Day 2,129

We drove in the vast emptiness beneath its ribs, counting vertebrae the size of houses and trying to keep our breathing even. It didn't matter how long the wretched thing had been dead for, not when you were driving over the densely compacted ashes of all the civilisations it had torched.

Undeath wasn't nearly as uncommon back when it was alive, in fact the towns it slaughtered sometimes picked themselves up and went right back to work afterwards... if it left their corpses charred. It soon learnt to reduce them to ashes and save itself the hassle of coming back to finish what it started.

Much like a dead bird will still cling to the branch it died on, tendons locked into place until it rots away to nothing, the dragon remained perfectly standing from the tip of its horns to the jagged spines on its tail. The only thing to have collapsed was the wings which had slowly lowered in its final moments and were now curled around it like it might still raise them and take flight.

None of us wanted to be there but the heat signature in the area had gone haywire the week before and the unspoken thought was that there was an egg buried somewhere under the bones and ash. We were lucky that this one had died of old age, we never stood a chance against anything more than a dying one.

But the further we drove in, the closer we got to the dragon's skull, the hotter it became.