Equestria is a land of many and various ecosystems; indeed, Princess Celestia once proclaimed that her nation’s environment was almost as diverse as the ponies who inhabited it. Within its vast borders, the intrepid traveler could experience mountains, forests, deserts, plains, and nearly every type of wetland imaginable. That said, there was one particular wetland—a swamp, to be specific—which inspired more than its fair share of trepidation. Gnarled, moss-laden trees writhed and curled their way out of the soggy peat, their thick, dark leaves covering the ground in shadow. What little sunlight managed to crack through this canopy was filtered through an acrid, brown mist that seemed to rise out of the ground as if it came from some pollution-belching subterranean factory.
This bizarre sense of organic industry was only heightened by the intensely hot plumes of flame that sporadically burst out of the ground like out-of-control blast furnaces. These fire geysers were more than enough to discourage the overwhelming majority of travelers from entering the swamp, but ironically enough, they were also the only reason the the swamp was traversable in the first place. It was their intense heat that dried out the decaying peat into solid cakes, creating a somewhat usable land route to the fishing villages to its south, which otherwise could only be reached by boat or flight. It was in the midst of this inhospitable waste that a solitary predator emerged from the shadows, quietly seeking out its prey.
Well... perhaps “solitary” wasn’t the most accurate descriptor in this instance. Or “quietly,” for that matter.
“I just don’t see why we’re wasting all this time hunting when we could probably get just as much food by scavenging. It’s half the work for the same reward.”
Eleanor groaned and placed a paw against the side of her head, where a sharp migraine was steadily gathering in strength. It was bad enough that her sister was always criticizing her, but unlike most tigers, Eleanor didn’t have the luxury of walking away when the griping became unbearable, because her sister also happened to be conjoined to her shoulder. “We’ve been over this, Agatha,” she said, rolling her eyes with impatience as she turned to her left to address the goat head directly. “Carrion is far too unsanitary. We need fresh meat, and to get fresh meat, we need to kill that meat ourselves, and in order to kill the meat, first we must hunt it. Are we clear?” Eleanor didn’t wait for an answer; instead, she stepped forward as if to continue the hunt, but Agatha’s cloven hind legs refused to cooperate.
The goat’s inexplicably pierced ears flattened as she sternly glowered back at her sister. “Not this time, sister,” Agatha said firmly. “We’re not going bounding off just so you can have the last word.”
Eleanor responded with a threatening growl, but a lifetime spent attached to a tiger seemed to have obliterated any timidity that may have been in Agatha’s nature; her legs remained rooted to their spots. “If you’d just let me graze on some swamp grass every now and then, we wouldn’t have to spend days going hungry while you looked for prey,” the goat insisted.
Somehow, Eleanor managed to retain enough self-control to keep from letting loose with a stream of expletives. It wasn’t easy being the only head on a chimera that had an appropriate sense of the dignity that came with being a predator. “We are carnivorous,” the tiger head growled.
“Hah!” Agatha replied haughtily. “If you’re so carnivorous, then why are you always trying to get your claws on some apple pie? Did you think there was meat in it?”
“There’s meat in apple pie?!” interjected a melodious voice from behind the two bickering heads.
Eleanor sighed. Sometimes, the only thing worse than Agatha’s nagging was her other sister’s spacey absent-mindedness. About the only good thing she could say about the viper who acted as her tail was that she usually seemed content to keep to herself most of the time. “No, Irene. Agatha’s just being snippy, as usual.”
“Are you sure? I mean, it would be so nice if more desserts had meat in them. Like, I was thinking maybe pony meat would be good if it was ground up into a cupcake...”
“Irene, please shut up,” Agatha said with a groan. “Your sister and I are busy fighting.”
The snake seemed rather nonplussed by this dismissal. “Well, if one of you has an idea that involves meat candy, I vote for that one.”
As the viper’s attention moved to what was no doubt some manner of shiny object, Eleanor continued her conversation with her sister. “Listen, Agatha, apple pie is the exception that proves the rule; therefore, we’re carnivorous.”
“That doesn’t make any sense at all! Exceptions don’t prove rules; they disprove them.” Not for the first time, Agatha looked like she wanted to give Eleanor a face full of the horns on her head, but the mechanics of headbutting one’s conjoined triplet had proven much too unwieldy for her in the past, so she had to settle for continued glowering.
“Will you quit splitting hairs?” Eleanor said. “If we just stood around so you could eat grass, we’d be the laughingstock of the entire swamp! How are we supposed to be effective predators if our prey isn’t intimidated by us?”
“Actually, if other animals didn’t find us intimidating, that would probably make preying on them easier.”
“Ugh! This is just like you! Quick with the criticism, but never offering a solid idea of your own.”
Agatha, however, had already prepared a retort. “I just said I could eat swamp grass to keep our stomach filled,” she said, continuing to glare at her sister.
Eleanor shook her head. “You must have misheard me. I want solid ideas, not stupid ones.”
“I explained why I think it’s a good idea.”
“Yes, and your stupid explanation is how I could tell that you were wrong.”
“Um, Eleanor...” Irene said hesitantly.
Eleanor didn’t even bother averting her eyes from Agatha as she answered, “Not now, Irene.” She continued dressing down her other sister. “We have an important role to play in this swamp—”
“I think I saw something,” Irene said, undeterred.
“Later, Irene,” Eleanor replied.
“Actually, I think we ought to take a look at it,” Agatha said, her eyes moving away from the tiger’s striped face and towards an empty space above her ears.
“Don’t you try to change the subject!” Eleanor snapped. She hated it when Agatha broke eye contact in the middle of a conversation.
Irene whirled her body through the air and smacked Eleanor in the side of the head with her neck. “No, really, we should probably head over there and have a look,” she said, gesturing towards of thicket of blackish-green bushes with her head.
Eleanor rubbed her jaw with one of her paws. “Ergh... fine, we’ll have a look at your whatever-it-is.”
The “whatever-it-is” turned out to be an abnormally large vermin, or what was left of it. The sisters had never bothered to find out the proper name for these rodents of unusual size, but they made for pretty good meals—filling, if a little on the bland side. This particular rodent was still mostly intact, with the obvious exception of the massive, bloody gash across its abdomen, from which assorted viscera and organs had spilled out, along with a puddle of dark red blood that was already soaking into the peat, creating an aroma that made Eleanor think of a rusty horseshoe inside of a moldy sock, even though she’d never really smelled either of these things in her life.
However, now was not the time to dwell on bizarre sensory experiences. “Something else is hunting our prey,” the tiger said somberly.
“Really?” Irene asked as she curled around to face her sister. “Do you think they might give us a few pointers? Because we don’t seem to be very good at hunting them.”
“We’ll do nothing of the sort,” Eleanor snarled, exposing even more of her razor-sharp teeth than usual. “‘They’ are trying to eat our food.”
“If you ask me, none of it was eaten,” Agatha interjected, her usual quivering whinny made even more intolerable with the addition of a healthy dose of excessively-knowledgeable pretension. “Pretty much everything is still there—it’s just spread out a bit.”
Eleanor was in no mood to listen to her sister play detective. “If it wasn’t attacked, then why are its intestines so far away from the rest of its body? A really nasty toe-stubbing, perhaps?”
“I never said it wasn’t attacked,” Agatha replied. “It just wasn’t eaten. I’d guess that it survived the attack and got away in time to die from its injuries.”
“Really?” Irene said, suddenly imposing herself on the conversation. She brought her head low to the ground and stared at the rodent for a few seconds. “It hasn’t been dead very long, though. It’s still warm.”
“And how do you know that?” Eleanor asked irritably.
“I’m a viper. Vipers can sense temperature.”
“And why haven’t you mentioned this before?!” Eleanor shouted in frustration. “That sort of thing would be incredibly useful while hunting.”
“Well, of course,” Irene replied. “Why do you think I’m always saying stuff like ‘Look over there,’ and ‘Hey, I think there’s something over here’?”
Eleanor didn’t quite know how to respond to this, so she simply scratched her head in thunderstruck bemusement. “But... but I—”
“You know,” Agatha said with triumphal smugness in her voice, “if you would actually listen to your sisters every now and then...”
This was enough snark to return Eleanor to her usual mood. “Oh, shut up! You’ve been ignoring her, too. In any case, we need to figure out what’s going on here. If Irene’s right, and the body is still warm...” The tiger’s eyes widened as the implications suddenly burst into her train of thought. “...that means it hasn’t been dead long. The intruder must be nearby! Come on, we need to get going!”
Somewhat predictably, Agatha did not share her sister’s enthusiasm. “Are you nuts? Why on earth would you want to hunt another large predator?”
“Because we need to defend our territory, obviously,” Eleanor replied incredulously.
“If it were obvious, do you really think I would have asked you?” Agatha deadpanned as she lowered her eyelids.
“Yes, you would, because you like to contradict everything I say,” Eleanor replied.
Notably, Agatha didn’t even bother denying her sister’s claim. “We’ve never done any of this territory defending business before.”
“Well, no other predators have ever tried to challenge us before.”
“Fine,” Agatha said, letting out an exasperated sigh. “But can we at least eat this rodent first?”
“No!” Eleanor roared. “We need to track the intruder while the trail’s still fresh, and besides, that’s carrion, and we don’t eat carrion.”
“The flies haven’t even started to gather yet!” Agatha said, wresting control of one of Eleanor’s paws and pointing towards the remains to emphasize her point. “Surely that’s sanitary enough for you.”
“Defending our status as the swamp’s top predator takes priority over a meal. You’ve got to know your place on the food chain!”
“Hang on,” Irene suddenly said as she slithered between her sisters’ necks, “we’re supposed to chain up our food? That would definitely make it easier to hunt.”
Eleanor smacked her paw against her face. “No, Irene. Whatever did this wants to take our place on the food chain, which means that it wants to take our food.”
“Well, maybe it doesn’t know that it’s already ours. We should find it and explain things.”
Eleanor looked askance at the viper head. “I agree, if by ‘explain things,’ you mean ‘rip the bastard to shreds.’”
Irene shook her head. “Uh, no, I meant that we should explain things. Who knows? It might be friendly.”
“Can’t this wait until later?” Agatha asked, eyeing the rodent carcass greedily. “Preferably until after we’ve eaten this rodent?”
“No,” Eleanor said sternly, stamping one of her paws into the peat for emphasis. “If we want to find this intruder, we need to track it now, before the trail goes cold.”
“Oh! I want to find it!” Irene shouted enthusiastically. “Maybe it has some good cupcake recipes!”
Eleanor decided to ignore the latter part of her sister’s statement and focus on the positive. “Great! That means we’ve got a consensus.”
“Actually, you only have a majority,” Agatha corrected.
“Whatever,” Eleanor said. “We have some tracking to do.”
The tracking itself went much more smoothly than normal, thanks in part to Eleanor’s sarcastic inquiry as to any other talents that Irene had—which was how she learned that Irene’s sense of smell was far more sensitive than hers or Agatha’s. This turned out to be quite useful, since the rodent’s blood trail had already soaked into the peat, making it almost impossible to see with the naked eye, and ended at the edge of one of the few streams in the swamp that ran fast enough to keep relatively clear of decaying plant matter.
Irene’s head hovered over the ground as she flicked her tongue repeatedly to gather elusive scent particles. “Definitely a reptile,” she said after a brief analysis. “But it’s not one I’ve ever smelled before.”
Eleanor nodded. It had been a long time since she and her sisters had done any proper tracking, as opposed to stumbling on a target through sheer luck. Doing things the right way for once made for an invigorating experience. “Can you tell where it is?”
“I’m not sure,” Irene replied with mild consternation in her voice. “It must have done a lot of moving around when it attacked the rodent, because its scent is all over the place. I should be able to tell you if we’re on the right track once we get moving again, though.”
“Okay... how about you, Agatha?” Eleanor said. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any hidden talents that could help us out.”
“Shut up,” Agatha said curtly as her ears twitched.
“Ugh, this is so typical of—”
“No, I mean be quiet so I can listen,” Agatha said in a harsh whisper.
Eleanor grudgingly did so, and soon she was able to hear what had piqued her sister’s interest: irregular splashes, coming not from the stream, but from somewhere past its opposite bank. Without a second thought Eleanor leapt into the water (giving her sisters mild cases of whiplash in the process) and swam to the opposite shore, where she could see the tracks of a large animal that had only recently pulled itself onto the bank. Ignoring Agatha’s attempts to chew her out for not providing an adequate warning, she ran through swamp, weaving around the fire geysers and exposed roots of the trees, pausing only to let Irene verify that their quarry was still ahead.
Eventually, though, the sisters arrived at a brackish pool of stagnant water with a line of stones poking out through its surface, and Eleanor skidded to a halt. “You’re stopping now?” Agatha asked, confused, only to be answered with a quick shushing noise as Eleanor took her sisters into some tall grass at the water’s edge.
“The ripples around those stones look suspicious,” the tiger explained. “I think the intruder is nearby.”
Irene flickered her tongue a few times and confirmed her sister’s theory. “It’s definitely close. The scent is really strong.”
“Which is why we’re going to wait here until it shows itself,” Eleanor replied.
Of course, waiting is, by nature, a rather dull activity, and as the minutes crawled by with no apparent change, the sisters began to grow restless. It was only Irene’s assurance that the intruder’s scent had yet to diminish that kept them from giving up and returning to their original task of searching for food—Agatha in particular seemed convinced that there might still be something salvageable from the rodent’s carcass. Indeed, when a live rodent of unusual size approached the pool, Agatha almost mustered up the willpower to wrench control away from Eleanor so she could attack.
“Come on,” the goat whispered angrily through clenched teeth. “It’s right there, and we’re hungry!”
Eleanor was just about to give in to the temptation to launch yet another round of bickering when the argument was suddenly rendered utterly moot. What the three of them had assumed was a row of rocks jutting out of the water’s surface suddenly rose out of the water, revealing itself to be a huge, reptilian beast with scales of hard, greenish-grey stone: a cragodile. Before any of the sisters could fully register the sight before them, the beast’s jaws had clamped onto its victim’s midsection and the squealing rodent was dragged underneath the water. The splashing and struggling ended a minute or so later, and soon the cragodile rose to the surface again.
For the briefest of moments, the sisters were stunned into silence, then they were ablaze with opinions.
“Ooh,” Irene said with a sudden dreamy look on her face. “He looks cute.”
“‘He’? Do you even know if it’s male?” Eleanor asked irritably.
“No, but we can find out, can’t we?”
“That’s true,” Eleanor said with a nod. “We can examine its corpse after we’ve torn it limb from limb.”
“No! We can’t do that,” Irene insisted. “It’s really hard to date somebody who’s dead.”
“Oh, no,” Eleanor replied sternly as she waggled a claw at the viper. “As a chimera, we only have four species to choose from for a mate, and cragodiles are not an option. It’s bad enough that we have to deal with Agatha’s ‘alternative lifestyle’ without you chasing after any reptile that strikes your fancy.”
“It is not a lifestyle,” Agatha angrily retorted. “I am simply not attracted to males, and that is that.”
“As I’ve said before,” Eleanor replied in a low growl, “I’m perfectly willing to make some accommodations for you, as long as it doesn’t get interfere with the propagation of our species—but we can discuss this later,” she abruptly said, cutting herself off to keep from heading off on a tangent. “Right now, we need a plan of attack.”
“I have a better idea,” Agatha said. “We should just retreat.”
Eleanor did her best to stifle the angry growl that rose unbidden from her throat. “Excuse me? The enemy is in our sight, and we have the element of surprise. Why on earth should we run away?”
“Because there’s no way we can beat that thing,” Agatha replied calmly. “We’re talking about a cragodile here. Its skin is made of stone. How are we supposed to get past defenses like that?”
If Eleanor had a reply to this, she never had the opportunity to say so. “Yoo-hoo! Mr. Cragodile! You wouldn’t happen to be single, by any chance?” Irene called out as she batted her eyes in what was apparently supposed to be a demonstration of coyness. Almost as an afterthought, the viper added: “Also, are you male?”
The good news, of course, was that Irene was quite successful in getting the cragodile’s attention, as the large predator turned its gaze towards their hiding place and spotted them almost immediately. The bad news was that her sisters had been correct in assuming that the cragodile’s attention was not particularly desirable in the first place.
Though its massive form looked ungainly, the cragodile’s appearance belied a surprising agility. In one swift movement, it lunged towards the chimera, covering a distance greater than its considerable body length as it opened its toothy jaws wide before snapping them shut with an audible clack mere inches from Eleanor’s paws. This was sufficient to faze the tigress enough for Agatha to wrest control of their body away from her, and the trio was soon bounding away from their pursuing adversary.
However, it seemed that the cragodile was more of a sprinter than a distance runner, as it was soon far behind. The lack of any visible threat released enough of Agatha’s tension to allow Eleanor to halt their retreat. “Hold it!” she roared as the three of them ground to a halt. “Why on earth are we running away?”
“I would have thought that was obvious,” Agatha replied, rocking her head back to gesture behind them. “I’d rather not be on that thing’s menu.”
“It wasn’t trying to eat us,” Eleanor said. “We just saw it feed. It was only trying to kill us.”
“Oh, well, I’m sorry if I missed the distinction,” Agatha replied as her mouth crumpled into a sneer. “Now, can we get going? I’d like to put more distance between us and that reptile.”
“Really?” Eleanor replied. “Because I prefer fighting to starving.”
“You’re exaggerating,” Agatha said. “We can find something else to eat.”
Eleanor shrugged the shoulder nearest to her head. “Today, sure. But you saw the size of that cragodile. If that thing sticks around, it’s going to be eating a lot of food, and anything that goes into its stomach won’t be going into ours. If it doesn’t go, sooner or later, we’ll have to.”
Irene gasped. “You mean we’ll have to move out of the swamp?”
“Well, that, or die of starvation,” Eleanor said.
“But I don’t want to move!” Irene exclaimed. “I only just got my corner of the den just the way I like it!”
“So you’re with me, then?” asked Eleanor.
“I guess...” Irene replied, hanging her head low, “but it’s such a shame that we have to fight someone that adorable.”
“Uh, right.” Eleanor turned her head back to her other sister. “How about you?”
Agatha let out a resigned sigh. “When you put it that way... I guess we might as well get this over with now.”
“Great!” Eleanor said a she turned their body back towards the general direction of the cragodile. “Then it’s time we take back our swamp!”
It wasn’t long before the sisters found the pool, but the cragodile was nowhere to be seen. Presumably, it had been content to frighten its opponents away and had decided to wait for more prey to ambush. Thus, Eleanor asked Irene to coax the cragodile out into the open again. She regretted the decision almost immediately.
“Mr. Cragodile? I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s going to work out between us. It’s not you; it’s me.... Well, actually, it’s not me either. It’s my sisters. You see, one of them is a racist and the other one’s a pervert.”
“Hey!” Eleanor and Agatha shouted in unison as they craned their necks so they could accost their sister to her face.
However, there was little time for another squabble to begin, as the cragodile charged out from behind a tree to their right and lunged towards the chimera, snapping its jaws closed near their midsection. Miraculously, the three sisters shifted effortlessly from bickering to coordinating their movements almost immediately, despite the fact that none of them was actually “in charge” at the moment. The chimera bounded into the air, landing on the cragodile’s tough, scaly back, giving Eleanor a perfect opportunity to sink her canines into one of the chinks in its stony armor.
Unfortunately, it seemed that underneath the top layer of armor was a second layer, intended to protect the cragodile from exactly that sort of attack. Eleanor’s roar of pain was only muffled when she brought one of her paws to her face and gingerly covered her chipped sabertooth. “Damn it!” she shouted as she jumped off the cragodile’s back, eyeing the reptile warily in case it attempted a counterattack. “We need a new plan, now!”
“Ooh!” Irene volunteered. “What if I bit him? I’m venomous, after all!”
“And where exactly are you going to bite it?” Eleanor asked as she dodged another lunge from the cragodile.
“I dunno,” Irene said. “Maybe he has a soft spot on his tummy. Maybe if you get close enough, I can slide under there and find out.”
Eleanor would very much have liked to knock this idea down as being silly and excessively dangerous, but she didn’t have one of her own to replace it. So, taking advantage of the cragodile’s relatively low agility, she darted around the beast, pretending to attack it near the base of its tail as Irene slithered beneath it. This seemed promising at first; not only were the sisters largely clear of the tail’s thrashing as it swept back and forth over the peat moss, but by staying close to the cragodile’s hind legs, its massive jaws were kept far out of range. However, the intruder’s attempts to bludgeon or bite the chimera stopped abruptly after about thirty seconds when it dashed away from the trio.
“What just happened?” Eleanor asked.
“Um... I think he might have felt me prodding for a nice soft spot for my fangs,” Irene said. “On the plus side, though, while I was poking around I found definite proof that Mr. Cragodile really is a ‘mister.’”
Eleanor groaned in exasperation. “Great. So there’s no soft spot on his underbelly, then?”
“I didn’t say that. It’s softer under there, but it’s not as soft as, say, an alligator’s underside. Actually, I’d say it’s about as tough as an alligator’s overside.”
Eleanor cast a sidelong glance at her other sister as she watched the cragodile lined itself up for another charge. “Hey, Agatha, feel free to jump in with an idea at any time.”
“I’ll have you know I’ve been trying to think of one,” Agatha said testily. She glanced back at her other sister. “Irene, you say the belly’s not as well protected as the rest?”
“Well, yeah, but it’s still pretty well protected,” Irene said, clearly uncertain what her sister was getting at.
“Right,” Agatha said with a nod. “We need to get away from here—”
“Damn it, Agatha! We are not running away!” Eleanor insisted.
“Let me finish,” Agatha snarled. “We need to get away from here so that we can fight on more advantageous terrain. Or haven’t you noticed that there aren’t that many fire geysers in this area?”
Eleanor briefly looked around and realized it was true; for the most part, the ground beneath them was solid because this section of swamp had dozens of tangled tree roots beneath the peat, giving it support, rather than the fire-dried peat bricks near their main hunting grounds. Suddenly, Agatha’s idea made perfect sense. “You want to lure it on top of one of the vents.”
“Exactly,” Agatha said with a smug grin on her face.
“Agatha, you’re a genius!” Eleanor exclaimed as she nimbly dodged the cragodile’s latest charge.
“Glad you finally noticed,” Agatha replied. “Now how about letting me be the leader from now on?”
Eleanor’s expression immediately darkened. “Don’t push your luck.”
Over the next thirty minutes, the sisters were more like matadors than predators as they coaxed the cragodile away from the safety of its brackish lair through a mixture of taunts, feints, and in Irene’s case, more than a few suggestive come-hither looks. But eventually, they lured the beast into one of the most active sections of the swamp, with dozens of geysers erupting in flame every few seconds.
However, all that nimble footwork took a lot of energy, and given how little food the sisters had eaten recently, they soon felt themselves wearing out and getting sluggish. It wasn’t too bad at first: indeed, it was little more than a vague feeling of weakness in the knees and Irene acting a bit more light-headed than usual. But as the fight dragged on, the close calls kept getting closer and closer. Eventually, the cragodile’s teeth grazed one of Agatha’s goat legs, which was enough to put all three sisters off-balance and nearly caused them to tumble right into an erupting plume of fire.
As Eleanor did her best to ignore the odor of singed fur, she sized up the situation. There seemed to be little chance that they’d be able to wear out the cragodile—not on an empty stomach, in any case. But the trouble was that the their opponent refused to stay put; every time they lured it over a vent, it charged them before the geyser could actually erupt. If Agatha’s plan was to work, they needed some way to keep their foe from moving around... but how could they do that with those teeth snapping at them whenever they got close?
Then, suddenly, inspiration hit Eleanor like an out-of-control ursa major. If the teeth were a problem, they could just remove them from the equation.
“Irene!” the tigress shouted. “The next time that thing charges, you need to wrap yourself around its mouth and hold it shut.”
Her sister, however, was rather less enthusiastic. “What?! I can’t do that! I’m a viper, not a constrictor!”
“We don’t have time to argue,” Eleanor snarled back. “Just shut up and do it!”
And as the cragodile charged past the sisters yet again, Irene did precisely that, hurling herself over its snout as soon as it snapped shut and curling herself around it like a bullwhip. “Okay,” she called out, “I think I’ve got him.”
Grinning, Eleanor reached out her claws and grabbed onto the beast’s rocky midsection. Even if she couldn’t pierce its skin, the crevices allowed her to maintain her grip as she shoved the cragodile on top of the nearest geyser vent and used all of her strength to prevent him from wriggling away.
“Well, this is just peachy,” Agatha said as the cragodile thrashed beneath them. “Now what?”
“Now,” Eleanor replied as she pressed her shoulder even harder against the beasts rocky skin, “we wait for the geyser to erupt.”
“Have you lost your mind?” Agatha screeched. “We’ll be burnt to a crisp!”
“Which is why we’ll have to let go and jump away at the last second,” Eleanor said evenly.
It seemed that the cragodile understood the gist of their conversation, because its thrashing grew even more violent. “Are you alright, Irene?” Eleanor called out.
“I think so,” the viper called back. “I haven’t had too much trouble keeping his mouth shut, but it feels like he’s going to rip me off of you if he keeps shaking his head.”
Eleanor wasn’t sure how to reassure her sister at first, but then she heard a soft gurgling noise from below the cragodile’s underbelly. “Just hang in there a little longer,” she said. The gurgling began to grow in volume, until Eleanor felt the peat beginning to shift slightly beneath them. She waited as long as she could, and then shouted, “Irene, let go!”
The chimera jumped back just in time to watch the cragodile take the full force of a fire geyser eruption to its midsection. The creature let out a low bellow that sounded like a pair of tremendous stones slowly grinding together, amplified a thousandfold as it was lifted off the ground by a jet of flame that spread out across its underbelly. It was all over in less than a second, but the brief moment when the reptile lay unmoving seemed to last an eternity. Finally, the cragodile got to its feet, and though it was obviously injured, it moved as fast as it could towards the edge of the swamp, leaving the sisters to quietly bask in the successful defense of their territory.
Unfortunately, though, that defense had been rather noisy, which meant that nearly all of the prey in that territory had gone into hiding. A quick trip back to the rodent carcass that had started this mess revealed that it had already started to rot in the swamp’s heat and humidity. With a sigh and a rumble from their stomach, the sisters slowly trudged back towards their den, hopeful that tomorrow would grant them a more successful hunt.
They were nearly halfway there when the conversation started again.
“You know,” Agatha said, “we still have the option of eating some swamp grass to tide us over.”
“Agatha...” Eleanor growled.
“Hey, a lot of perfectly respectable predators are omnivores,” Agatha insisted.
Eleanor groaned. “You just don’t get it, do you? This isn’t about respectability, it’s about...” The tigress abruptly lost her train of thought as her other sister started to repeatedly headbutt her in the back of the neck. “Can’t this wait until later, Irene?” she said, barely able to keep her voice from rising to a roar.
“Um, not really,” Irene replied. “It’s just that if I was you, I’d take a look near that tree stump over there.”
“Huh?” Eleanor asked. “What does that have to do with... ohhh....” The tigress stealthily guided her sisters to the stump in question and peered over it, where a rodent of unusual size (and unusual fatness, for that matter) was happily munching on some sort of plant life with a particularly stupid look on its face. Silently, she turned to look her sisters, who both joined her in a deliciously evil grin.
Without a further word of argument, Eleanor returned her attention to the rodent, subtly flexed her muscles, and pounced.