at the ripe age of five, has managed to get pregnant and the weight of her stomach heavy with a clutch of eggs meant that she had gained over four-hundred kilograms. Though less visible then when she had been on her hind legs, it is possible to see small bulges in the thinner skin of the dragoness' stomach where the eggs, nearly ready to be laid, vied for more room in her crowded body.
The bulges shifted as Salma walked, the eggs rolling about inside her as she moved until she stopped at a depression in the ground. To her it wasn't a hole in the ground or by any means large despite what humans confronted with such a thing would declare it, no to her it was a nest to lay her eggs. She tilted her head, on great yellow eye inspecting it before she snorted out a soft stream of smoke in disapproval.
Not quite ready.
Salma lifted her right foreleg off the ground and proceeded to use the tough skin of her knuckles to dig, her talons occasionally used to scrape out a piece of rock in the way, until the hole had been both widened and deepened by a third of it's original size. Satisfied, the Horntail started the tedious task of spreading her hoard of smooth stones all around the nest - only stopping when the ground surrounding the nest was no longer visible for an entire tail length.
For a second time Salma heaved herself onto her hind legs, the skin of her stomach stretching to show six distinct bulges, to breath fire on the area. The flames hardened the dirt nest and scorched the few colorful stones to black but most of all, the flames marked the territory as Salma's own - proclaimed that this was her nest.
The task of creating a nest for her eggs complete, Salma took to the sky once more in search of food.
Not four months ago, when Salma had been on a hunt, she would have been targeting elk or even other dragons for food. Now, though, the eggs inside of her didn't allow her to risk such things and were too developed to even fly in the manner needed to hunt another dragon. With the restriction on her, Salma goes after the same prey that she did when she was an adolescent learning to hunt - deer.