Thorenoussardus sharpened her claws on a jagged rock, instinctively knowing what was about to unfold. Her claw sharpening was a daily ritual, but her attention to detail on this day was even more acute. She tended them with added purpose, knowing that they would soon be tested to their fullest potential.

There! The first vibration, followed by another. She froze at attention! Only her nostrils flared as she savored the air to determine distance and direction. They were close. Very close. More and more taste developed in the back of her throat as she focused in on her distant, soon to be target. A calm resolve washed over her as she bolted into action.

Suddenly she was running, a startling contrast from the stillness only moments ago. Off in the distance, she could see the figures, their tiny heads poking out randomly above the hedge. They looked quite the same as the ones on the other side, but the others didn’t have the same pungent and malicious odor as these ones. What was it about them that made her so furious and spiteful?

As she approached, her rage quickened and she became even more adamant and intent on devouring them. And to her own astonishment, she stopped, panting in a silent reservoir of fury. She knew that they were deserving of maximum destruction. She could inhale and sense their injustice and wrongdoing, yet she was paralyzed in her ability to act. She begged her muscular frame and mighty jaws of death to go teething and seething as they were so want to do, still they would not obey. Bewildered and confused, she hovered above them as though caught in a dark limbo, a purgatory of inaction.

The young faces of the Russian soldiers gazed upward at her, surveying her terrifying tooth-filled jaws as her saliva rained down upon them, dripping and sweating like a warm cascade of salty spray. One by one, the soldiers lay down their rifles and backing up and backing up, slowly made their way backward across the border, back from whence they came.

The Ukrainian forces slowly and cautiously emerged from hiding, casually relaxed their rifles, looking with their weary, glassy eyes through Thorenoussardus. They neither cheered nor amazed, but simply turned and slumped toward home, heavily weighted in the knowledge of the work that was to follow.