The moment your foot crosses the frost-slick threshold into the glacial cathedral that forms the mouth of her domain—walls taller than trees and curved inward like the ribs of a beast long since fossilised in golden ice—you realise, not just intellectually but in the very marrow of your bones, that this is no place for mortals to tread with hope or ambition or even reverence; it is a place of inevitability, of indulgent hunger carved into architecture, of rules not written on paper or in stone but etched deep into the bedrock by the will of a singular being whose appetite has never known denial.

The air does not welcome you; instead, it presses against your lungs with the weight of frostbitten centuries, perfumed with a scent both sweet and unsettling—like overripe raspberries left to ferment atop bones that were never cleaned, mingled with the stale heat of belly breath and the clean, sharp tang of distant snow, as though the entire world around you has been exhaled from the lips of something that eats kingdoms for recreation and digests myths out of boredom.

There are no flames here, no torches to ward off darkness, only the pulse of bluish light diffused through the frozen walls—walls that seem to breathe just slightly, flexing and contracting with a rhythm that does not align with your heartbeat but instead forces it to adjust itself in response, as though your body, too, already understands that it is no longer sovereign.

There is no herald, no thunderous fanfare, no scream of wind to signal her approach—only a slow and subtle shift in the quality of the space around you: the temperature drops with such immediacy that your teeth ache in your jaw, the floor hums beneath your boots with vibrations that feel personal, almost intimate, and your senses spike into panic not because of what you see but because of what you feel in the pit of your stomach, like a predator’s eyes fixing on you from somewhere beyond the veil of logic and light.

Elsie does not explode onto the scene in fury or dominance—she doesn't need to; she enters like a glacier flowing downhill, slow and heavy and devastating, her presence so commanding that the space seems to pull itself inward to accommodate her massive frame, her limbs trailing wisps of frost that curl around stone like fingers testing for weakness, her golden scales flickering in and out of visibility as if reality itself can’t quite look at her directly without flinching.

Her wings are colossal, vast beyond what your brain had previously considered possible without collapsing under its own weight, and yet she moves with the fluidity and careless grace of a woman lounging in a hot tub after a long day—her thick, muscular tail trailing behind her like a whip half-curled in amusement, her enormous underbelly swinging with delicious fullness, each step causing the contents within to slosh and shift with the unmistakable sound of trapped, living bodies jostling inside their final, luxurious prison.

She halts a mere breath away, her chest rising and falling slowly, deliberately, with the unhurried patience of a creature that has never once had to concern itself with time or consequences, and as her massive snout tilts downward to examine you, the heavy musk of her breath wraps around your shoulders like a weighted blanket soaked in fermented sugar and spoilt wine—heady, sweet, and almost nauseating in its intimacy.

She lifts a claw, lazily dragging it across the swollen curve of her belly, where movement can now be seen—subtle, slow rolls of flesh that pulse just beneath the shimmering golden surface of her scales like someone far, far too late to change their fate.

She speaks then—not in words that dance or weave, but in syllables cracked and broken, her voice a frigid drawl soaked in slurred consonants and guttural vowels, shaped by vocal cords never meant for this tongue and strained by her own disinterest in using them.

“You all squirm. You all wish for stuff,” she purrs, dragging a claw in lazy circles across the swollen curve of her gut. “Belly remember. Belly always hungry."