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The Adventure of a Reincarnated Kobold
A commission for 
venter_laetus
Dawf and Hilden (original character names changed) (C)
Midnight_Yamikidate
The turquoise kobold gasped awake, and took his first breath for the hundredth time.
Rain was smashing the satiny green forest floor, pounding the muck beneath the grass into a swampy mulch, washing away the footsteps of his former life.
He had been eaten by a bear—that much, he could remember. He had spent the dragon’s-share of that lifetime serving a bronze dragon named Barrus. If only he and his dragon hadn’t been separated by the fog, by the raging showers … If only he had stayed put … instead of becoming even more dreadfully lost … Mayhaps then, they would still be together. They would be returning to the cave on High Rock, Venter riding dragonback with that jury-rigged saddle.
He narrowed his emerald eyes on the crashing rain that misted on the rounded tip of his muzzle, sighed. He rose from the eggshells of his transformed gemstone, brushed some off his thighs and rear-end. He pinched around his navel, finding the hard shape of the gemstone reformed. Yes, it was there again. Good.
Across the misted detritus he traipsed. Every now and then, he would bow his head in search of his former incarnation’s footprints. Any of them would do to help him find his way back. Perhaps he could still find that old bronze. He stumbled a few times because he had to constantly look up to keep avoiding those gnarled boles of the trees. As he went forward, they would catch him unawares from the dense billows of grey. A couple of times, his foot plunged into a soup of mud or found itself ensnared by arching fingers of some tree base.
How long it seemed he had been walking blind when he finally found some footprints of his own. Footprints … that he’d just made a few minutes ago, he realized, judging by their freshness. His joy simmered. Venter had just been—as he always had been, as far as memory could tell—going in circles.
It was getting chilly. The retreat of the fog was followed by the fall of the sun from its lofty throne atop the clouds to the commonwealth below the treetops. He couldn’t quite see through the overstory’s congestion of verdure, but one thing was clear: The shadows were swallowing up the landscape that had been revealed just a seeming thought or two ago.
Spewing cold fog, he ignored all his footprints from then on. All were likely new. He hurried through ferns—whose tapering leaves glinted from the rain—and across spreads of mushrooms, rubbing his arms. The muck soiled his ankles, and splashed in globules as he passed.
Up ahead, the darkened shape of a hill reared its stone-dappled head, just past a stream in its high tide. Into the face that pointed profile-view at Venter was wrought a round arc, the entrance to a cave. Shelter, thought the kobold. He brushed aside prickly plants and ran toward the mound. He began to descend the saturated slope before the stream, but the slippery loam sloughed off a layer below his feet, making him slide onto his buttocks. He went rolling down, and then splashed into (what was for him) rather deep water.
He surfaced—chattering with the ice-cold water gnawing at his hide. He hurried toward the cave, wherein—he hoped—he would find warmth. The closer he came, the more that he sensed his plight was over. The subdued howl of the storm subsided more as the darker-than-dark enshrouded him. From farther down the mossy-walled interior, there resonated a stony, breathy, grinding sound. It retired as a metallically hollow one, the sound of inward breathing.
Venter froze in his tracks, waited for the hollow portion of the sound to repeat: Another rumbling of the underground preceded it. He scrambled into the entryway, where he had seen a small recess coming in. He tucked himself into that, focused on numbing himself to the chills.
He thought of going further into the cave no more. He would not wake a sleeping dragon, not when he knew not whether the dragon would greet him with benign grumpiness or tooth-and-claw for the late greeting. Although he would be revived no matter what, he would rather not be lacerated to nondescript pieces.
Too much danger in sleeping here … He would just rest his eyes … Warm up … Leave till daybreak, when the dragon was well-rested and likely more sociable …
The coma had other plans.
The kobold woke to his own long, inaudible yawn. Morning rays lapped at his face like grotesque tongues. He blinked awake, feeling suddenly lawless. Light the color of citrus and clam-flesh clothed the entry floor.
“Oh no … I didn’t leave.”
“No,” rumbled a huge voice. “You didn’t, did you?”
The initial roll of the ground from the loosening of that great, vintage voice pitched Venter’s off his feet and into a panic. He tried to stand fully, but bumped his head on the ceiling of the recess. That slumped him back into the previous pose and shadowed his vision with dots and maelstroms.
“I apologize for the overwhelming comfort of my home.”
It was the voice of a dragon, Venter realized with certainty: And it was flat in tone, rich in timbre, tinged with snark. The dragon sounded terrifyingly close, but Venter had not glanced to the side to see—could not summon the courage to do so.
There came a sigh.
“Well, that’s what I get for refurbishing the damn place. ’S what we get. If it weren’t so cosy, you might have woken with a backache earlier and been off before me knowing. But nevertheless, you’re here now, uninvited and descried. And you’re the closest thing to breakfast in sight.”
A black, purple-clawed forepaw that was as long—or, perhaps, longer—than Venter’s leg stepped in front of the recess. Dirt smoldered around the trembling floor.
“No, wait, let me explain,” came a small, sunken voice.
The voice drowned under the following booms of the dragon’s feet. The dragon paced around to face the recess, exposing an underbelly of virulent purple. But what have I to say that would concern him? I was searching for my master, needed shelter … so what? He’ll still be hungry, all the same …
“P-perhaps I could serve you something to ea-eak.”
He found himself clutched at maw level, inhaling the noxious purple billows of the dragon’s nose-breath. Big nostrils flared just a dragon’s foreleg-span away. Long fangs dripped from the back of his jaws, fell halfway down the length of loose, petal-shaped stubble of the dragon’s lower jaw.
This dragon was poisonous—was named Sini, unbeknownst to Venter. He twitchily raised a brow at the kobold, and the violet eyes behind his round spectacles narrowed irreverently.
“Heh? You came all this way just to propose to serve me?” His long, floppy ears galloped mockingly. His jaws motioned to laugh, but the sound never came. “Are your claws of more use than mine? Is your breath, are your legs, are your w—no, you haven’t any wings.” He shook his head. “Don’t swell yourself up to be more than you are. At best you’ll serve my stomach for a couple of hours. In you go!”
“Wait, you could use me—” Venter blathered on, squirmily trying to finish his pitch, but Sini was no longer listening. The dragon yawned, reeled closer his kobold-carrying fist and pitched Venter toward the pitch black of his maw. So many things, Venter could have proposed to the dragon, had he enough time. I may not find Barrus, but he could be my new master …
Yes, he decided. The black-and-purple drake would be his new master. When he revived, he would grow to be a bigger, better meal for the black-and-purple one.
What tore him from his reverie was the plop. His body now hugged the dragon’s warm, meaty tongue. Hrrrm-ing, the dragon grinded him against the rugged palate of his mouth using the thick, pink appendage. Slick splattering sounds preceded chintzy drizzling noises. The hot, gelatinous slime of the salivary glands poured down and oozed over the kobold’s head and back and arms, preparing him for a descent down the dragon’s esophagus, whose threshold bands-of-muscle wobbled and clenched into their empty circumferences eagerly.
Large talons released Venter’s tail. The giant tongue steepened its slope, rolling its midsection along the rugged palate closest to the upper frontal chops. With a hiccup of motion, the gullet straightened and spasmed for a gulp; and strong, slippery flesh threshed the kobold into the slimy, humid midsection of the throat. The throat—what with its breadth—could grant passage to prey twice his size and grip them with just a moderate tightness, and so he slid through the tract of wet, silken muscles without much great hold-up. Only because the throaty bands contracted inward a lot when the dragon swallowed did Venter feel the walls mold around him per swallow: They just purposely narrowed, schlepping him downward in a goop-laden descent.
It was soothing, the familiar convulsions of a dragon’s throat. While he enjoyed the ride, he noticed that this dragon was swallowing him toward the quaking sphincter rather fast, as though the dragon frequented much larger meals.
At this rate, I’ll have to become a much more filling meal for him, the kobold thought.
As fleshy bands congregated around him and heaved him toward the passage into the stomach, he imagined his bulge slipping through the base of the neck before fading below the forechest to amass again at the stomach; and the moment afterward, the esophageal tract squelched him out into a spacious belly. He splashed into riled-up tides of stomach acids, acids the color of concentrated plum juice. The floor of the gut caved downward: He could tell from the feeling below his feet as the murky enzymes rose over his body. They seared into his turquoise hide. He slipped, and the slow gravity of the dense liquids laid him on his backside, while the surface of the juices above rippled and bubbled and emitted gases of digested particles to permeate and swell the stomach per passing second. Around him the cavernous space shuddered, before a belch quaked the gut and spread wide the doorway to the esophagus. All became a blur of smog, both in the atmosphere and in Venter’s thoughts. Musks of previous game and decaying odors of fruits and vegetables steeped in the surrounding fluids. They burned his olfactory system with strong, bitter, sweet odors. Buried in the stink of the dragon’s paunch and serenaded by the cajoling echoes of a long, gritty, lionhearted belch, Venter felt the lack of oxygen muffle his thoughts. Soon, only the surest ones remained. And so, before the dragon digested him entirely, he decided:
I will serve him as best as I can.
Opting to hyper-metabolize the kobold, so that he could get on with his morning routine for the day without too tawdry a stomach cramp, Sini stretched his length in the mouth of the cave, then lounged there and bowed his head, concentrating on quickening the work of his digestive juices. His belly burgeoned at the flanks. It swelled with poisonous fumes, the byproduct of the belly’s furious gurgling and burbling. A metallic purr trilled out of the cave, for Sini fancied the abusive sensations of his juices and venomous miasmas puffing out his sides and battering his inner walls until he had to simply purge a flood of foul air, to announce his stomach’s filthy process to the woods.
“BuuwrrrOOORrrgGHH!”
The purgative belch fashioned a poisonous smoke stack from the vent of his lair, and he huffed with great relief, feeling as though he’d emptied his guts of all their contents. The significantly fresh, gamey flavor of his meal made itself hospitable on his taste buds, where it would reside for a couple meals more. For this he was glad. He smacked his chops and tasted the meat again before his stomach involuntarily heaved and rolled his main body in circles. Hypothermic shakes arrested his neck, and the neck straightened out of its serpentining shape before it dove back into the shape for his maw to retch up a slew of little kobold bones.
“Phew,” he said. He gazed down at the purple-steaming pile of bones. His eyes blinked in glee. After resting for a mental transition, Sini lumbered to his feet then padded out onto his muddy lawn, before he shimmied his wings and outstretched them, and then cast himself off the earth a-flight. His wingtips cleaved leaves from the trees and set them in autumnal swirls; and then he vanished beyond the tarp of needly broadleaf trees, bound to roam the woods to glimpse some event of intrigue and to perhaps write about it later after some lunch.
Buried beneath bones, bones drenched in stomach bile, a gemstone pulsated purple: the gemstone of the kobold’s navel. The shades of autumn maple and sherbet pink evaporated from the land as the sun climbed free from shyness and cast the woods beneath a baby blue. The bone pile rustled. The purpled gem had grown to the size of an egg, had become opaque and covered with a rough, chitinous surface.
The gem—the egg—it hatched.
A horned turquoise head emerged, and bones scattered and spilled about. The pile was peppered with eggshells. Alongside them, Venter took his first steps. Again.
Next time, I’ll be more than just breakfast. He’ll be gurgling me for the whole day. Venter nodded to himself. Already, he was planning how he would grow bigger.
He skittered off the lawn outside the cave via a bridge he hadn’t seen yesterday, then stole into the woods. With daylight beaconing the way, he discovered and caught a couple of critters within the half-hour. The squirrel and the bird obviously wouldn’t grow him as big as he needed to be to fill Sini, but everyone has to start with small, humble goals. He ate them both, spent a while digesting them against a tree trunk, then grew from 3’ tall to 3’3”. He was still perhaps only one-fourth the size of Sini. Synced with his ambitions, his stomach deflated and grumbled for more food. He foraged for another hour. With each meal, he grew from the mass of his prey; and with each growth spurt, he grew more able to catch prey. A number of squirrels, raccoons, and a doe later, Venter had grown to 5’ tall, which meant he would no longer be considered a midget in most societies.
Speaking of people, I can move on to bigger meals, he thought. He stumbled out of the forestry onto a manmade path. Sooner or later, I’ll come upon a couple of travellers, or a town full of food to help me grow. He wandered down the beaten road for a while. He spotted an old sign pointing to a couple of different villages, Brightton and Landerdale. Since Brightton sounded, well … brighter, he hiked down that way for a while. He realized just how much distance he could cover with his larger body. I’ve walked a couple miles more in the past hour than I would have otherwise.
And his distance coverage paid off. A few minutes after merging onto a road that forked into two towards the direction from which he’d come, he chanced upon a couple of quadrupedal wolves. One had black and vanilla fur, the other blue and white. They had been trailblazing alongside each other. Venter considered pouncing on the both of them and eating them, but he quickly decided against this. The two of them together definitely outweighed him and could overpower him. Besides, two against one was never a presentation of good odds. Perhaps he could convince the travellers to lower their guard.
When they took notice of him, the white-and-black one asked if he were a dragon.
“Hmm? Why would you think that? I’m a kobold. Dragons are way bigger, and winged most times.”
“You seem much too big to be a kobold,” said the white-and-black one, and the blue wolf glanced at this wolf with the expectancy of a clueless youngling. Venter got the impression that the blue wolf preferred to not speak.
“My master’s a dragon, though,” Venter went on. “He’s so big, I couldn’t even touch the bottom of his neck. But eventually I’ll be able, because I’m getting bigger so that I can feed him.”
Upon the white-and-black wolf’s face spread a look of hope, as bright as a nova, and he piped up: “That big, honest? Has he a big cave, then?”
“I would say it’s roomy,” stumbled Venter. “Why d’you ask?”
“Enough room for a couple of wolves to stay for a while? We’ve been sleeping below skies of rain and in below freezing temperatures.”
“B-brr-berlow freezing,” chattered the blue, finally.
“What do you say?” said the white-and-black, eyes broadening, only his toes planted on the ground now, for he had leaned very far forward. “We just want to get out of the elements and share company with some folk and not worry about the dangers of the road. You seem like a fine guy. I’m sure your master’s the same.”
“Sure,” repeated the blue.
The kobold idled, and scratched behind his shoulder. These guys seemed like the sort he’d like to travel with. Unfortunately, serving his master simply took priority over leisurely indulgences and acts of lesser virtue, such as sparing a couple of amiable folk for the sake that they were amiable. Surely, if he only ate the bad ones, that saying You are what you eat would come back to haunt him, at least in the form of a stomach ache.
“I’m sure my master wouldn’t mind,” he said, although he was sure of nothing. “But … the way to his lair is riddled with criminals and violent predators. Because I know the safest and swiftest way back, I’ll have to guide you to his lair myself.”
The white-and-black one said, “Doesn’t sound like an issue to me.”
“But you know how dragons are,” Venter went on. “They have secrets, many secrets. And so I have to take you blind. That way, you won’t be able to tell anyone how to get to his lair. The both of you have to journey there in my stomach.”
To his relief, neither of the wolves asked why such a welcoming dragon would be so secretive about the location of his home. Nor did they ask, Wouldn’t they just know the way once they ventured back to the trade road?—since, surely, they would be able to do so, unless the dragon were holding them hostage.
Their more pressing concerns led them to questions about the safety of his belly. Venter wasn’t the most charismatic liar in the world, yet so many unfortunate things had happened to the wolves on the road that the sight of the kobold’s maw brought to both of them a great relief and sensation of homecoming—that of returning to a home they never had.
The black-and-white wolf—Dawf was his unintroduced name—ushered the blue wolf Hilden toward Venter, then aided the kobold and Hilden in getting Hilden down Venter’s gullet. Dawf faced his backside against Hilden’s rump then heaved his weight against Hilden’s haunches while pedalling his feet and gritting his teeth, while the kobold widened his strained jaws and ignored the stress on them to the best of his ability. Until the doe of earlier, Venter had never eaten a meal thicker than one of his thighs, so swallowing a canine who nearly matched his own body in weight challenged his throat. The slimy, esophageal rings naturally tried to upchuck the wolf, but since Venter steadily pulled the flanks of Hilden into his tract with his forepaws and Dawf’s impassioned aid, he nulled his body’s inclinations and forced the head and forelegs of Hilden down his throat. The extreme distention of the circular walls meant that the flesh clenched and squeezed on Hilden as tight as an anaconda might, which meant that oxygen was vented from the throat sparingly and that the voyage down for Hilden was swelteringly warm. The dog panted while the squelches of the swallowing muscles themselves seemed to whinny and beg.
A handful of gulps, and the canine’s bulge descended the kobold’s frontal figure with the clumsy, lurching motions of a drunkard going down a ladder. When only the rump stuck out of Venter’s jowls, the canine’s hind paws wiggled up and down to propel him faster into the gullet, into which he was already sliding down with steadier slurping noises and speed thanks to the accrued slather drizzling down Venter’s tongue. Dawf leaped round to face Venter, then with a “Hi-yah!” tackled the jutting hindquarters of his buddy down the hatch—not to mention, nearly choked Venter into a cardiac arrest.
“Home sweet home, here I come!” echoed distantly the blue, and doggystyled his way down the slippery, meandering chute into his final destination, the reptile’s paunch. The bean-shaped stomach groaned and expanded. Its walls latched taut around the wolf’s form so that the bulge convincingly impersonated the wolf’s squirmy tussles and gradual curls of the body.
From inside resounded the chirpy, optimistic comments of the wolf.
“That does look and sound like a lovely place to lounge,” said Dawf to Venter. “You almost have me sold on the notion of living inside you, instead of the dragon’s lair.”
Venter’s gaze steered into his periphery. “You won’t be inside me for long.”
That much was true, the truest words he had said to the couple of wolves.
“Aww.” Dawf's pointy ears slumped. “Well, we’ll savor the time inside you, then! But the sooner we get to our actual home, the better.”
Dawf bunched up the muscles of his haunches, then bounded headlong into the maw of the kobold. The canine’s charge took Venter and his throat muscle aback, yet the muscles reacted quick and dilated to welcome the muzzle, the temple and the nape and the forelegs of the wolf before the kobold even fell onto his rump. When he did, burgles raced and reverberated through his bloated gullet, while his belly slammed the trail and parted his thighs. The rowdiness of the internal massager meant that Venter had to reflexively grab the ground behind his backside to support himself, to lean back as Dawf wormed his way down the bulging neck and burrowed under that flesh cavity to a chorus of sloppy, fleshy gulps and squelches.
Venter purred and rubbed over his distended rib cage, where the surface fluttered and morphed in wavelets from the squirmy dog within. By and by, he felt his internal cavity yawn open and reunite the canine pals. The muscles blinked and flashed with powerful pushes and shimmies to piledrive the slime-pasted Dawf into Hilden and further stretch the metabolic bungalow that was Venter’s belly. Steady swallows and chest rubs preceded the final fate of Dawf, which was him being curled up alongside Hilden.
The two of them rumbled up a storm, as gullibly content as they were. They thought that they would arrive at dragon’s doorstep before the fall of the sun and perhaps be adopted before the pass of a month. So they, carefree, cuddled and licked each other as a celebratory ceremony until the acids in which they bathed climbed fully over the two of them and churned them into a soupy mulch. The canine shapes on the rotund surface of the kobold’s belly waned to the occasional travel of a bubbly bump over the squishy flesh until the belly shrank and receded at the apex from Venter’s shins to the plumpest sections of his thighs.
And Venter’s thighs appeared much squishier and pudgier after he completed the digestion of the wolf-duo, along with his buttocks and his tail and his arms and his belly in general. A harsh observer would consider him portly, but he would still be able to travel and hunt with his new helping of jiggly pudge. Whatever wasn’t turned into dog pudding had grown him from 5’ tall to 7’ tall. He now stood taller than most folk of the biped races.
Venter was getting closer to being a filling snack for Sini. He had expanded not only vertically this time, but horizontally, if only a meager amount. He chose to continue travelling in the direction from which the wolves came; he’d enjoyed their taste and figured that, from where food of good quality tromped, more would do so in the future. As he resumed his adventure, he noticed how wobbly his tail, hips and arse had become from the previous meal. He certainly wasn’t complaining; he liked the ticklish rhythmic bounces of flesh he felt with every step, and adjusted to his new body weight en route toward the easterly village.
Bumbling down the road came a beaten old caravan, whose live-in vehicle was drawn by a single donkey. The driver, an unkempt bear, spat commands from the other end of the reins and jerked on the straps from his position beneath a leather shade, while shadowy shapes behind him within the car threw dice back and forth on a mat. Venter saw the caravan approaching and slurped across his muzzle. He stood a couple of feet taller than the donkey, despite the donkey’s abnormal largeness. He backed up to distance his legs and lock them, so that he would withstand the impact of the incoming donkey.
There seemed to be an implied truth about the donkey, here: He was too stupid to slow down, despite that someone obstructed his path. The flies buzzing about his eyelids and his consistent, mindless forward galumphing hinted at that—and so prejudice came in handy here. The bear driver blurted at the blockade of the reptile, and snapped his blubbery arms down a deal more than once on the reins, yet his steed stayed steadfast in its simple-minded gallivant and drove right into the kobold’s maw. The squelch and the following whinny of the dumb animal was followed by a jarring BUMP of the whole caravan that jolted the backmost pair right off their rumps and sent rolling their gaming paraphernalia right off the back of the wagon, it did. The vehicle’s motion had been replaced by gulps and swallows. Well, wanting to know what the vehicular hubbub and the moist noises were about, the pair in back snatched the shoulders of the driver and peered over him, and watched bewildered with him as a kobold pulled himself over the donkey and inflated his gullet with the fluffy nape of the dumb riding beast.
“Woah, Ness! Woah!” cried the ursine, and jerked on those reins as if to sentence his donkey to the noose in case the kobold could not pull it off; but sincerely, he was just trying to urge the beast to back away from the predator. His honey-addled mind couldn’t process that, no matter whether Ness went left or right or back or forth, there was no escaping something that so voraciously clenched and swallowed over you, so as to reel you into its stomach.
The anthropomorphic dumbasses in back—a kitsune and his earnest-faced grey wolf—began to exclaim “Woah Ness woah!” and “Here he comes!” as though the mere sayings would serve as good luck charms to ward off the oncoming carnivore. They tugged on the coattails of the bear’s travelling coat to aid the guy, while the huge kobold rolled his eyes in mirth and ploughed his claws through the tufts of donkey fur, dragging his maw over the rump of the squirmy beast while gurgly rumbles assembled at his hyperextending midriff.
As Venter swallowed over the hindquarters, the ursine’s reins lost more and more slack, being forced against the upper lip and the palate of the kobold, both of which were bound downwards, toward the steed’s hind legs. As a result, the bear and his travelling companions suddenly and unwillingly became the bait at the end of a fishing line of his own make. He was ejected from his satin seat of crimson, he and the duo attached to him. Presently, the kobold wretched up the wooden side-attachments of the caravan which had connected the horse’s flanks to it; and the debacle became a “four birds, one stone” sort of deal—or specifically, for this case, “four jackasses, one belly.”
At length, the 7’-tall kobold lay on his overtaxed, horse-and-bear-laden belly. The mishmash of feral and anthropomorphic bulges wormed and twitched with very little purchase against the swollen walls of his cramped innards, and their owners made to being digested in the hydrochloric pool without waiting for the kitsune or the wolf to engage in the melting ritual. A few more gulps bunched up the waists and legs of the duo and pulled them through the kobold’s agape maw, while the bulge of his throat shifted and maneuvered and slackened, before at length Venter concentrated with labored breaths and lunged his neck during a series of erratic gulps to force the quartet of legs down the slackening bands of esophageal muscle.
Moist paroxysms mandated that the kitsune and the wolf room fully into the expanding paunch. Stern and unwavering with their ruling as they were, the paroxysms had their way; and so the former occupants of the caravan now packed the interior of the reptile without any of their belongings but themselves. The journey they took now was not to the westerly town, but to Unconsciousness: a land preceded by swelling hills of acid and harsh, fetid climate and geysers of sulfuric, corrosive ichor; a land which had before it rather unwanted and scarcely warranted road, but not much scenery, or things of good or bad, in itself.
For a few hours, a stuffed kobold lounged in the middle of the easterly trade road, digesting an ugly mound of prey. Their cries were nastier still, the gurgles against their skin and flesh wetter and bigger and bassier the closer the digestive process came to its apex. The shifting of anatomic bulges eased up round that halftime point of the gurgling, some hours in; and the outlines of the prey grew obscure, and then fused together: And then you couldn’t tell the feral from the bipeds. By and by, the belly deflated so as not to anchor Venter to the ground any longer. And so he rose, even tubbier before, sporting what one might call a “beer gut” from a ways off, as well as pudge enough for him to pass as one of the royalties who goes nowhere really, but strolls the hall of their keep all day.
Would that he still looked a kobold in full, he may not have passed as such—but Venter had grown to 9’ tall from the protein and the fat of the previous buffet. One might have been satisfied by the feast of a full adventure-group under normal circumstances, but his duty to his dragon back at the cave pushed his metabolism to greater toils, thus greater need. From his stomach erupted a ghastly snarl, one which waved off the prey and predators alike in the closeby acres. Now, he could—and really needed to—eat a really big feast. Only a town would do. The one he was due—Brighton, was it?—would do.
His trip to the village went awry by his own doing. Travellers had earlier spotted the large … what they described as a “wingless dragon” digesting something—probably many things—when they came west upon the road. Rather than to meet the menace, they hiked themselves back to the easterly village, warned everyone and sent the whole populace off by wagon, horse and foot. So when Venter arrived, the village that he had planned to be his dessert was unfortunately deserted.
His stomach groaned louder—so loud, the diagonal board atop a row of boards on some boarded-off window of an abandoned tavern came unhinged and slid to point purely vertical on one side of the rowed boards; and beneath that board was this old poster, one featuring a draconic graphic and the bold words of gratuitous size:
BEWARE OF THE DRAGON.
Venter made his eyes as thin as conifer needles. He made out a phrase written much smaller beneath the main one: Stay clear of the southern cave! Remnants of maids and cattle found in its perimeter. A young brown dragon, about 11’ tall, has been living there since x.7.19.3. These handy details about the dragon and directions to his whereabouts took Venter to the woodlands south, where a cave sat upon a rugged shelf of bones too old for the crows and ravens to touch. The entryway lay at least a storey above the spearheads of the pines and oaks of the lower ground level.
After a climb that would have fatigued his former dwarf-sized self for the rest of the day, Venter met the pitch mouth of the cave. He had done away with many hours, beforehand, so an afternoon sun held itself with esteem, high, and shone easily into the lair to show snoring a dragon Venter had never met, not as far as he could remember.
Venter tiptoed into the cave. He tried to make to the dragon’s tail so that he could start his feast from the beast’s narrowest point; but once the intruder had trapped himself in the dragon’s reach, the dragon snapped awake from feigned sleep, with an “Aha! GOT you!”—before he had indeed “gotten” him—and lunged out with a slathering maw of several fangs you could not compare against pitiable mortal steel. Venter, though, leaped back into the doorway, where sunlight bounced off his naval gem. LO—the light gleamed like the cleanest of tropic seas in the dragon’s eye. Consequently, reeled back did the dragon, and bellowed: “Ahhh! The stone! So bright is it! Where did you obtain such a splendid treasure, wingless one?”
Venter had nearly raced off. Although he could potentially defend himself against claw and tooth and firebreath at his newfound size, the mindset of a smaller kobold had not fled him, yet. Now that the dragon admired the sparkle-stone in his navel so feverishly, Venter paused to think, then removed the stone. He raised it to the dragon’s eye.
“Is this something you’d like to be yours, dragon?”
“You mock me, wave your spoils over my muzzle? Answer my question! Ask no more until then.”
Venter jumped back, startled from the vocal boom. “I have shown you where the stone came from already,” he said. He pushed a claw into the button of his belly and wiggled it around.
“Have you? Make your meaning clear.”
“The stone came from my navel. That’s where all the stones come from. But I shan’t show you.”
“Wh-what do you mean you shan’t? How dare you, you little prick. I demand you show it to me. Elsewise, I’ll shave your little nub and jewels off.”
“Well, since you’re the larger dragon, if you insist. Go on, push your head in and peer inside. Seize one in your jaws, and then return to the outside world the richer. But you can only take one of the stones. That’s my condition.”
The dragon, thinking that he could overpower the wingless one if he wanted, thus could take all the stones he wanted once he was inside, agreed to this condition. He then bowed his head, chuckled a dark chuckle then rammed his snout into the kobold’s navel. “I will take the greatest stone of your stone-hoard,” he mumbled. He dove deep—so deep, he could search with his eyes inside of the kobold’s belly button for the cache of beautiful gemstones.
Something wrapped tightly around his muzzle and reeled him deeper into the navel—and after the slightly moist convulsion, circular, starry bands of flesh were engulfing him from snout-tip to middle of his neck. With alarm did the brown drake retort to this turn of events, and he lurched backward just out of gut-feeling; but the navel innards of the kobold—feeling ravenous and pleased by the mass and scaly warmth of their catch—hoisted his head back into secure place before it could abandon the powerful flesh-rings, and then gulped, and then gulped and gulped and kept the barrage of squelchy swallows going, and hurled the dragon chest-deep into the depths of the belly button, which by medical means should have been tied into a knot at some point of the depths.
But no—it wasn’t. Otherwise, how was the dragon being hauled deeper and deeper into the kobold’s rotund gut with contractions of the curvy surface and gasps of the kobold? Venter moaned as the dragon, who could be compared with a wagon in size relative to Venter, slorshed and squorrched into his increasingly wet and hungry belly depths while the bulge of his head filled into the lint-riddled pit of Venter’s belly button.
Keeping the dragon at bay shouldn’t have been so hard, considering that moisture continuously claimed him and bays tend to be the moistest bodies around. Yet, he groaned and dizzied Venter from the mere vociferation, and he rammed himself forth, so that Venter stumbled outside. The kobold braced his foot-claws, just as stones crumbled from the cliff of the cave shelf behind him and disturbed some birds on the nests of a lower shelf, so that they flocked up and pecked at Venter’s limbs and face. That sure bothered the kobold. He struggled to fend off the charge of the dragon alone.
Got to grab onto something, he thought, or I’ll certainly fall.
The dragon backed up just to batter forward for the ultimate rodeo charge. Venter yelped as his heels turned like door knobs and his back went the way of the blown over rake. He flailed his paws, his claws. He found his sight turned to the patches of clouds as the dragon bowled him over the edge—and then a fierce tug of his tail snapped him back toward the cliff-face soon as he extended from the shelf so far.
His tail—he had just caught a hold of a boulder outside the cave!
His back hit the shelf. The shelf quaked and crumbled off a stingy share of pebbles, pebbles that cascaded along the natural rampart, behind where Venter now swayed, squirmed, twitched and moaned: He hung upside-down, while the half-submerged dragon muffledly begged and gurgled and flailed with only the center of his body to the tip of his tail free of the carnivorous navel. More of that derg piled into the gluttonous belly button pit while his belly rounded and swelled and further fussed in the fashion of borborygmi and waterlogged barking, caused by molten, dragon-digesting belly lint.
A blood-rush surged into Venter’s skull, both from the euphoric distention of his belly button and the working of gravity. Never had he eaten anyone using his navel before, not that he could remember. Yet, the skill came to him as surely as wing beating comes to a stark. No instruction manual or lesson from some special teacher had been necessary.
He pumped his gut muscles, squorched the winged dragon down to claim as far as the dragon’s nethers and rump. Only wingtips protruded, now. Those had freedom for not much longer. Two peristaltic suckles corkscrewed the derg so that the smooth, shiny hide of his thighs slipped down, and the navel lips contracted somewhat, packaging away more of the kobold’s prize.
SQUUEELLECH. SSQQUUUEEERRRCH. SQQUUUURRORORORORRCH.
“O-oh …”
His face went flushed as his muscles clamped powerfully on the hindquarters and then sealed tight and smacked together, natural lubricant fluids now dribbling from his navel region. Just the tail remained. Then, with one last peristaltic clench and squeeze, Venter felled the appendage into his belly button pit, where the rest of the devoured dragon now writhed and howled.
The internal walls of the belly button pit were flushed, ridiculously cramped with the ingested dragon. Venter breathed tiredly as his belly sagged from above and smothered his chin. As it expanded to adjust to the girth of the dragon, the belly pressed the kobold’s head flat against the cliff-face; and the gurgles of its corrosive belly-lint chipped off more of the stones behind as stony, reverberant grumbles and groans folded over the shelf. The digestion of the mythical beast commenced.
Soon … thought Venter, listening to the gripping growls and reverberations and sloshing noises of his belly button as the stomach walls rhythmically pulsed and sucked tighter on his dragon prey. Soon, I’ll be size enough for my master …
He constricted tighter the rock his tail had curled around with every inward throb of his belly walls. His body swayed and knocked against the cliff face as the gastric groans plunged deeper in tone, as his digestive juices sloughed the dragon’s figure into something less refined, like an unfinished clay statue. Soon, even shudders of the dragon ceased. Burbles rolled over the surface of Venter’s deflating gut to substitute. His tail was tiring of holding him up, so he encouraged his molten belly button lint to enzymatically break down the dragon as fast as it could. Because of this, just a quarter of an hour passed wherein his spherical gut deflated from a relatively vehicular size to a size he could almost wrap his arms around. The hyper-rapid digestion left him shaking all over. But the weakness that should have transpired never came. Instead came strength, strength ebbing into him from the digesting dragon. Strong muscle formed from some of the worn pudge, and then pudge plopped onto the sinewy limbs so that he appeared well-fed, but strong also—and much bigger.
Dozens of crackles, creaks and rotationary adjustments of his bones later, he had grown to 12’ tall, thanks to the corroded dragon. He sighed, then capitalized on his decreased weight, pulling himself to the flat of the shelf by his looped tail. Before he rose fully to his feet, his muscles contracted.
“Arrgh.”
Horns elongated atop his head; and then his muzzle shot forward in its own spurt of growth. The scales of his topmost back shedded. A pair limbs erupted from junctures near the shoulders. After jutting backward some ways, they formed joints and angled skywards. Then, much farther up, a pair of additional joints were wrought, as well as angles whose edges extended for the outermost fingers of newborn wings—dragon wings of which leathery turquoise membranes were stitched and frontal claws born from the beaks (if you will) of the wings.
Once he loosed his chubby tail from the boulder, the tail broadened to double its previous girth then extended for double the length, then measured long enough to be made a lasso of. The kobold balled his fists to focus and succeeded in flicking his wings. The membranes of them swatted off some sticky ichor from their sinewy birth, then stretched in full and shuddered against the current of afternoon-time winds.
Venter turned west; and from the cliff face he could see, quite far away, the gap in the treetops where his master’s cave lay across the stream. As far as it was, Venter marvelled that it wasn’t further, for he’d been smaller journeying here and had travelled all the way on measlier feet.
He cast the balls of his feet from the ledge, smashingly flapped his way into the sky and eventually found a steady current to ride westward. Meanwhile lurked Sini, The Dragon of Poisons, in the heart of his lair. He had breakfasted and done lunch. His plump ovoid plum of stomach attested to the latter, for his lunch of several edible bushes and one single antelope had hardly appeased his appetite. He belched cavernously, long and loud. The miasma of purple mind-poisons perfumed the air as though to set the mood for the story he currently pinned on papyrus with quill and ink. A small meal always left him dissatisfied but did not make him lethargic, so he had the right balance of digesting food to effectively pen some literature.
As he concluded a paragraph, he nodded his head from side to side, mouthing out some potential words for the next installment. “Prodigy? … Protege? … Prawns? Rgh, stop being hungry.”
The particular sound of a dragon’s wingbeats came mashing downwind. Sini blinked and bolted to his feet abruptly, blasting his papers aside and ink well into a spill. He prowled into the threshold of his cave, throating out a low snarl. He blinked when he saw the skybound silhouette. Not four-legged at all was this one. Sini wasn’t even sure that it was a dragon. Certainly, this one was not a hostile dragon. He slumped at ease, and breathed easier venom-jets, releasing the muscles of his gaseous venom reservoir.
“Huh? That one’s familiar … No, I’m mistaken. I’ve got to be.”
Before him the draconic kobold alighted on Sini’s front yard just past the bridge. The kobold bowed, then said, “I’ve returned, master.”
Sini clamped his teeth a few times, and scrutinized the kobold through his round lenses scoffingly. “First of all … Didn’t I digest you about ten hours ago? Secondly, weren’t you … smaller? More wingless? And since when am I the master of anyone?”
Venter leaned back, looking quizzical but unwounded. “I thought you said I wasn’t large enough for you earlier,” he came with swift reply. “So, I got bigger for you, and this time I’ll be much more filling.”
“Food that comes back from the grave,” mumbled Sini, unsure of what he thought of their mysterious reuniting. Questions remained unanswered, but he sensed that pursuing clearer answers would leave him with an even emptier stomach. All this chatter had ripped him an even huger appetite, as though it were a legendary sword slashing through his stomach. A humble boom from his belly proved thus. “You’ll save me a few hunting excursions to the end of the river and the villages, I guess.”
Sini licked his chops and paced to the snout of Venter then yawned his maw for his feast of similar height. A huurrrmph of belch burst free from his maw of its own accord, and the hypnotic poisonous smog billowed out to further incentivize the feeding on Venter’s end. A bit woozy from the belch, Venter grinned from cheek to cheek then reached deep into the back of the maw, and corkscrewed a grip into the fat of the dragon’s tongue. He pulled himself into the heat-laden, stench-heavy atmosphere and felt again that he was right where he belonged: in the throat of a humming dragon.
Sini’s lanky ears stood like keen antennae and flittered to the flavors of salty, sweet and smoky flavors darting across his tasting appendage. “Hrmph, rrkry,” he grumbled approvingly, while he suckled and slurped up the newly horned head. His jaws drooled and spread apart with the flexibility of a snake’s as the bridge of his snout furrowed from how much he lifted his upper jaws, pushing his glasses closer to his face.
From a faraway gander, the sight of a dragon devouring another draconic creature would have been queer, to say the least—that, and impossible not to look at. Rarely did one catch a glimpse of a mystical beast idle and vulnerable in front of their abode. Yet, there he stood, grunting with satisfaction and pulling the kobold’s paws off the greenery with each ravenous swallow. His nostrils vented poisons. He wrung his neck and plumped up the neck more with wobbling, throaty bulges. He gave guttural growls from the difficulty of breathing, but continued on until the belly of the kobold filled his slick, mucous walls of slippery, goopy flesh.
His maw stretched forth with the motions of ursine yawns. He snarfed and swallowed with greater power, harrumphing gladly. Scrabbling down his throat came the arms of the kobold. Soon they pushed into the steamy atmosphere of his stomach, where the malformed globules of his lunch floated and continued to break down. The kobold would find that a side-effect of the dragon’s neurotoxin was a numbness of the body, which prohibited any great pain from spittle of the sloshing, sizzling acids and the hot atmosphere but allowed pleasurable sensations to filter through to his skin.
Said numbness slithered over the rest of his body after a deal of swallows more, until Sini slurped up the tip of his tail and the poison dragon’s belly jiggled and projected down toward his feet, lapping against his ankles. The prey within orchestrated a string of glorps and gurgles. Sini laid himself down again, bedding himself to the deep, grinding burbles and resonances of his ovular paunch. The dragon hiccuped a couple of times. The motions sprawled him out longer along the lawn while his prey within began to boil down and join his lunch: to break down, to eventually become a layer of blubber on his belly and limbs.
The dragon chuffed after a while. He felt more bloated from a span of metabolizing the winged kobold. He curled inward, braced himself then uttered a monstrous belch. Upon the loam and the bridge clattered a mess of bones, while more bones followed them. He blurted them from his poison-billowing maw, and they splashed into the stream ahead. What washed into the stream was the purple gemstone of the kobold, who had served the poison dragon well. Now the stone meandered down the stream, carried by its calm, idyllic current; and sometime later, the stone would be washed ashore at the size of an egg. When he hatched again, he would find another master who he would indubitably serve just as well.
venter_laetus Dawf and Hilden (original character names changed) (C)
Midnight_YamikidateThe Adventure of a Reincarnated KoboldThe turquoise kobold gasped awake, and took his first breath for the hundredth time.
Rain was smashing the satiny green forest floor, pounding the muck beneath the grass into a swampy mulch, washing away the footsteps of his former life.
He had been eaten by a bear—that much, he could remember. He had spent the dragon’s-share of that lifetime serving a bronze dragon named Barrus. If only he and his dragon hadn’t been separated by the fog, by the raging showers … If only he had stayed put … instead of becoming even more dreadfully lost … Mayhaps then, they would still be together. They would be returning to the cave on High Rock, Venter riding dragonback with that jury-rigged saddle.
He narrowed his emerald eyes on the crashing rain that misted on the rounded tip of his muzzle, sighed. He rose from the eggshells of his transformed gemstone, brushed some off his thighs and rear-end. He pinched around his navel, finding the hard shape of the gemstone reformed. Yes, it was there again. Good.
Across the misted detritus he traipsed. Every now and then, he would bow his head in search of his former incarnation’s footprints. Any of them would do to help him find his way back. Perhaps he could still find that old bronze. He stumbled a few times because he had to constantly look up to keep avoiding those gnarled boles of the trees. As he went forward, they would catch him unawares from the dense billows of grey. A couple of times, his foot plunged into a soup of mud or found itself ensnared by arching fingers of some tree base.
How long it seemed he had been walking blind when he finally found some footprints of his own. Footprints … that he’d just made a few minutes ago, he realized, judging by their freshness. His joy simmered. Venter had just been—as he always had been, as far as memory could tell—going in circles.
It was getting chilly. The retreat of the fog was followed by the fall of the sun from its lofty throne atop the clouds to the commonwealth below the treetops. He couldn’t quite see through the overstory’s congestion of verdure, but one thing was clear: The shadows were swallowing up the landscape that had been revealed just a seeming thought or two ago.
Spewing cold fog, he ignored all his footprints from then on. All were likely new. He hurried through ferns—whose tapering leaves glinted from the rain—and across spreads of mushrooms, rubbing his arms. The muck soiled his ankles, and splashed in globules as he passed.
Up ahead, the darkened shape of a hill reared its stone-dappled head, just past a stream in its high tide. Into the face that pointed profile-view at Venter was wrought a round arc, the entrance to a cave. Shelter, thought the kobold. He brushed aside prickly plants and ran toward the mound. He began to descend the saturated slope before the stream, but the slippery loam sloughed off a layer below his feet, making him slide onto his buttocks. He went rolling down, and then splashed into (what was for him) rather deep water.
He surfaced—chattering with the ice-cold water gnawing at his hide. He hurried toward the cave, wherein—he hoped—he would find warmth. The closer he came, the more that he sensed his plight was over. The subdued howl of the storm subsided more as the darker-than-dark enshrouded him. From farther down the mossy-walled interior, there resonated a stony, breathy, grinding sound. It retired as a metallically hollow one, the sound of inward breathing.
Venter froze in his tracks, waited for the hollow portion of the sound to repeat: Another rumbling of the underground preceded it. He scrambled into the entryway, where he had seen a small recess coming in. He tucked himself into that, focused on numbing himself to the chills.
He thought of going further into the cave no more. He would not wake a sleeping dragon, not when he knew not whether the dragon would greet him with benign grumpiness or tooth-and-claw for the late greeting. Although he would be revived no matter what, he would rather not be lacerated to nondescript pieces.
Too much danger in sleeping here … He would just rest his eyes … Warm up … Leave till daybreak, when the dragon was well-rested and likely more sociable …
The coma had other plans.
The kobold woke to his own long, inaudible yawn. Morning rays lapped at his face like grotesque tongues. He blinked awake, feeling suddenly lawless. Light the color of citrus and clam-flesh clothed the entry floor.
“Oh no … I didn’t leave.”
“No,” rumbled a huge voice. “You didn’t, did you?”
The initial roll of the ground from the loosening of that great, vintage voice pitched Venter’s off his feet and into a panic. He tried to stand fully, but bumped his head on the ceiling of the recess. That slumped him back into the previous pose and shadowed his vision with dots and maelstroms.
“I apologize for the overwhelming comfort of my home.”
It was the voice of a dragon, Venter realized with certainty: And it was flat in tone, rich in timbre, tinged with snark. The dragon sounded terrifyingly close, but Venter had not glanced to the side to see—could not summon the courage to do so.
There came a sigh.
“Well, that’s what I get for refurbishing the damn place. ’S what we get. If it weren’t so cosy, you might have woken with a backache earlier and been off before me knowing. But nevertheless, you’re here now, uninvited and descried. And you’re the closest thing to breakfast in sight.”
A black, purple-clawed forepaw that was as long—or, perhaps, longer—than Venter’s leg stepped in front of the recess. Dirt smoldered around the trembling floor.
“No, wait, let me explain,” came a small, sunken voice.
The voice drowned under the following booms of the dragon’s feet. The dragon paced around to face the recess, exposing an underbelly of virulent purple. But what have I to say that would concern him? I was searching for my master, needed shelter … so what? He’ll still be hungry, all the same …
“P-perhaps I could serve you something to ea-eak.”
He found himself clutched at maw level, inhaling the noxious purple billows of the dragon’s nose-breath. Big nostrils flared just a dragon’s foreleg-span away. Long fangs dripped from the back of his jaws, fell halfway down the length of loose, petal-shaped stubble of the dragon’s lower jaw.
This dragon was poisonous—was named Sini, unbeknownst to Venter. He twitchily raised a brow at the kobold, and the violet eyes behind his round spectacles narrowed irreverently.
“Heh? You came all this way just to propose to serve me?” His long, floppy ears galloped mockingly. His jaws motioned to laugh, but the sound never came. “Are your claws of more use than mine? Is your breath, are your legs, are your w—no, you haven’t any wings.” He shook his head. “Don’t swell yourself up to be more than you are. At best you’ll serve my stomach for a couple of hours. In you go!”
“Wait, you could use me—” Venter blathered on, squirmily trying to finish his pitch, but Sini was no longer listening. The dragon yawned, reeled closer his kobold-carrying fist and pitched Venter toward the pitch black of his maw. So many things, Venter could have proposed to the dragon, had he enough time. I may not find Barrus, but he could be my new master …
Yes, he decided. The black-and-purple drake would be his new master. When he revived, he would grow to be a bigger, better meal for the black-and-purple one.
What tore him from his reverie was the plop. His body now hugged the dragon’s warm, meaty tongue. Hrrrm-ing, the dragon grinded him against the rugged palate of his mouth using the thick, pink appendage. Slick splattering sounds preceded chintzy drizzling noises. The hot, gelatinous slime of the salivary glands poured down and oozed over the kobold’s head and back and arms, preparing him for a descent down the dragon’s esophagus, whose threshold bands-of-muscle wobbled and clenched into their empty circumferences eagerly.
Large talons released Venter’s tail. The giant tongue steepened its slope, rolling its midsection along the rugged palate closest to the upper frontal chops. With a hiccup of motion, the gullet straightened and spasmed for a gulp; and strong, slippery flesh threshed the kobold into the slimy, humid midsection of the throat. The throat—what with its breadth—could grant passage to prey twice his size and grip them with just a moderate tightness, and so he slid through the tract of wet, silken muscles without much great hold-up. Only because the throaty bands contracted inward a lot when the dragon swallowed did Venter feel the walls mold around him per swallow: They just purposely narrowed, schlepping him downward in a goop-laden descent.
It was soothing, the familiar convulsions of a dragon’s throat. While he enjoyed the ride, he noticed that this dragon was swallowing him toward the quaking sphincter rather fast, as though the dragon frequented much larger meals.
At this rate, I’ll have to become a much more filling meal for him, the kobold thought.
As fleshy bands congregated around him and heaved him toward the passage into the stomach, he imagined his bulge slipping through the base of the neck before fading below the forechest to amass again at the stomach; and the moment afterward, the esophageal tract squelched him out into a spacious belly. He splashed into riled-up tides of stomach acids, acids the color of concentrated plum juice. The floor of the gut caved downward: He could tell from the feeling below his feet as the murky enzymes rose over his body. They seared into his turquoise hide. He slipped, and the slow gravity of the dense liquids laid him on his backside, while the surface of the juices above rippled and bubbled and emitted gases of digested particles to permeate and swell the stomach per passing second. Around him the cavernous space shuddered, before a belch quaked the gut and spread wide the doorway to the esophagus. All became a blur of smog, both in the atmosphere and in Venter’s thoughts. Musks of previous game and decaying odors of fruits and vegetables steeped in the surrounding fluids. They burned his olfactory system with strong, bitter, sweet odors. Buried in the stink of the dragon’s paunch and serenaded by the cajoling echoes of a long, gritty, lionhearted belch, Venter felt the lack of oxygen muffle his thoughts. Soon, only the surest ones remained. And so, before the dragon digested him entirely, he decided:
I will serve him as best as I can.
*Opting to hyper-metabolize the kobold, so that he could get on with his morning routine for the day without too tawdry a stomach cramp, Sini stretched his length in the mouth of the cave, then lounged there and bowed his head, concentrating on quickening the work of his digestive juices. His belly burgeoned at the flanks. It swelled with poisonous fumes, the byproduct of the belly’s furious gurgling and burbling. A metallic purr trilled out of the cave, for Sini fancied the abusive sensations of his juices and venomous miasmas puffing out his sides and battering his inner walls until he had to simply purge a flood of foul air, to announce his stomach’s filthy process to the woods.
“BuuwrrrOOORrrgGHH!”
The purgative belch fashioned a poisonous smoke stack from the vent of his lair, and he huffed with great relief, feeling as though he’d emptied his guts of all their contents. The significantly fresh, gamey flavor of his meal made itself hospitable on his taste buds, where it would reside for a couple meals more. For this he was glad. He smacked his chops and tasted the meat again before his stomach involuntarily heaved and rolled his main body in circles. Hypothermic shakes arrested his neck, and the neck straightened out of its serpentining shape before it dove back into the shape for his maw to retch up a slew of little kobold bones.
“Phew,” he said. He gazed down at the purple-steaming pile of bones. His eyes blinked in glee. After resting for a mental transition, Sini lumbered to his feet then padded out onto his muddy lawn, before he shimmied his wings and outstretched them, and then cast himself off the earth a-flight. His wingtips cleaved leaves from the trees and set them in autumnal swirls; and then he vanished beyond the tarp of needly broadleaf trees, bound to roam the woods to glimpse some event of intrigue and to perhaps write about it later after some lunch.
Buried beneath bones, bones drenched in stomach bile, a gemstone pulsated purple: the gemstone of the kobold’s navel. The shades of autumn maple and sherbet pink evaporated from the land as the sun climbed free from shyness and cast the woods beneath a baby blue. The bone pile rustled. The purpled gem had grown to the size of an egg, had become opaque and covered with a rough, chitinous surface.
The gem—the egg—it hatched.
A horned turquoise head emerged, and bones scattered and spilled about. The pile was peppered with eggshells. Alongside them, Venter took his first steps. Again.
Next time, I’ll be more than just breakfast. He’ll be gurgling me for the whole day. Venter nodded to himself. Already, he was planning how he would grow bigger.
He skittered off the lawn outside the cave via a bridge he hadn’t seen yesterday, then stole into the woods. With daylight beaconing the way, he discovered and caught a couple of critters within the half-hour. The squirrel and the bird obviously wouldn’t grow him as big as he needed to be to fill Sini, but everyone has to start with small, humble goals. He ate them both, spent a while digesting them against a tree trunk, then grew from 3’ tall to 3’3”. He was still perhaps only one-fourth the size of Sini. Synced with his ambitions, his stomach deflated and grumbled for more food. He foraged for another hour. With each meal, he grew from the mass of his prey; and with each growth spurt, he grew more able to catch prey. A number of squirrels, raccoons, and a doe later, Venter had grown to 5’ tall, which meant he would no longer be considered a midget in most societies.
Speaking of people, I can move on to bigger meals, he thought. He stumbled out of the forestry onto a manmade path. Sooner or later, I’ll come upon a couple of travellers, or a town full of food to help me grow. He wandered down the beaten road for a while. He spotted an old sign pointing to a couple of different villages, Brightton and Landerdale. Since Brightton sounded, well … brighter, he hiked down that way for a while. He realized just how much distance he could cover with his larger body. I’ve walked a couple miles more in the past hour than I would have otherwise.
And his distance coverage paid off. A few minutes after merging onto a road that forked into two towards the direction from which he’d come, he chanced upon a couple of quadrupedal wolves. One had black and vanilla fur, the other blue and white. They had been trailblazing alongside each other. Venter considered pouncing on the both of them and eating them, but he quickly decided against this. The two of them together definitely outweighed him and could overpower him. Besides, two against one was never a presentation of good odds. Perhaps he could convince the travellers to lower their guard.
When they took notice of him, the white-and-black one asked if he were a dragon.
“Hmm? Why would you think that? I’m a kobold. Dragons are way bigger, and winged most times.”
“You seem much too big to be a kobold,” said the white-and-black one, and the blue wolf glanced at this wolf with the expectancy of a clueless youngling. Venter got the impression that the blue wolf preferred to not speak.
“My master’s a dragon, though,” Venter went on. “He’s so big, I couldn’t even touch the bottom of his neck. But eventually I’ll be able, because I’m getting bigger so that I can feed him.”
Upon the white-and-black wolf’s face spread a look of hope, as bright as a nova, and he piped up: “That big, honest? Has he a big cave, then?”
“I would say it’s roomy,” stumbled Venter. “Why d’you ask?”
“Enough room for a couple of wolves to stay for a while? We’ve been sleeping below skies of rain and in below freezing temperatures.”
“B-brr-berlow freezing,” chattered the blue, finally.
“What do you say?” said the white-and-black, eyes broadening, only his toes planted on the ground now, for he had leaned very far forward. “We just want to get out of the elements and share company with some folk and not worry about the dangers of the road. You seem like a fine guy. I’m sure your master’s the same.”
“Sure,” repeated the blue.
The kobold idled, and scratched behind his shoulder. These guys seemed like the sort he’d like to travel with. Unfortunately, serving his master simply took priority over leisurely indulgences and acts of lesser virtue, such as sparing a couple of amiable folk for the sake that they were amiable. Surely, if he only ate the bad ones, that saying You are what you eat would come back to haunt him, at least in the form of a stomach ache.
“I’m sure my master wouldn’t mind,” he said, although he was sure of nothing. “But … the way to his lair is riddled with criminals and violent predators. Because I know the safest and swiftest way back, I’ll have to guide you to his lair myself.”
The white-and-black one said, “Doesn’t sound like an issue to me.”
“But you know how dragons are,” Venter went on. “They have secrets, many secrets. And so I have to take you blind. That way, you won’t be able to tell anyone how to get to his lair. The both of you have to journey there in my stomach.”
To his relief, neither of the wolves asked why such a welcoming dragon would be so secretive about the location of his home. Nor did they ask, Wouldn’t they just know the way once they ventured back to the trade road?—since, surely, they would be able to do so, unless the dragon were holding them hostage.
Their more pressing concerns led them to questions about the safety of his belly. Venter wasn’t the most charismatic liar in the world, yet so many unfortunate things had happened to the wolves on the road that the sight of the kobold’s maw brought to both of them a great relief and sensation of homecoming—that of returning to a home they never had.
The black-and-white wolf—Dawf was his unintroduced name—ushered the blue wolf Hilden toward Venter, then aided the kobold and Hilden in getting Hilden down Venter’s gullet. Dawf faced his backside against Hilden’s rump then heaved his weight against Hilden’s haunches while pedalling his feet and gritting his teeth, while the kobold widened his strained jaws and ignored the stress on them to the best of his ability. Until the doe of earlier, Venter had never eaten a meal thicker than one of his thighs, so swallowing a canine who nearly matched his own body in weight challenged his throat. The slimy, esophageal rings naturally tried to upchuck the wolf, but since Venter steadily pulled the flanks of Hilden into his tract with his forepaws and Dawf’s impassioned aid, he nulled his body’s inclinations and forced the head and forelegs of Hilden down his throat. The extreme distention of the circular walls meant that the flesh clenched and squeezed on Hilden as tight as an anaconda might, which meant that oxygen was vented from the throat sparingly and that the voyage down for Hilden was swelteringly warm. The dog panted while the squelches of the swallowing muscles themselves seemed to whinny and beg.
A handful of gulps, and the canine’s bulge descended the kobold’s frontal figure with the clumsy, lurching motions of a drunkard going down a ladder. When only the rump stuck out of Venter’s jowls, the canine’s hind paws wiggled up and down to propel him faster into the gullet, into which he was already sliding down with steadier slurping noises and speed thanks to the accrued slather drizzling down Venter’s tongue. Dawf leaped round to face Venter, then with a “Hi-yah!” tackled the jutting hindquarters of his buddy down the hatch—not to mention, nearly choked Venter into a cardiac arrest.
“Home sweet home, here I come!” echoed distantly the blue, and doggystyled his way down the slippery, meandering chute into his final destination, the reptile’s paunch. The bean-shaped stomach groaned and expanded. Its walls latched taut around the wolf’s form so that the bulge convincingly impersonated the wolf’s squirmy tussles and gradual curls of the body.
From inside resounded the chirpy, optimistic comments of the wolf.
“That does look and sound like a lovely place to lounge,” said Dawf to Venter. “You almost have me sold on the notion of living inside you, instead of the dragon’s lair.”
Venter’s gaze steered into his periphery. “You won’t be inside me for long.”
That much was true, the truest words he had said to the couple of wolves.
“Aww.” Dawf's pointy ears slumped. “Well, we’ll savor the time inside you, then! But the sooner we get to our actual home, the better.”
Dawf bunched up the muscles of his haunches, then bounded headlong into the maw of the kobold. The canine’s charge took Venter and his throat muscle aback, yet the muscles reacted quick and dilated to welcome the muzzle, the temple and the nape and the forelegs of the wolf before the kobold even fell onto his rump. When he did, burgles raced and reverberated through his bloated gullet, while his belly slammed the trail and parted his thighs. The rowdiness of the internal massager meant that Venter had to reflexively grab the ground behind his backside to support himself, to lean back as Dawf wormed his way down the bulging neck and burrowed under that flesh cavity to a chorus of sloppy, fleshy gulps and squelches.
Venter purred and rubbed over his distended rib cage, where the surface fluttered and morphed in wavelets from the squirmy dog within. By and by, he felt his internal cavity yawn open and reunite the canine pals. The muscles blinked and flashed with powerful pushes and shimmies to piledrive the slime-pasted Dawf into Hilden and further stretch the metabolic bungalow that was Venter’s belly. Steady swallows and chest rubs preceded the final fate of Dawf, which was him being curled up alongside Hilden.
The two of them rumbled up a storm, as gullibly content as they were. They thought that they would arrive at dragon’s doorstep before the fall of the sun and perhaps be adopted before the pass of a month. So they, carefree, cuddled and licked each other as a celebratory ceremony until the acids in which they bathed climbed fully over the two of them and churned them into a soupy mulch. The canine shapes on the rotund surface of the kobold’s belly waned to the occasional travel of a bubbly bump over the squishy flesh until the belly shrank and receded at the apex from Venter’s shins to the plumpest sections of his thighs.
And Venter’s thighs appeared much squishier and pudgier after he completed the digestion of the wolf-duo, along with his buttocks and his tail and his arms and his belly in general. A harsh observer would consider him portly, but he would still be able to travel and hunt with his new helping of jiggly pudge. Whatever wasn’t turned into dog pudding had grown him from 5’ tall to 7’ tall. He now stood taller than most folk of the biped races.
Venter was getting closer to being a filling snack for Sini. He had expanded not only vertically this time, but horizontally, if only a meager amount. He chose to continue travelling in the direction from which the wolves came; he’d enjoyed their taste and figured that, from where food of good quality tromped, more would do so in the future. As he resumed his adventure, he noticed how wobbly his tail, hips and arse had become from the previous meal. He certainly wasn’t complaining; he liked the ticklish rhythmic bounces of flesh he felt with every step, and adjusted to his new body weight en route toward the easterly village.
Bumbling down the road came a beaten old caravan, whose live-in vehicle was drawn by a single donkey. The driver, an unkempt bear, spat commands from the other end of the reins and jerked on the straps from his position beneath a leather shade, while shadowy shapes behind him within the car threw dice back and forth on a mat. Venter saw the caravan approaching and slurped across his muzzle. He stood a couple of feet taller than the donkey, despite the donkey’s abnormal largeness. He backed up to distance his legs and lock them, so that he would withstand the impact of the incoming donkey.
There seemed to be an implied truth about the donkey, here: He was too stupid to slow down, despite that someone obstructed his path. The flies buzzing about his eyelids and his consistent, mindless forward galumphing hinted at that—and so prejudice came in handy here. The bear driver blurted at the blockade of the reptile, and snapped his blubbery arms down a deal more than once on the reins, yet his steed stayed steadfast in its simple-minded gallivant and drove right into the kobold’s maw. The squelch and the following whinny of the dumb animal was followed by a jarring BUMP of the whole caravan that jolted the backmost pair right off their rumps and sent rolling their gaming paraphernalia right off the back of the wagon, it did. The vehicle’s motion had been replaced by gulps and swallows. Well, wanting to know what the vehicular hubbub and the moist noises were about, the pair in back snatched the shoulders of the driver and peered over him, and watched bewildered with him as a kobold pulled himself over the donkey and inflated his gullet with the fluffy nape of the dumb riding beast.
“Woah, Ness! Woah!” cried the ursine, and jerked on those reins as if to sentence his donkey to the noose in case the kobold could not pull it off; but sincerely, he was just trying to urge the beast to back away from the predator. His honey-addled mind couldn’t process that, no matter whether Ness went left or right or back or forth, there was no escaping something that so voraciously clenched and swallowed over you, so as to reel you into its stomach.
The anthropomorphic dumbasses in back—a kitsune and his earnest-faced grey wolf—began to exclaim “Woah Ness woah!” and “Here he comes!” as though the mere sayings would serve as good luck charms to ward off the oncoming carnivore. They tugged on the coattails of the bear’s travelling coat to aid the guy, while the huge kobold rolled his eyes in mirth and ploughed his claws through the tufts of donkey fur, dragging his maw over the rump of the squirmy beast while gurgly rumbles assembled at his hyperextending midriff.
As Venter swallowed over the hindquarters, the ursine’s reins lost more and more slack, being forced against the upper lip and the palate of the kobold, both of which were bound downwards, toward the steed’s hind legs. As a result, the bear and his travelling companions suddenly and unwillingly became the bait at the end of a fishing line of his own make. He was ejected from his satin seat of crimson, he and the duo attached to him. Presently, the kobold wretched up the wooden side-attachments of the caravan which had connected the horse’s flanks to it; and the debacle became a “four birds, one stone” sort of deal—or specifically, for this case, “four jackasses, one belly.”
At length, the 7’-tall kobold lay on his overtaxed, horse-and-bear-laden belly. The mishmash of feral and anthropomorphic bulges wormed and twitched with very little purchase against the swollen walls of his cramped innards, and their owners made to being digested in the hydrochloric pool without waiting for the kitsune or the wolf to engage in the melting ritual. A few more gulps bunched up the waists and legs of the duo and pulled them through the kobold’s agape maw, while the bulge of his throat shifted and maneuvered and slackened, before at length Venter concentrated with labored breaths and lunged his neck during a series of erratic gulps to force the quartet of legs down the slackening bands of esophageal muscle.
Moist paroxysms mandated that the kitsune and the wolf room fully into the expanding paunch. Stern and unwavering with their ruling as they were, the paroxysms had their way; and so the former occupants of the caravan now packed the interior of the reptile without any of their belongings but themselves. The journey they took now was not to the westerly town, but to Unconsciousness: a land preceded by swelling hills of acid and harsh, fetid climate and geysers of sulfuric, corrosive ichor; a land which had before it rather unwanted and scarcely warranted road, but not much scenery, or things of good or bad, in itself.
For a few hours, a stuffed kobold lounged in the middle of the easterly trade road, digesting an ugly mound of prey. Their cries were nastier still, the gurgles against their skin and flesh wetter and bigger and bassier the closer the digestive process came to its apex. The shifting of anatomic bulges eased up round that halftime point of the gurgling, some hours in; and the outlines of the prey grew obscure, and then fused together: And then you couldn’t tell the feral from the bipeds. By and by, the belly deflated so as not to anchor Venter to the ground any longer. And so he rose, even tubbier before, sporting what one might call a “beer gut” from a ways off, as well as pudge enough for him to pass as one of the royalties who goes nowhere really, but strolls the hall of their keep all day.
Would that he still looked a kobold in full, he may not have passed as such—but Venter had grown to 9’ tall from the protein and the fat of the previous buffet. One might have been satisfied by the feast of a full adventure-group under normal circumstances, but his duty to his dragon back at the cave pushed his metabolism to greater toils, thus greater need. From his stomach erupted a ghastly snarl, one which waved off the prey and predators alike in the closeby acres. Now, he could—and really needed to—eat a really big feast. Only a town would do. The one he was due—Brighton, was it?—would do.
His trip to the village went awry by his own doing. Travellers had earlier spotted the large … what they described as a “wingless dragon” digesting something—probably many things—when they came west upon the road. Rather than to meet the menace, they hiked themselves back to the easterly village, warned everyone and sent the whole populace off by wagon, horse and foot. So when Venter arrived, the village that he had planned to be his dessert was unfortunately deserted.
His stomach groaned louder—so loud, the diagonal board atop a row of boards on some boarded-off window of an abandoned tavern came unhinged and slid to point purely vertical on one side of the rowed boards; and beneath that board was this old poster, one featuring a draconic graphic and the bold words of gratuitous size:
BEWARE OF THE DRAGON.
Venter made his eyes as thin as conifer needles. He made out a phrase written much smaller beneath the main one: Stay clear of the southern cave! Remnants of maids and cattle found in its perimeter. A young brown dragon, about 11’ tall, has been living there since x.7.19.3. These handy details about the dragon and directions to his whereabouts took Venter to the woodlands south, where a cave sat upon a rugged shelf of bones too old for the crows and ravens to touch. The entryway lay at least a storey above the spearheads of the pines and oaks of the lower ground level.
After a climb that would have fatigued his former dwarf-sized self for the rest of the day, Venter met the pitch mouth of the cave. He had done away with many hours, beforehand, so an afternoon sun held itself with esteem, high, and shone easily into the lair to show snoring a dragon Venter had never met, not as far as he could remember.
Venter tiptoed into the cave. He tried to make to the dragon’s tail so that he could start his feast from the beast’s narrowest point; but once the intruder had trapped himself in the dragon’s reach, the dragon snapped awake from feigned sleep, with an “Aha! GOT you!”—before he had indeed “gotten” him—and lunged out with a slathering maw of several fangs you could not compare against pitiable mortal steel. Venter, though, leaped back into the doorway, where sunlight bounced off his naval gem. LO—the light gleamed like the cleanest of tropic seas in the dragon’s eye. Consequently, reeled back did the dragon, and bellowed: “Ahhh! The stone! So bright is it! Where did you obtain such a splendid treasure, wingless one?”
Venter had nearly raced off. Although he could potentially defend himself against claw and tooth and firebreath at his newfound size, the mindset of a smaller kobold had not fled him, yet. Now that the dragon admired the sparkle-stone in his navel so feverishly, Venter paused to think, then removed the stone. He raised it to the dragon’s eye.
“Is this something you’d like to be yours, dragon?”
“You mock me, wave your spoils over my muzzle? Answer my question! Ask no more until then.”
Venter jumped back, startled from the vocal boom. “I have shown you where the stone came from already,” he said. He pushed a claw into the button of his belly and wiggled it around.
“Have you? Make your meaning clear.”
“The stone came from my navel. That’s where all the stones come from. But I shan’t show you.”
“Wh-what do you mean you shan’t? How dare you, you little prick. I demand you show it to me. Elsewise, I’ll shave your little nub and jewels off.”
“Well, since you’re the larger dragon, if you insist. Go on, push your head in and peer inside. Seize one in your jaws, and then return to the outside world the richer. But you can only take one of the stones. That’s my condition.”
The dragon, thinking that he could overpower the wingless one if he wanted, thus could take all the stones he wanted once he was inside, agreed to this condition. He then bowed his head, chuckled a dark chuckle then rammed his snout into the kobold’s navel. “I will take the greatest stone of your stone-hoard,” he mumbled. He dove deep—so deep, he could search with his eyes inside of the kobold’s belly button for the cache of beautiful gemstones.
Something wrapped tightly around his muzzle and reeled him deeper into the navel—and after the slightly moist convulsion, circular, starry bands of flesh were engulfing him from snout-tip to middle of his neck. With alarm did the brown drake retort to this turn of events, and he lurched backward just out of gut-feeling; but the navel innards of the kobold—feeling ravenous and pleased by the mass and scaly warmth of their catch—hoisted his head back into secure place before it could abandon the powerful flesh-rings, and then gulped, and then gulped and gulped and kept the barrage of squelchy swallows going, and hurled the dragon chest-deep into the depths of the belly button, which by medical means should have been tied into a knot at some point of the depths.
But no—it wasn’t. Otherwise, how was the dragon being hauled deeper and deeper into the kobold’s rotund gut with contractions of the curvy surface and gasps of the kobold? Venter moaned as the dragon, who could be compared with a wagon in size relative to Venter, slorshed and squorrched into his increasingly wet and hungry belly depths while the bulge of his head filled into the lint-riddled pit of Venter’s belly button.
Keeping the dragon at bay shouldn’t have been so hard, considering that moisture continuously claimed him and bays tend to be the moistest bodies around. Yet, he groaned and dizzied Venter from the mere vociferation, and he rammed himself forth, so that Venter stumbled outside. The kobold braced his foot-claws, just as stones crumbled from the cliff of the cave shelf behind him and disturbed some birds on the nests of a lower shelf, so that they flocked up and pecked at Venter’s limbs and face. That sure bothered the kobold. He struggled to fend off the charge of the dragon alone.
Got to grab onto something, he thought, or I’ll certainly fall.
The dragon backed up just to batter forward for the ultimate rodeo charge. Venter yelped as his heels turned like door knobs and his back went the way of the blown over rake. He flailed his paws, his claws. He found his sight turned to the patches of clouds as the dragon bowled him over the edge—and then a fierce tug of his tail snapped him back toward the cliff-face soon as he extended from the shelf so far.
His tail—he had just caught a hold of a boulder outside the cave!
His back hit the shelf. The shelf quaked and crumbled off a stingy share of pebbles, pebbles that cascaded along the natural rampart, behind where Venter now swayed, squirmed, twitched and moaned: He hung upside-down, while the half-submerged dragon muffledly begged and gurgled and flailed with only the center of his body to the tip of his tail free of the carnivorous navel. More of that derg piled into the gluttonous belly button pit while his belly rounded and swelled and further fussed in the fashion of borborygmi and waterlogged barking, caused by molten, dragon-digesting belly lint.
A blood-rush surged into Venter’s skull, both from the euphoric distention of his belly button and the working of gravity. Never had he eaten anyone using his navel before, not that he could remember. Yet, the skill came to him as surely as wing beating comes to a stark. No instruction manual or lesson from some special teacher had been necessary.
He pumped his gut muscles, squorched the winged dragon down to claim as far as the dragon’s nethers and rump. Only wingtips protruded, now. Those had freedom for not much longer. Two peristaltic suckles corkscrewed the derg so that the smooth, shiny hide of his thighs slipped down, and the navel lips contracted somewhat, packaging away more of the kobold’s prize.
SQUUEELLECH. SSQQUUUEEERRRCH. SQQUUUURRORORORORRCH.
“O-oh …”
His face went flushed as his muscles clamped powerfully on the hindquarters and then sealed tight and smacked together, natural lubricant fluids now dribbling from his navel region. Just the tail remained. Then, with one last peristaltic clench and squeeze, Venter felled the appendage into his belly button pit, where the rest of the devoured dragon now writhed and howled.
The internal walls of the belly button pit were flushed, ridiculously cramped with the ingested dragon. Venter breathed tiredly as his belly sagged from above and smothered his chin. As it expanded to adjust to the girth of the dragon, the belly pressed the kobold’s head flat against the cliff-face; and the gurgles of its corrosive belly-lint chipped off more of the stones behind as stony, reverberant grumbles and groans folded over the shelf. The digestion of the mythical beast commenced.
Soon … thought Venter, listening to the gripping growls and reverberations and sloshing noises of his belly button as the stomach walls rhythmically pulsed and sucked tighter on his dragon prey. Soon, I’ll be size enough for my master …
He constricted tighter the rock his tail had curled around with every inward throb of his belly walls. His body swayed and knocked against the cliff face as the gastric groans plunged deeper in tone, as his digestive juices sloughed the dragon’s figure into something less refined, like an unfinished clay statue. Soon, even shudders of the dragon ceased. Burbles rolled over the surface of Venter’s deflating gut to substitute. His tail was tiring of holding him up, so he encouraged his molten belly button lint to enzymatically break down the dragon as fast as it could. Because of this, just a quarter of an hour passed wherein his spherical gut deflated from a relatively vehicular size to a size he could almost wrap his arms around. The hyper-rapid digestion left him shaking all over. But the weakness that should have transpired never came. Instead came strength, strength ebbing into him from the digesting dragon. Strong muscle formed from some of the worn pudge, and then pudge plopped onto the sinewy limbs so that he appeared well-fed, but strong also—and much bigger.
Dozens of crackles, creaks and rotationary adjustments of his bones later, he had grown to 12’ tall, thanks to the corroded dragon. He sighed, then capitalized on his decreased weight, pulling himself to the flat of the shelf by his looped tail. Before he rose fully to his feet, his muscles contracted.
“Arrgh.”
Horns elongated atop his head; and then his muzzle shot forward in its own spurt of growth. The scales of his topmost back shedded. A pair limbs erupted from junctures near the shoulders. After jutting backward some ways, they formed joints and angled skywards. Then, much farther up, a pair of additional joints were wrought, as well as angles whose edges extended for the outermost fingers of newborn wings—dragon wings of which leathery turquoise membranes were stitched and frontal claws born from the beaks (if you will) of the wings.
Once he loosed his chubby tail from the boulder, the tail broadened to double its previous girth then extended for double the length, then measured long enough to be made a lasso of. The kobold balled his fists to focus and succeeded in flicking his wings. The membranes of them swatted off some sticky ichor from their sinewy birth, then stretched in full and shuddered against the current of afternoon-time winds.
Venter turned west; and from the cliff face he could see, quite far away, the gap in the treetops where his master’s cave lay across the stream. As far as it was, Venter marvelled that it wasn’t further, for he’d been smaller journeying here and had travelled all the way on measlier feet.
He cast the balls of his feet from the ledge, smashingly flapped his way into the sky and eventually found a steady current to ride westward. Meanwhile lurked Sini, The Dragon of Poisons, in the heart of his lair. He had breakfasted and done lunch. His plump ovoid plum of stomach attested to the latter, for his lunch of several edible bushes and one single antelope had hardly appeased his appetite. He belched cavernously, long and loud. The miasma of purple mind-poisons perfumed the air as though to set the mood for the story he currently pinned on papyrus with quill and ink. A small meal always left him dissatisfied but did not make him lethargic, so he had the right balance of digesting food to effectively pen some literature.
As he concluded a paragraph, he nodded his head from side to side, mouthing out some potential words for the next installment. “Prodigy? … Protege? … Prawns? Rgh, stop being hungry.”
The particular sound of a dragon’s wingbeats came mashing downwind. Sini blinked and bolted to his feet abruptly, blasting his papers aside and ink well into a spill. He prowled into the threshold of his cave, throating out a low snarl. He blinked when he saw the skybound silhouette. Not four-legged at all was this one. Sini wasn’t even sure that it was a dragon. Certainly, this one was not a hostile dragon. He slumped at ease, and breathed easier venom-jets, releasing the muscles of his gaseous venom reservoir.
“Huh? That one’s familiar … No, I’m mistaken. I’ve got to be.”
Before him the draconic kobold alighted on Sini’s front yard just past the bridge. The kobold bowed, then said, “I’ve returned, master.”
Sini clamped his teeth a few times, and scrutinized the kobold through his round lenses scoffingly. “First of all … Didn’t I digest you about ten hours ago? Secondly, weren’t you … smaller? More wingless? And since when am I the master of anyone?”
Venter leaned back, looking quizzical but unwounded. “I thought you said I wasn’t large enough for you earlier,” he came with swift reply. “So, I got bigger for you, and this time I’ll be much more filling.”
“Food that comes back from the grave,” mumbled Sini, unsure of what he thought of their mysterious reuniting. Questions remained unanswered, but he sensed that pursuing clearer answers would leave him with an even emptier stomach. All this chatter had ripped him an even huger appetite, as though it were a legendary sword slashing through his stomach. A humble boom from his belly proved thus. “You’ll save me a few hunting excursions to the end of the river and the villages, I guess.”
Sini licked his chops and paced to the snout of Venter then yawned his maw for his feast of similar height. A huurrrmph of belch burst free from his maw of its own accord, and the hypnotic poisonous smog billowed out to further incentivize the feeding on Venter’s end. A bit woozy from the belch, Venter grinned from cheek to cheek then reached deep into the back of the maw, and corkscrewed a grip into the fat of the dragon’s tongue. He pulled himself into the heat-laden, stench-heavy atmosphere and felt again that he was right where he belonged: in the throat of a humming dragon.
Sini’s lanky ears stood like keen antennae and flittered to the flavors of salty, sweet and smoky flavors darting across his tasting appendage. “Hrmph, rrkry,” he grumbled approvingly, while he suckled and slurped up the newly horned head. His jaws drooled and spread apart with the flexibility of a snake’s as the bridge of his snout furrowed from how much he lifted his upper jaws, pushing his glasses closer to his face.
From a faraway gander, the sight of a dragon devouring another draconic creature would have been queer, to say the least—that, and impossible not to look at. Rarely did one catch a glimpse of a mystical beast idle and vulnerable in front of their abode. Yet, there he stood, grunting with satisfaction and pulling the kobold’s paws off the greenery with each ravenous swallow. His nostrils vented poisons. He wrung his neck and plumped up the neck more with wobbling, throaty bulges. He gave guttural growls from the difficulty of breathing, but continued on until the belly of the kobold filled his slick, mucous walls of slippery, goopy flesh.
His maw stretched forth with the motions of ursine yawns. He snarfed and swallowed with greater power, harrumphing gladly. Scrabbling down his throat came the arms of the kobold. Soon they pushed into the steamy atmosphere of his stomach, where the malformed globules of his lunch floated and continued to break down. The kobold would find that a side-effect of the dragon’s neurotoxin was a numbness of the body, which prohibited any great pain from spittle of the sloshing, sizzling acids and the hot atmosphere but allowed pleasurable sensations to filter through to his skin.
Said numbness slithered over the rest of his body after a deal of swallows more, until Sini slurped up the tip of his tail and the poison dragon’s belly jiggled and projected down toward his feet, lapping against his ankles. The prey within orchestrated a string of glorps and gurgles. Sini laid himself down again, bedding himself to the deep, grinding burbles and resonances of his ovular paunch. The dragon hiccuped a couple of times. The motions sprawled him out longer along the lawn while his prey within began to boil down and join his lunch: to break down, to eventually become a layer of blubber on his belly and limbs.
The dragon chuffed after a while. He felt more bloated from a span of metabolizing the winged kobold. He curled inward, braced himself then uttered a monstrous belch. Upon the loam and the bridge clattered a mess of bones, while more bones followed them. He blurted them from his poison-billowing maw, and they splashed into the stream ahead. What washed into the stream was the purple gemstone of the kobold, who had served the poison dragon well. Now the stone meandered down the stream, carried by its calm, idyllic current; and sometime later, the stone would be washed ashore at the size of an egg. When he hatched again, he would find another master who he would indubitably serve just as well.
FIN
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Category Story / Vore
Species Dragon (Other)
Size 120 x 120px
File Size 495.2 kB
Thank you, Mitch! Yeah, funny that - I originally wrote oral vore instead of navel vore. But after reading Venter's bio, I saw an opportunity to showcase that navel vore ability and scrapped the third instance of oral for that. I'm glad that you enjoy that scene as it's written now.
You're welcome, and that's quite the nice twist to hear! It's rare to read a well-worded version of it, so I'm glad ya made the call. Generally I skim stories these days, but I ended up reading this one all the way through. It's a testament to your abilities in any case.
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