The day before had been normal as far as she could remember. Animals had ran from her, she chased them, ate them, then she continued roaming her territory. Afterwards she went to drink from the river. That was where she passed that odd hatchling.

Her memory of it was gone, deemed unimportant. It had gotten her attention, the way it looked like there were two of them, but then it held still. There hadn't been a point in going after it. It would likely starve without its mother and she likely had killed it already.

She was woken up in the middle of the night by an itch on her neck. An insect had bit her, not that she understood that. A quick scratch against a tree and she was back to snoring.

Now that itch dominated a third of her attention. The other two thirds were the way her body felt like it was on fire and her joints ached. She was hungry, too. She felt as if she were starving.

The feeling of fire in her belly drove her into a constant run. Burning the excess energy she felt boiling in her helped and the itch on her neck became bearable, but that didn't help the feeling of hunger. Ever since then she hadn't stopped running and killing. The pack of edmontosaurus were slammed into without warning. A female barely got to warn the others before she was swallowing the head. The calf that had been knocked over had an entire section of its back and ribs crushed before they were torn away.

That's how it went as the dinosaurs scattered. One bite too powerful to escape from, another body added, rinse and repeat. Even the eggs weren't spared as their parents abandoned them to reproduce elsewhere.

Three generations were laid out amidst the broken nests. Two elders, one adult, and three calfs were laid out with a massive bite taken out of each of them. The eggs were practically mush as it ran over the predator's tongue.

With the same ferocity she showed when they were alive the bodies were barely chewed as they were torn apart. The raptors that had been following her gave her more of a berth than normal. One of their pack had already disappeared between bites without any sign of acknowledgement. It had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The hot blood helped make her aching teeth feel better. Her skin felt like it was constantly being pelted by sparks of fire every time a raindrop hit her. Slinging one of the corpses against herself, a behaivor so alien to her, a shiver of relief washed over her as the blood seemed to suck the fire from her own.

But like before the hunger returned. She could feel the meat and bones in her stomach disappear. Groaning in discomfort she finished off the other corpses before going to run after the others.

Catching a few stragglers was easy enough. With all the blood she had thrown around plenty of them had been splashed. Despite the rain coming down they were stained. A calf that couldn't keep up, its mother getting slammed by a skull harder than stone, and countless others chased down. She chased them for longer than what should have been possible. One even died after its heart gave out, not that it got to stay in its chest cavity.

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Yet, despite having eaten twice her own weight, it all disappeared. Snapping at a tree in frustration she charged off again, venturing out of her own territory.

With the river as her guide she followed the old trail of the sautopods. They would have been long gone, but even they needed rest. But not her, not with so much energy flowing through her. Any smaller animals drinking from the river were either decapitated and eaten or chased down and eaten.

Running almost non stop she was bound to run into something. The river eventually spread out, feeding into a swamp. Her mountain was behind her, the familiar forest having transitioned to swampland miles back. Each step added to her frustration as branches snapped against her hide, cuts along her body steamed as the hot blood found an escape. Even her legs were beginning to accumulate cuts from jutting pieces of wood, but she kept running.

The scent of those sauropods had been picked up. Miles were nothing to her, not just because she had no sense of measurement but because sinking her teeth into something was her highest priority.

She would have to wait before she could get a sauropod, although the alternative wasn't too small. A long sail was coming out of the water, the body underneath sliding over the mud as the dinosaur gripped a long fish in an oddly long mouth. Despite what the future species of the planet would hope to witness the spinosaur didn't have enough time to climb out of the water before its own food was taken from it with interest.

Stronger jaws snapped shut over its own and the animal was being slung around. Tons of weight were planted firmly in the mud while it's own were forcibly removed from the river, dragged by its mouth, then into a tree after the tyrannosaurus's jaws snapped shut. As the female swallowed each of the three pieces, one after the other, she kept her eye on the disfigured predator struggling to gather its wits.

For her, feeding off those chunks was only the beginning. The hunger actually lessened somewhat, but she was still starving. So, after those pieces disappeared, she was already charging forward again. The spinosaurus was only just getting back on its feet, prepared to run, but then the jaws that disfigured it were stabbed into its neck. Pain flared again as it was shook around and another piece of it was torn away. The roar of pain died in a gurgle as it started drowning on its own blood.

Finally, the hunger felt like it had been sated little by little. With each piece she tore from the carcass the fire in her belly gathered into a tighter ball, drawing it away from the rest of her body. The soreness in her joints gradually disappeared along with the dinosaur's liver, the burning of her skin became ice but she kept eating. Relief was in her jaws, running though her teeth in crimson streams, snapping wetly and disappearing.

The body was hollowed out and the limbs had been stripped of meat, shattered, and eaten to the joints before she stopped. Her breathing grew labored, the energy she had been using had condensed in her like a miniature star, and now that her body was running on its own energy it realized it had long ago expended its own natural reserves. Her whole body felt sluggish, as if it were one with the muck in the swamp, dragging her down.

That was what happened, in a way. She collapsed against the rest of the body, nestling into the ribcage. The blood, once cooling on her skin, felt warm as she shivered. Closing her eyes was easy as the skin was beginning to droop and fuse. Unconsciousness took her as her downy-feathers fell away and pink skin rippled, sticking to the still warm corpse of the spinosaurus. The bones of both creaked as they were drawn in into a ball of pulsing pink meat.

A curious frog nearby watched the blob of tissue suck in itself before the outside hardened. Before the cracks sealed themselves a burst of fire struck out like sunlight. It was unable to jump out of the way before it was struck and thrown back into the water, smoking as its charred remains sank into the silt.