It took about 30 seconds for her to realize plan “Drag the snake somewhere safe” would not be working out.

It was too heavy. She could drag it, barely, but it’d take her forever to get anywhere and wouldn’t be the safest thing to do with other animals that may want to attack her lurking around. She’d thought about slinging it around her body somehow, but it was too thick. She would basically be trapped struggling to move with this thing wrapped around her and be even more exposed.

So she decided to go with plan B, which was to just eat as much of it as she could and keep a patch of scaled skin as a souvenir. It wouldn’t be as nice as having the whole thing but that was fine. This plan had a much lower chance of getting her ambushed.

She set into the snake and filled her belly. She managed to get a chunk of skin with an adept use of saliva to dissolve the parts around her desired patch and used her claws to tear the section off. She worked it on to her head and set off.

She moved further into the forest, being much more alert for danger than she had been, keeping eyes, ears and nose out for any would-be ambushers.

It had been getting steadily brighter, but she was caught off guard when she was suddenly blasted by a beam of ocular pain from the heavens.

What is that!?

There was a patch in the sky between the trees near the horizon that had suddenly become pain incarnate. It had been getting brighter for a while but now she suddenly couldn’t look anywhere near it. In fact, as soon as it was visible it made everything hurt to look at.

Through squinted watery eyes she saw a darker spot nearby and darted over to it. The pain immediately abated, although looking at the brighter spots still hurt some. Daring a peek it looked like some of the tree branches and leaves were between her and that ferociously bright spot. It still hurt to look in that direction, light bleeding around the edges.

She should have expected this really. It had been going fine, she didn’t realize it would get bright so suddenly. Looking around, there were a lot of shadows now. It was actually pretty amazing. She’d figured out shadows before with her crystal, finding out that you could put stuff in between it and the shine and it’d block it.

She’d had a lot of fun rendering herself and other things as flat shadows on the wall. This was like that writ large. This light was so bright it made everything have a shadow! That was really cool. She decided to move on regardless. This was tolerable and there were enough shadows that she could move around without too much trouble.

There was actually more shadow than bright spots, the forest canopy being thick enough that most areas were in the shade.

She patted her head with a paw.

Yup still up there.

Blue scale patch in place, she moved on.