This is a fun little story. I expected the ancient ritual to involve a sacred sword and trident.

It’s not quite clear why you “counted [yourself] lucky”.

A quibble: “ground that randomly spit fire” should be “spits fire” (or “spat fire”, I guess).

On a conceptual note, this was really well played – I didn’t expect the twist in the slightest (although perhaps I should have done, this being one of your originals, after all).

On a strictly technical note, however, there were a few sentences – particularly in the middle – where some punctuation could have been used to great effect to emphasise certain points and to break up relatively monotonous sentences.

Nicely told in such a dramatic way. Love the pun-tastic fun of ripping out the artichoke heart. It reads as either absurd fantasy or a really creative way of enjoying an evening of cooking.

I totally got a visual of the ROUS’s when you described the ground that spat fire. And that was before I read the tags!

Mmmm, artichoke hearts…

I rather imagined it as a giant hunting before I got to the end. This made me smile, very well played :)