The scaled woman's horned head tilted just slightly on hearing his growled insults. "I am Tiamat, you little [i]bug[/i]. Mother of life, and first goddess of the primordial sea. That you are graced with my gaze at all is far more than you deserve."

Her knees bent, and she spread her arms wide. Each of her fingertips bore a great curved talon, as long as a carving knife and wickedly sharp. A mere flick of her wrist would have sufficed to slice an ordinary man into a half-dozen pieces, but in this case that would evidently not be enough. She beckoned, instead, egging on the beast as he rose up and drew level with her. "Much better. You may be uncouth for a meal, but at the very least..."

A stream of fire erupted in her direction, and she sprang up off her perch. "...You have the good grace to come to me already well-cooked!"

The stone where she'd stood less than a second before was promptly blasted into molten slag, but the dragon was already beyond the reach of the flames. Her wings snapped open, and she threw her weight forwards, plunging headfirst towards her prey. The blazing river rose to follow her, but she bobbed up a little further with every inch it adjusted, always flying just barely out of its reach. She did not beat her wings, nor attempt to desperately maneuver, but merely glided along the full length of the attack with an almost effortless grace. The searing, vaporizing fire of the phoenix might as well have been a bright orange carpet laid out to welcome her arrival.

Was it magic? One of her six godly powers? Hardly! This was only the natural result of the attack itself, and Tiamat's own mastery of flight. Any mass of fire so formidably large and hot created waves of heated, expanding air around it, which naturally rose upward due to the resulting loss of density. It was this air that Tiamat was gliding on, catching the upward flow with her extended wings and letting it buoy her just above the raging inferno as it moved to follow her. In this way she rode the flames straight to Archontikos, their crackle and roar mingling with the sound of her mocking laughter.

Perhaps the lion would realize his mistake and stop the torrent, but by then it would already be too late. Tiamat had altitude, she had momentum, and her agility in the air was such that a mere tilt of her wings brought her swooping upward just a fraction of a second before collision. As she flashed past above her prey, her left leg whipped downwards, a full set of talons extended to rake across the back of his uppermost right wing.

[@Griffintaur]