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The Tavern, the Curse and the Tasty City
A commission for 
thunderstrike23
The 15th of the month had arrived, and so had Zane’s paycheck. To celebrate, after work the black and purple gryphon drove to Barrels, his favorite downtown tavern. He seated himself in a high stool beside the bar, separated a couple of feet from the bar by his great, rotund gut. One bright pink slash on the top left curve of the plum-purple dome symbolized the last time his eating curse had taken control: the curse which amplified his hunger, which had once led to Zane devouring an entire city.
Reminding himself to stay mentally sober and eat less than he desired had become routine. I still don’t know what awakens the curse, but it’s best that I only drink a couple of brews and eat just a single meal. Too many people around for me to be getting super duper hungry without any casualties.
A regular—a lizard named Vahn—seated himself beside the gryphon. “Heya, bubble gut. Haven’t seen you ‘round in a while. You ready to eat?”
Zane stayed reserved, not because he was soft-spoken, but for the sake of Vahn and the crowd around him. “Just a little bit.”
“Ohh. You’re still on that diet, then? Pity.”
That cut open a wound in Zane’s pride. “Nah, I’m not on anything like that.” Vahn had known him back before the first marking on his stomach had appeared. Before the blasted curse.
“Heya fellas,” the bartender—a smoking hot vixen—propped her elbows on the bar. She smiled silkily at the two. “Can I get you started on a couple of drinks?”
“Barrel ale for me,” Zane said.
“Barrel ale as well,” Vahn said.
“Playing it safe, huh? You got it.”
She went to prepare the ales. Vahn countered, “Oh no. A lizard simply knows what he likes. I’m not playing tonight, Sheryl. I’d like uh”—he was speedreading the menu—“Gimme a couple o’ those steak sammiches and the sweet potato fries, all the sauces. Yeah, three orders of that. And three triple bacon cheeseburgers, uh, two personal pepperoni pizzas, one of those thick chocolate shakes, and a sundae … Aaaaah, fuck it—and everything I just said, I want to order all of that for my pal Zane here, too.”
“Vahn,” Zane tried, reaching over, but Vahn laughed and smacked his hand away.
“Hungry boys tonight.” Sheryl smiled with alcohol-flushed cheeks, and slid their mugs of ale over. “On your burgers, do you want pickles, ketchup—”
“Everything on everything.” Vahn waved dismissively, but not rudely. He was dismissing the price of the order, dismissing all the cares in the world. Her words “Will have your food ready soon” evaporated into the cacophony of the kitchen, and Vahn smiling turned to Zane, who looked like he had just been evicted.
“Vahn—you know, I can’t eat all that.”
“Aww, can’t handle the portions ya used ta? Well, I wish you the best of luck in your slim-fast pilgrimage.” He pressed his hands together for prayer and bowed his head slightly. “I’ll gladly eat everything you can’t fit myself. Barrels will be taking down your ‘Biggest Eater’ title soon and putting one with my name up on the wall.”
The lizard jabbed a finger at a photograph on the wall of Zane, who was surrounded by piles of plates and belching uncouthly at the camera. Zane must have eaten way more there than Vahn had just ordered—dozens of sandwiches, burgers, pies, pizzas, chickens and desserts. But Zane feared that what Vahn had just ordered was the appetizer round of several competitive eating rounds to come.
I come here to escape pressure, Zane thought solemnly, chugging some of his ale. He smashed the mug down then licked ale foam off his beak. The sweet, malty liquor was swathing his worries with a fog of encouragement, coaxing him not to be so damned high-strung. He grabbed the mug again and downed it. He ended up calling for five refills, all of which he finished before their orders arrived. The plates sprawled out along the bar with a wider breadth than their combined, fully-extended arms. And everything smelled mouthwatering, mesmeric.
“Brruuurrroaaaaahp.”
Zane grinned, teasing the top of his ale-filled gut between talons.
“Thank you, thank you,” answered Vahn to something the bartender said. Then he turned to Zane. “Look at you. Didn’t save any room at all for eating, you were so infatuated with your favorite ale?”
“Oh, shove it,” Zane said, throwing him a friendly leer. “I’ll smoke you.”
“Thaaataboy.” Vahn clapped Zane on the shoulder. He wasted no time digging into his first dish of the assembly.
Hearing that initial crunch of toasted bread and seeing ropes of cheese batter his friend’s muzzle, Zane felt in his stomach awaken the sleeping giant. What was he being humble for? What good was fear of what he wasn’t even sure was going to happen—especially if fear meant he couldn’t eat however much delicious food as he wanted?
Zane abducted a giant cheeseburger and mashed into it. Time phased by, and stains of cheese and ketchup smeared his bare violet chest, while his bongo of belly had ballooned exponentially. The dishes and utensils on the bar were rattling and clinking from the combined gurgles and rumbles of the hungry lads’ bellies, both of which pressed compactly against the bars now, for just a few bites remained on each of their plates. All the meaty, cheesy, sugary goodness roiled and rolled and churned in the stews of their capable stomachs. Around the two feasters there had been aroused looks of intrigue from the other attendees of the tavern: some regulars, others newcomers, who watched the two eat with exceptional awe and delight.
This awe developed to greater scale when the boys cleaned house on the first order, and slouched back in their cushioned stools, rubbing over their swollen bellies and groaning. The light rock band playing in the corner of the bar was abruptly interrupted by a slew of belches that made the guitarist’s hands hit out-of-tune notes and the drummer fall out of tempo entirely. After a minute the band stopped their song because the burps grew huge and horrid, roaring through the tavern and splashing the drinks of drunk people in their faces. The anger this caused was, overall, smothered by fits of laughter because the jolly drunkards overwhelmed the quick-tempered ones by about a 3:1 ratio. Plus, a group in the corner had begun clapping and cheering the two on as they ordered their second batch of food, which was even bigger than the first.
Tables were filling up because many people, after eating, opted not to leave: They wanted to see the hungers of the gryphon and the lizard duke it out until one seized victory. By and by, round two’s feast arrived; fillets of fish, huge french fries, creamy chowders, caesar salads, onion rings, fried chicken, dumplings, chicken tacos, juicy steaks, bloated lasagnas, banana splits and specialty apple pies comprised the buffet; and single-handedly, the duo had unspokenly reserved the whole bar for their food. Even then, additional tables were brought out out, courtesy of the tavern team: The bartenders used these to pile the surplus of food around the two, within reach. Other customers were licking their lips with envy, or cheering the lizard and the gryphon on in boisterous bellows. Even the guitar band said fuck it and gathered in an unthreatening pseudo circle around the pair to watch them destroy this second order of blood-pressurizing entrees.
The reincarnated paychecks of the duo rolled down their maws as they voraciously wrecked the platters of greasy, saucy five-star food. Zane was belching thunderously between every couple of bites, his expression fixated on the heavens before him. He panted as his belly added another handspan of girth. The stomach wobbled noisily and pleaded for him to stop, while wetly yelling for him not to at the same time. Not that Zane could hear the mixed messages; nor could he see Vahn’s bafflement, as the lizard reached his point of queasiness and suffered at the mere sight of his remaining twelve dishes. Zane ate as though he were afraid to slow down; and it would have been obvious that he was possessed by dark, gluttonous forces, if the roaring ambience of the room weren’t so merry and concealing of Zane’s curse of frenzied eating.
“Ughhhh … Zane … we bit off more than we could chew, dude … That was really too much that we ordered … Zane? Zane, I’m talking to you!”
Zane managed—between bites—a few words: “BeeeaaaaaaaAAAWWWURHHP … Mmmh, speak for yourself, lightweight … I can eat more, so much more. I’m even more hungry than before.”
The manic sound of Zane’s voice, and Zane’s sheer lack of concern about all the pasta sauce he was drooling down his beak, alerted Vahn that something was terribly awry. “You really don’t have to jest about your hunger. I mean it. That’s a lot, Zane. I just want you to know you can slow down and take it easy anytime. I forfeit, alright?” He gave a chuckle to indicate his friendliness, but nervousness seeped in.
The unorthodoxy of Zane’s hunger and health concerns rattled Vahn’s mind. Didn’t he say he couldn’t eat this much earlier? The sudden change of Zane’s temperament was palpable and unsettling, and transcended mere envy. Vahn worried. If he ends up in cardiac arrest because of me, I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.
Zane feasted like a creature dozens of sizes bigger than the one before Vahn. It were as though a large, quadrupedal dragon had performed a mirage spell on himself and was filling a stomach that was much larger in reality. Every plate that Zane defeated left Vahn looking more puzzled than before. Soon, the assembly of plates lacked anything atop their surfaces but crumbs and smears of sauces. And not even those smears escaped the hunger of Zane: The dragon proceeded to lap off the ranch, barbecue, mustard, ketchup and tartar sauce from each plate. Afterwards, he slumped back in his seat and sighed triumphantly, and the tavern burst into a roar of cheers and applause. Halfway into the cacophony, a monstrous “BURREWWEEAAAARRRCH!” drowned out the response of the crowd. Vahn flinched, recoiling in his seat from the gastric stench.
“I think I’m gonna go for a round three,” Zane said, clapping a humongous, jiggling midriff.
He opened his mouth to order from Sheryl, who was on standby. But Vahn firmly laid a hand on Zane’s wrist. “Listen. You’ve won already, man. Won by a long shot. It’s not possible for you to still be hungry. Give your stomach a break.”
Contact with Vahn caused Zane to visibly tweak. The nostrils of his beak flared, and he shook his head, and mumbled, “No … not him …” while a gigantic rope of drool descended from his maw. His flight muscles clenched inward then spasmed in a fit of fluttering. “Not now … but … Oh, he’s … smelling yummy …”
“Psst, Zane? Jeez, Zane, are you okay? Should we be concerned? Uhhm, Sheryl—is anyone seeing this?”
Vahn rattled the arm of his friend, who was clearly lapsing into some sort of incoherent coma or having an unidentified allergic reaction. Shivers faster than cheetahs on Five Hour Energy ran up his arm when Zane locked a grip of steel around his wrist. Drooling beak agape, Zane looked over the lizard’s middleweight figure and stuffed belly through his round spectacles. The grip trembled, and Zane loosed an undulating trill of rapture. The pulpy sound of his fat, lubricated tongue slurping his mouth from one corner to the other caused Vahn to wince.
“But lizard’s not on the menu, Vahn,” Zane groaned. A brisk manic guffaw followed. “Oh, Vahn, you can understand, I hope … I’m starving, and I could g-gobble you up right now!”
Vahn began mouthing words of panic at his own expense: He could have used that precious time to jerk away as hard as he could. Now, his words of reason flew right over the delirious bird’s head; and Zane gripped the lizard’s opposite wrist and wrenched him forward, yawning his maw wide. The impenetrable heat of an active digestive system blasted over the lizard’s face as the hungry beak clamped over his head; as he was encapsulated in the raunchy, saucy atmosphere of his friend’s mouth.
His muffled cries rung like thunder over his ears. He was pushing at the euphorically beating wings of the gryphon, trying desperately to resist an uprising current of slime-saturated gullet muscles. Vaguely, he could hear the crowd panicking—could feel arms wrestling around his; feel people pulling on his legs.
But Zane was simply too hungry to be stopped. He was panting so profusely in his bliss, his spectacles were fogging up. His face screwed into a maelstrom of austerity and degeneracy. He perched his chin higher, drooling over his sauce-stained chest. More swallows yanked the lizard snack deeper into his throaty digestive tract. The slobbery, palpitating gullet muscles yanked in the scaly shoulders and the chest, and the power of each swallow became increasingly derisory towards the efforts of the people who were trying to pry the lizard free.
The red cheeks from the gryphon’s intoxication flushed brighter as his throat muscles began plunging the turgid, round gut of the lizard deeper into his salivating beak. Not only did the scaly flavor and savory aroma of the lizard urge him to eat faster: He saw members of the crowd tugging on the ankles and wrists of the beloved reptile, mustering all their power to unshackle him from the imprisoning flesh rings of the gryphon’s gullet. As a result, the members of the crowd enslaved themselves to being eaten, creating a chain of limbs which Zane eagerly gulped towards. Many of the crowd members released their grip on Vahn when they saw that beak snarfing Vahn up steadily, consuming the scaly buttocks before starting on the final three limbs. They let go. A couple people, however, thought that they could relinquish Vahn at the last moment: They underestimated the speed at which Zane was dining. Because of this, they became side courses for the main entree of the dinner.
Gullkk … GUULLP … GGLLLBRBRK!
The force of each swallow of the chain of prey leaned Zane’s stool off of its front legs. The seat toppled and thumped against the floor, and Zane rolled over his head, beaching on his bouncy belly as the last limbs of a succulent triad plummeted into his maw with a sluurrrrrrrrrp and a medley of howls from within his shutting beak. The belly of the gryphon barely inflated, representative of the stomach’s hammerspace.
“Hic … HIC!”
The glutton hugged his belly, and rose to his feet before a couple of snarling sloshes rocked his stomach. Around him, bartenders and customers were screaming and fleeing for the exit. Unfortunately for them, Zane had an excess of energy from all of the food he had eaten. He ziplined to the door with brusque wingbeats, and toppled a table in front of the door, preventing people from leaving. One of the customers took a risk: They reached for the table to pull it out of the way, but Zane clasped them and licked his lips, regarding them as a child regards a new teddy bear. The kitsune customer wiggled in his grasp, and out of her maw erupted a bleat, but he didn’t care: He just gulped down her head then released her and downed her shoulders next, proceeding to slurp up the rest of her.
Behind the bar, the eagle manager was dialing the police on a cell phone as covertly as possible. In lieu of an escape route, many of the customers clustered around the manager, unintentionally forming a meat shield. Unfortunately, Zane loved the taste of meat shields. He loved the smell of this one, too: It was comprised of avians, reptiles, felines, canines and dragons.
With gut bouncing and gurgling, he stomped forebodingly towards the flappy door of the counter. One avian of the meat shield nearly swooned from the approaching predator. She clambered onto the bar, and jumped for the window, flapping her wings at high speeds. She hoped to burst through the glass—for there were little options left. Alas, she was little more than fast food for Zane. The gryphon jumped and kicked off of a wooden support beam. He made an arc between twenty and thirty feet long in the air, and caught the bird in his elastic gullet, before rolling to a stop, his gut squishing against the inner front facade of the room.
“BUHHREEEAAARP!”
That hope-shattering belch broke the ranks of the meat shield; people were losing hope that the manager would do anything. And besides, they saw an opening to clear the door before the gryphon rose. Several folk bounded for the door, only for Zane to leap in front of them, like a final boss in a video game. He sniggered, eyes flickering over the entrees before him. His nostrils sniffed. Italian food … Mexican food … a little bit of Chinese, too! he thought, smelling some Asian heritage on the white tiger to his right.
The eager manager thumbed the red phone button on his cell. “Okay, help is on the way, folks,” he assured the people round him; but when he looked up from his technology, he saw that only two of the customers still surrounded him: a dragon guitarist and a bear drummer, who clung in fear to his feathery arms. They trembled so because the shadow of Zane ping ponged over their gazes, while the belly bulge of the gryphon distended and gargled louder.
“The gig is up,” groaned the guitarist.
“We’ve got to hide somewhere, quick!” said the bear.
As though holding hostage the manager, they pulled the eagle with them into the kitchen. They then shoved aside some boxes on the lower level of a steel platform of cooking ingredients, and crept into the foetal position beneath it. Alas, they could hear the noises of swallows and gulps and repugnant belches from the main room; and soon, there came a length of quietude, disturbed only by the noises of borborygmi … Floorboards thumped heavily. Talons scraped along wood, coming closer, closer … The peak of a fluffy plum gut pushed through the threshold of the kitchen before Zane entered, sweating a bit from the labor he had forced upon his metabolism. Throughout the metal-laden kitchen reverberated the deep, gross grumbles of his belly slowly stewing away guests of the restaurant, the stew spiced by the various foods he had eaten earlier.
Not long did the manager or the survivors last; kitchen pans clattered about, and a couple olive oil bottles shattered. Zane would have been a rather unsanitary chef, for he grasped all over his food before washing his hands, even though he had been handling money earlier. He almost slipped over a puddle around a caution sign as he slung himself over the kitchen sink, gripping the metal edges to help him gulp down the legs of the eagle, the bear and the dragon jutting from his maw. With a mighty GULP, he dropped the food into the organic pot of his gut.
Zane had little control over the temperature of said pot; they simmered away slowly, all three dozen of his people meals. He could not speed up his metabolism, and yet he still hungered. But before he would proceed eating, he needed to drink; his mouth was ridiculously parched. He turned around and reached for the faucet knobs, but his ginormous sphere of gut was sandwiched taut between him and the sink, distancing his hands from the knob. “J-just … a little cl-closer!” With pumps of his wings, he lunged out and seized the knob for cold water, and he wheeled the faucet on. His beak latched onto the crook of the faucet, and he glugged for a full half-minute before he released the faucet and panted happily.
He paced out of the kitchen. His belly felt like a hybrid between a big, turgid water balloon and a bounce house crowded with people. His trip to the door was laden with unanticipated burps and wobbles of his gut which only exaggerated his swaying drunkard’s gait.
The door swung open. Several officers stood in a croissant shape ahead of a triad of police cars, blockading the door. “Croissants,” Zane muttered, “my hurrrwrp favorite.” the officers heard the drooling bird say.
One of them gulped, and said dryly, “Freeze,” but that only gained him the attention of the bird. A swirl of feathers jetted from the door to the officer. A girly scream preceded two poorly aimed gunshots. Like a worm, the fox officer was snatched from above and converted into a dancing bulge for Zane’s esophagus.
Before the bird even landed, gunfire was raving in the air, bullets slamming into the sherbet sky; and once the bird did land, the police officers were appearing to be having seizures because Zane was pouncing so fast from place to place, pistols whipping from angle to angle. The new officer on the job wailed and sweated as badges and officer hats plopped around him, littering the asphalt as feathers congested the air, Zane’s belly in constant motion and gurgling around the officer’s head.
The officer could not get a solid aim. He never would. When Zane alighted before him, his bubble gut bounced up and whacked the pistol out of his hand. “N-no, my wife at home! What will she do without my salary?!” cried the officer, now being coiled by the gryphon’s tail and lifted to the beak of the gryphon. Out of that a tongue slickly whacked off his hat.
“You have a wife too, huh? Well, she’ll be doing the same thing you’ll be doing once the two of you move into your new home: my gut.”
And with that, Zane devoured the officer whole. The guy’s shoes rolled off of the surface of Zane’s gut. Zane frowned as his belly rippled in minute expansion. It felt as though a void within his stomach was eating away at him, and if he did not eat the void first he would fall prey. But he couldn’t eat the void, could he? So he would do the next best thing: He would eat everything around him.
He gave a dastardly snigger and rubbed his paws together, the sight of a police vehicle extremely appetizing to the inebriated glutton. He clamped his paws around the front bumper of the car, then began heaving it into his maw with a strength he had not realized he possessed; all of the consumed protein was giving him a surge of power—that, as well as the adrenaline from his eating curse.
Minutes later, the car was sliding down his esophagus, his lower jaw balancing the vehicle with unexplainable skill. The gigantic rectangular piece of iron rolled down his throat, bulging his gastrointestinal tract cartoonishly until it began vanishing into the almost-perfect hammerspace of his stomach. He gulped hard. The back bumper joined the digesting police force and tavern attendees. He decided he liked the taste of new cars and rubber—or, perhaps he was so hungry that everything tasted heavenly? He was eating the second car a few minutes later, and then the third.
His stomach bulged out a couple inches farther; his belly was expanding less and less, the more egregious his diet became.
The sight of the tavern made his stomach rev like a great underwater motorcycle. He pounced on the front facade, and his maw crashed into the door. His hunger awarded his beak with extreme flexibility; so his beak stretched over the wood and the roof tiles; and soon he was dragging himself along the roof, burdening his trumpeting belly with square foot after square foot of the property.
“Yeah, I heard you the first time,” Sini the guardian dragon blurted into the massive walkie talkie. The 200’-tall dragon received an earful of wrath from Defense Dispatch. “I said YES! I HEARD YOU! I just don’t believe your claims. A tiny little anthropomorphic gryphon does not simply eat an entire police force by himself, forget an entire tavern. But since you insist, and I’d like you to be happy, my partner and I will go to investigate.”
The black and purple dragon hung up.
“Dispatch?” asked his partner, a 200’-tall ruby dragon named Sanders. The two of them stood on the fringes of the metropolis, their mere presences guaranteeing that any invaders from foreign countries would be warded off.
“Yep. This time, they insist that there’s a wee bird who ate three police vehicles and a tavern.”
“To be fair, even if the bird is like a hundred feet tall, he’s ‘wee’ to us, Sini.”
“Fair enough. Anyhoo, let’s not keep dispatch waiting. This bird is purportedly devouring more buildings around the area of that tavern Barrels.”
So both dragons spread their leviathan wings, and engulfed the noon sky in a plethora of membrane folds. Not even a couple of minutes had passed when storm gales brewed and gusted the rooftops of the buildings around the circumference of Barrels’ former position. Around the tavern’s previous site, it looked like a small nuke had gone off; so many more buildings should have flanked the group of streets here. Had the gryphon really eaten them all?
Both guardians scrutinized the area devoid of buildings, until a gastric groan rumbled so strongly, the noise gave both Sini and Sanders chills, even though their aerial heights were about twenty storeys off of the ground.
“There.” Sini jabbed a claw at a supernaturally distended beak: It was worming its way over a liquor store.
“Great spotted eggs,” Sanders cursed. “Look at his pace. Look at his gut.”
Even with his round spectacles, Sini needed to descend and be closer to the city to see the gut. He lowered himself a few storeys, a few more, and groaned. “Science be damned. How is this possible?” He witnessed as the stomach failed to expand in proportion to the mass of the consumed building. Sini shook his head incredulously, and when he looked again, the whole building was gone, and the gryphon was suckling on the knobs in the centers of his fingers, apparently getting the alcoholic flavor of the ale store off of each of them.
“Why—this is snake oil!” Sini cried. “I refuse to have my eyes sell me illegitimate shit! I will get to the bottom of this!”
And indeed, Sini set off to get to the bottom of it, just how an alcoholic gets to the bottom of a beer bottle. He eased his wingbeats and docked in the clear space of seemingly eaten buildings. Since he was so huge, he lost sight of Zane: But then, he checked between his legs, and there the gryphon was, moaning like a maniac and caressing Sini’s megalithic foreleg.
“Holler if you need me,” echoed Sanders’ voice from above.
“Rawr, hey! You can’t be going around eating buildings,” Sini barked at the gryphon.
But the gryphon paid no mind to the scolding. All of his mind was particularly involved in the appreciating of the savory flavor of the dragon’s scales. Plum and blackberry flavors served as the bassline for the dragon’s exquisite taste, the quality high enough to satiate the avian connoisseur. Cataracts of drool overflowed from the gryphon’s beak; and the gryphon could not bear to fondle this foreleg any longer. He needed to eat every pound and scale of the juicy, live dragon. His belly demanded it. Its acids churned away his previous meals with a slow maelstrom and needed more sustenance than he had stuffed himself with thus far.
So, Zane skipped to Sini’s foreclaws, hefted one up and stuffed the spear of tasty scales down his gullet.
“What, no! You can’t be eating me either! Get off, pesky bird! Agh!”
Up lifted Sini’s forepaw, and the dragon flailed it. The gryphon flapped like a ragdoll, but the more of the claw he swallowed, the less flappy his body became: But at the same time, he was swallowing the other foreclaws, and flapping with his wings to assist his esophagus in snarfing up the entire paw.
The dragon threw his head high and honked a beckon of distress to the sky; and the ruby dragon, hearing the black and purple dragon’s holler, called back, asking Sini if he legitimately needed help (Sanders wasn’t aware of what was going on because he was browsing funny cat pictures on his large cellular phone). But Sini didn’t hear that question; he was busying himself trying to yank the gryphon off of his ankle using the free forepaw. But Zane was not stifled in his voracious plight. The bird swallowed whole the megalith paw, claws and pads and scales and all. He pulled himself up the length of Sini’s foreleg like a jungle animal climbing a coconut tree. Now Sini’s cries of distress barreled over the adjacent streets, and shook vehicles and knocked pedestrians over; and he was rolling over the empty plot of land, kicking that half-eaten foreleg with surprising force, suffusing the air with cannoning thuds.
Now, these thuds interfered so jarringly with Sanders’ cell phone reception, he looked up from his cellular screen sporting a grimace of pure malice. Sini—you’d best quit fussing about and fucking with my signal before I jam this 5g phone up so far up your vent! The thought of speaking these words weaved into perfection. But before he could speak them, he saw an anomaly which made his foreclaws eerily uncontrollable. The giant phone fell to the earth, smashed a vehicle into pieces.
That gryphon had devoured Sini’s entire foreleg. The lack of a fitting stomach bulge tested Sanders’ perception of reality: The leg stretched Zane’s esophagus to widen its breadth, aye, but the belly had swelled only a couple of inches. The belly’s hammerspace cast the illusion that Sini had been amputated. But then, Zane’s beak opened abominably wide—the gouts of drool rolling over thousands of great hind scales; and the illusion was broken, for Sanders could see for himself how Zane was making limbs disappear. That maw climbed over the base of the lashing tail. Sini whipped it as hard as he could, but the maw’s stretching was certain and steady. The tail could cease the beak’s expansion no more than a mortal can abort the expansion of a black hole adjacent to their homeworld.
And then, hollering Sini’s name nonsensically, Sanders was sliding steeply from the heavens with easier wingbeats; and he eructed a stream of flames to purge Sini’s tail of the hungry gryph; but the flames harmed the victim more than the aggressor, for Sini bleated, “Ow, ow, why are you attacking me?!” while the snakes of fire slithered down the tail, half of which was now dressed with the gryphon’s digestive system. Zane swallowed and swallowed. Flames ate away at his feathers, baptismal flames which signified his new role as an eater of guardian dragons.
The sheer scale of what Zane was eating—or, rather, the sheer scales—baffled him. Even as his claws drove through the great furrows between black scales in Sini’s tail base and pulled him closer to the dragon’s hindquarters, his whole cramped digestive tract ached as though he had neglected eating for days. Had he?
All the ale blurred the events of the evening. The clearest thing to him was his hunger. The second clearest thing was the orgasmic struggling of the great dragon. Zane could feel Sini massaging his guts and throat as he gulped over the haunches and the belly. His feathers had been roasted thoroughly from the unchecked flames, but those same flames were smoking out as his stretchy beak began bending backwards to engulf the dragon’s wings with the meticulous movements of a voracious slime.
The ruby landed on Sini, and tried to wrestle Zane off. Instead, the flavor of the ruby dragon only inspired Zane to keep gulping, so that he would sooner be able to devour whole his second course. Soon, a belly not much bigger than an exercise ball featured miniature bulges of Sini’s entire body attacking the belly walls, while a ginormous head jutted out of Zane’s beak. With slurps, Zane zipped up that dragon neck with esophageal flesh in turtleneck fashion. One last gulp bellied the dragon entire; and he then turned his attention to the second dragon, who suddenly looked as though he had made a grave error not to flee while he still had the chance.
The ruby whirled around to race off into the sky, but Zane pounced on the scaly tail using his maw; and the gluttonous feasting of round two commenced. He gulped and gulped, and the dragon protested and squirmed but nevertheless found his haunches slipping toward the maw. The avian snaked over his leviathan prey, and stashed that draconic muzzle away behind his beak before making one last gulp. The belch that resulted from his duo of dragon meals trembled the whole city.
A city which did not last long, alas. Zane’s hunger consumed him. It knew no limits: So, he began chomping up the concrete and the trees, chomping up the rest of the apartment complexes and liquor stores and grocery stores and shopping outlets and government buildings in the district. His belly growled and goaded him to eat even more districts of the city, and he did, until the entire metropolis was stewing away in his stomach. The whole feast toiled into midnight. In the crater of the city that used to be, Zane lay atop a purple hillock of gut, groaning in pleasure, belching up crunched-up cars and corroded steel beams and building materials from time to time. Amongst the gastric litter of things expelled rested the great bones of the former city’s guardian dragons; skulls several storeys in size sat in the rubble amongst Zane.
Had he not tired, his voracious eating session might have continued. But with one final throaty belch, he passed out from the needs of his flesh and bones; and when he awoke, a severe headache hung over his mind like a sickly miasma. Despite that he felt like someone had dragged him out of the grave and played yahtzee with his skull, he felt incredibly well-nourished. He was also definitely pudgier around the middle; his plum belly measured larger than before, as well as his hips and his buttocks; and two new slash marks had appeared at the top left of his belly, signifying that he had eaten a portion equal to two small cities. That explained the crater in which he sat, along with all of the bones.
Yet, Zane could not remember for the life of him what city he ate while he was drunk. Was it an unimportant one? Although he felt guilty about the ordeal, if he could go back in time and repeat whatever happened last night, he would do so eagerly. After all, life’s greatest joys require great sacrifices.
thunderstrike23The Tavern, the Curse and the Tasty CityThe 15th of the month had arrived, and so had Zane’s paycheck. To celebrate, after work the black and purple gryphon drove to Barrels, his favorite downtown tavern. He seated himself in a high stool beside the bar, separated a couple of feet from the bar by his great, rotund gut. One bright pink slash on the top left curve of the plum-purple dome symbolized the last time his eating curse had taken control: the curse which amplified his hunger, which had once led to Zane devouring an entire city.
Reminding himself to stay mentally sober and eat less than he desired had become routine. I still don’t know what awakens the curse, but it’s best that I only drink a couple of brews and eat just a single meal. Too many people around for me to be getting super duper hungry without any casualties.
A regular—a lizard named Vahn—seated himself beside the gryphon. “Heya, bubble gut. Haven’t seen you ‘round in a while. You ready to eat?”
Zane stayed reserved, not because he was soft-spoken, but for the sake of Vahn and the crowd around him. “Just a little bit.”
“Ohh. You’re still on that diet, then? Pity.”
That cut open a wound in Zane’s pride. “Nah, I’m not on anything like that.” Vahn had known him back before the first marking on his stomach had appeared. Before the blasted curse.
“Heya fellas,” the bartender—a smoking hot vixen—propped her elbows on the bar. She smiled silkily at the two. “Can I get you started on a couple of drinks?”
“Barrel ale for me,” Zane said.
“Barrel ale as well,” Vahn said.
“Playing it safe, huh? You got it.”
She went to prepare the ales. Vahn countered, “Oh no. A lizard simply knows what he likes. I’m not playing tonight, Sheryl. I’d like uh”—he was speedreading the menu—“Gimme a couple o’ those steak sammiches and the sweet potato fries, all the sauces. Yeah, three orders of that. And three triple bacon cheeseburgers, uh, two personal pepperoni pizzas, one of those thick chocolate shakes, and a sundae … Aaaaah, fuck it—and everything I just said, I want to order all of that for my pal Zane here, too.”
“Vahn,” Zane tried, reaching over, but Vahn laughed and smacked his hand away.
“Hungry boys tonight.” Sheryl smiled with alcohol-flushed cheeks, and slid their mugs of ale over. “On your burgers, do you want pickles, ketchup—”
“Everything on everything.” Vahn waved dismissively, but not rudely. He was dismissing the price of the order, dismissing all the cares in the world. Her words “Will have your food ready soon” evaporated into the cacophony of the kitchen, and Vahn smiling turned to Zane, who looked like he had just been evicted.
“Vahn—you know, I can’t eat all that.”
“Aww, can’t handle the portions ya used ta? Well, I wish you the best of luck in your slim-fast pilgrimage.” He pressed his hands together for prayer and bowed his head slightly. “I’ll gladly eat everything you can’t fit myself. Barrels will be taking down your ‘Biggest Eater’ title soon and putting one with my name up on the wall.”
The lizard jabbed a finger at a photograph on the wall of Zane, who was surrounded by piles of plates and belching uncouthly at the camera. Zane must have eaten way more there than Vahn had just ordered—dozens of sandwiches, burgers, pies, pizzas, chickens and desserts. But Zane feared that what Vahn had just ordered was the appetizer round of several competitive eating rounds to come.
I come here to escape pressure, Zane thought solemnly, chugging some of his ale. He smashed the mug down then licked ale foam off his beak. The sweet, malty liquor was swathing his worries with a fog of encouragement, coaxing him not to be so damned high-strung. He grabbed the mug again and downed it. He ended up calling for five refills, all of which he finished before their orders arrived. The plates sprawled out along the bar with a wider breadth than their combined, fully-extended arms. And everything smelled mouthwatering, mesmeric.
“Brruuurrroaaaaahp.”
Zane grinned, teasing the top of his ale-filled gut between talons.
“Thank you, thank you,” answered Vahn to something the bartender said. Then he turned to Zane. “Look at you. Didn’t save any room at all for eating, you were so infatuated with your favorite ale?”
“Oh, shove it,” Zane said, throwing him a friendly leer. “I’ll smoke you.”
“Thaaataboy.” Vahn clapped Zane on the shoulder. He wasted no time digging into his first dish of the assembly.
Hearing that initial crunch of toasted bread and seeing ropes of cheese batter his friend’s muzzle, Zane felt in his stomach awaken the sleeping giant. What was he being humble for? What good was fear of what he wasn’t even sure was going to happen—especially if fear meant he couldn’t eat however much delicious food as he wanted?
Zane abducted a giant cheeseburger and mashed into it. Time phased by, and stains of cheese and ketchup smeared his bare violet chest, while his bongo of belly had ballooned exponentially. The dishes and utensils on the bar were rattling and clinking from the combined gurgles and rumbles of the hungry lads’ bellies, both of which pressed compactly against the bars now, for just a few bites remained on each of their plates. All the meaty, cheesy, sugary goodness roiled and rolled and churned in the stews of their capable stomachs. Around the two feasters there had been aroused looks of intrigue from the other attendees of the tavern: some regulars, others newcomers, who watched the two eat with exceptional awe and delight.
This awe developed to greater scale when the boys cleaned house on the first order, and slouched back in their cushioned stools, rubbing over their swollen bellies and groaning. The light rock band playing in the corner of the bar was abruptly interrupted by a slew of belches that made the guitarist’s hands hit out-of-tune notes and the drummer fall out of tempo entirely. After a minute the band stopped their song because the burps grew huge and horrid, roaring through the tavern and splashing the drinks of drunk people in their faces. The anger this caused was, overall, smothered by fits of laughter because the jolly drunkards overwhelmed the quick-tempered ones by about a 3:1 ratio. Plus, a group in the corner had begun clapping and cheering the two on as they ordered their second batch of food, which was even bigger than the first.
Tables were filling up because many people, after eating, opted not to leave: They wanted to see the hungers of the gryphon and the lizard duke it out until one seized victory. By and by, round two’s feast arrived; fillets of fish, huge french fries, creamy chowders, caesar salads, onion rings, fried chicken, dumplings, chicken tacos, juicy steaks, bloated lasagnas, banana splits and specialty apple pies comprised the buffet; and single-handedly, the duo had unspokenly reserved the whole bar for their food. Even then, additional tables were brought out out, courtesy of the tavern team: The bartenders used these to pile the surplus of food around the two, within reach. Other customers were licking their lips with envy, or cheering the lizard and the gryphon on in boisterous bellows. Even the guitar band said fuck it and gathered in an unthreatening pseudo circle around the pair to watch them destroy this second order of blood-pressurizing entrees.
The reincarnated paychecks of the duo rolled down their maws as they voraciously wrecked the platters of greasy, saucy five-star food. Zane was belching thunderously between every couple of bites, his expression fixated on the heavens before him. He panted as his belly added another handspan of girth. The stomach wobbled noisily and pleaded for him to stop, while wetly yelling for him not to at the same time. Not that Zane could hear the mixed messages; nor could he see Vahn’s bafflement, as the lizard reached his point of queasiness and suffered at the mere sight of his remaining twelve dishes. Zane ate as though he were afraid to slow down; and it would have been obvious that he was possessed by dark, gluttonous forces, if the roaring ambience of the room weren’t so merry and concealing of Zane’s curse of frenzied eating.
“Ughhhh … Zane … we bit off more than we could chew, dude … That was really too much that we ordered … Zane? Zane, I’m talking to you!”
Zane managed—between bites—a few words: “BeeeaaaaaaaAAAWWWURHHP … Mmmh, speak for yourself, lightweight … I can eat more, so much more. I’m even more hungry than before.”
The manic sound of Zane’s voice, and Zane’s sheer lack of concern about all the pasta sauce he was drooling down his beak, alerted Vahn that something was terribly awry. “You really don’t have to jest about your hunger. I mean it. That’s a lot, Zane. I just want you to know you can slow down and take it easy anytime. I forfeit, alright?” He gave a chuckle to indicate his friendliness, but nervousness seeped in.
The unorthodoxy of Zane’s hunger and health concerns rattled Vahn’s mind. Didn’t he say he couldn’t eat this much earlier? The sudden change of Zane’s temperament was palpable and unsettling, and transcended mere envy. Vahn worried. If he ends up in cardiac arrest because of me, I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.
Zane feasted like a creature dozens of sizes bigger than the one before Vahn. It were as though a large, quadrupedal dragon had performed a mirage spell on himself and was filling a stomach that was much larger in reality. Every plate that Zane defeated left Vahn looking more puzzled than before. Soon, the assembly of plates lacked anything atop their surfaces but crumbs and smears of sauces. And not even those smears escaped the hunger of Zane: The dragon proceeded to lap off the ranch, barbecue, mustard, ketchup and tartar sauce from each plate. Afterwards, he slumped back in his seat and sighed triumphantly, and the tavern burst into a roar of cheers and applause. Halfway into the cacophony, a monstrous “BURREWWEEAAAARRRCH!” drowned out the response of the crowd. Vahn flinched, recoiling in his seat from the gastric stench.
“I think I’m gonna go for a round three,” Zane said, clapping a humongous, jiggling midriff.
He opened his mouth to order from Sheryl, who was on standby. But Vahn firmly laid a hand on Zane’s wrist. “Listen. You’ve won already, man. Won by a long shot. It’s not possible for you to still be hungry. Give your stomach a break.”
Contact with Vahn caused Zane to visibly tweak. The nostrils of his beak flared, and he shook his head, and mumbled, “No … not him …” while a gigantic rope of drool descended from his maw. His flight muscles clenched inward then spasmed in a fit of fluttering. “Not now … but … Oh, he’s … smelling yummy …”
“Psst, Zane? Jeez, Zane, are you okay? Should we be concerned? Uhhm, Sheryl—is anyone seeing this?”
Vahn rattled the arm of his friend, who was clearly lapsing into some sort of incoherent coma or having an unidentified allergic reaction. Shivers faster than cheetahs on Five Hour Energy ran up his arm when Zane locked a grip of steel around his wrist. Drooling beak agape, Zane looked over the lizard’s middleweight figure and stuffed belly through his round spectacles. The grip trembled, and Zane loosed an undulating trill of rapture. The pulpy sound of his fat, lubricated tongue slurping his mouth from one corner to the other caused Vahn to wince.
“But lizard’s not on the menu, Vahn,” Zane groaned. A brisk manic guffaw followed. “Oh, Vahn, you can understand, I hope … I’m starving, and I could g-gobble you up right now!”
Vahn began mouthing words of panic at his own expense: He could have used that precious time to jerk away as hard as he could. Now, his words of reason flew right over the delirious bird’s head; and Zane gripped the lizard’s opposite wrist and wrenched him forward, yawning his maw wide. The impenetrable heat of an active digestive system blasted over the lizard’s face as the hungry beak clamped over his head; as he was encapsulated in the raunchy, saucy atmosphere of his friend’s mouth.
His muffled cries rung like thunder over his ears. He was pushing at the euphorically beating wings of the gryphon, trying desperately to resist an uprising current of slime-saturated gullet muscles. Vaguely, he could hear the crowd panicking—could feel arms wrestling around his; feel people pulling on his legs.
But Zane was simply too hungry to be stopped. He was panting so profusely in his bliss, his spectacles were fogging up. His face screwed into a maelstrom of austerity and degeneracy. He perched his chin higher, drooling over his sauce-stained chest. More swallows yanked the lizard snack deeper into his throaty digestive tract. The slobbery, palpitating gullet muscles yanked in the scaly shoulders and the chest, and the power of each swallow became increasingly derisory towards the efforts of the people who were trying to pry the lizard free.
The red cheeks from the gryphon’s intoxication flushed brighter as his throat muscles began plunging the turgid, round gut of the lizard deeper into his salivating beak. Not only did the scaly flavor and savory aroma of the lizard urge him to eat faster: He saw members of the crowd tugging on the ankles and wrists of the beloved reptile, mustering all their power to unshackle him from the imprisoning flesh rings of the gryphon’s gullet. As a result, the members of the crowd enslaved themselves to being eaten, creating a chain of limbs which Zane eagerly gulped towards. Many of the crowd members released their grip on Vahn when they saw that beak snarfing Vahn up steadily, consuming the scaly buttocks before starting on the final three limbs. They let go. A couple people, however, thought that they could relinquish Vahn at the last moment: They underestimated the speed at which Zane was dining. Because of this, they became side courses for the main entree of the dinner.
Gullkk … GUULLP … GGLLLBRBRK!
The force of each swallow of the chain of prey leaned Zane’s stool off of its front legs. The seat toppled and thumped against the floor, and Zane rolled over his head, beaching on his bouncy belly as the last limbs of a succulent triad plummeted into his maw with a sluurrrrrrrrrp and a medley of howls from within his shutting beak. The belly of the gryphon barely inflated, representative of the stomach’s hammerspace.
“Hic … HIC!”
The glutton hugged his belly, and rose to his feet before a couple of snarling sloshes rocked his stomach. Around him, bartenders and customers were screaming and fleeing for the exit. Unfortunately for them, Zane had an excess of energy from all of the food he had eaten. He ziplined to the door with brusque wingbeats, and toppled a table in front of the door, preventing people from leaving. One of the customers took a risk: They reached for the table to pull it out of the way, but Zane clasped them and licked his lips, regarding them as a child regards a new teddy bear. The kitsune customer wiggled in his grasp, and out of her maw erupted a bleat, but he didn’t care: He just gulped down her head then released her and downed her shoulders next, proceeding to slurp up the rest of her.
Behind the bar, the eagle manager was dialing the police on a cell phone as covertly as possible. In lieu of an escape route, many of the customers clustered around the manager, unintentionally forming a meat shield. Unfortunately, Zane loved the taste of meat shields. He loved the smell of this one, too: It was comprised of avians, reptiles, felines, canines and dragons.
With gut bouncing and gurgling, he stomped forebodingly towards the flappy door of the counter. One avian of the meat shield nearly swooned from the approaching predator. She clambered onto the bar, and jumped for the window, flapping her wings at high speeds. She hoped to burst through the glass—for there were little options left. Alas, she was little more than fast food for Zane. The gryphon jumped and kicked off of a wooden support beam. He made an arc between twenty and thirty feet long in the air, and caught the bird in his elastic gullet, before rolling to a stop, his gut squishing against the inner front facade of the room.
“BUHHREEEAAARP!”
That hope-shattering belch broke the ranks of the meat shield; people were losing hope that the manager would do anything. And besides, they saw an opening to clear the door before the gryphon rose. Several folk bounded for the door, only for Zane to leap in front of them, like a final boss in a video game. He sniggered, eyes flickering over the entrees before him. His nostrils sniffed. Italian food … Mexican food … a little bit of Chinese, too! he thought, smelling some Asian heritage on the white tiger to his right.
The eager manager thumbed the red phone button on his cell. “Okay, help is on the way, folks,” he assured the people round him; but when he looked up from his technology, he saw that only two of the customers still surrounded him: a dragon guitarist and a bear drummer, who clung in fear to his feathery arms. They trembled so because the shadow of Zane ping ponged over their gazes, while the belly bulge of the gryphon distended and gargled louder.
“The gig is up,” groaned the guitarist.
“We’ve got to hide somewhere, quick!” said the bear.
As though holding hostage the manager, they pulled the eagle with them into the kitchen. They then shoved aside some boxes on the lower level of a steel platform of cooking ingredients, and crept into the foetal position beneath it. Alas, they could hear the noises of swallows and gulps and repugnant belches from the main room; and soon, there came a length of quietude, disturbed only by the noises of borborygmi … Floorboards thumped heavily. Talons scraped along wood, coming closer, closer … The peak of a fluffy plum gut pushed through the threshold of the kitchen before Zane entered, sweating a bit from the labor he had forced upon his metabolism. Throughout the metal-laden kitchen reverberated the deep, gross grumbles of his belly slowly stewing away guests of the restaurant, the stew spiced by the various foods he had eaten earlier.
Not long did the manager or the survivors last; kitchen pans clattered about, and a couple olive oil bottles shattered. Zane would have been a rather unsanitary chef, for he grasped all over his food before washing his hands, even though he had been handling money earlier. He almost slipped over a puddle around a caution sign as he slung himself over the kitchen sink, gripping the metal edges to help him gulp down the legs of the eagle, the bear and the dragon jutting from his maw. With a mighty GULP, he dropped the food into the organic pot of his gut.
Zane had little control over the temperature of said pot; they simmered away slowly, all three dozen of his people meals. He could not speed up his metabolism, and yet he still hungered. But before he would proceed eating, he needed to drink; his mouth was ridiculously parched. He turned around and reached for the faucet knobs, but his ginormous sphere of gut was sandwiched taut between him and the sink, distancing his hands from the knob. “J-just … a little cl-closer!” With pumps of his wings, he lunged out and seized the knob for cold water, and he wheeled the faucet on. His beak latched onto the crook of the faucet, and he glugged for a full half-minute before he released the faucet and panted happily.
He paced out of the kitchen. His belly felt like a hybrid between a big, turgid water balloon and a bounce house crowded with people. His trip to the door was laden with unanticipated burps and wobbles of his gut which only exaggerated his swaying drunkard’s gait.
*The door swung open. Several officers stood in a croissant shape ahead of a triad of police cars, blockading the door. “Croissants,” Zane muttered, “my hurrrwrp favorite.” the officers heard the drooling bird say.
One of them gulped, and said dryly, “Freeze,” but that only gained him the attention of the bird. A swirl of feathers jetted from the door to the officer. A girly scream preceded two poorly aimed gunshots. Like a worm, the fox officer was snatched from above and converted into a dancing bulge for Zane’s esophagus.
Before the bird even landed, gunfire was raving in the air, bullets slamming into the sherbet sky; and once the bird did land, the police officers were appearing to be having seizures because Zane was pouncing so fast from place to place, pistols whipping from angle to angle. The new officer on the job wailed and sweated as badges and officer hats plopped around him, littering the asphalt as feathers congested the air, Zane’s belly in constant motion and gurgling around the officer’s head.
The officer could not get a solid aim. He never would. When Zane alighted before him, his bubble gut bounced up and whacked the pistol out of his hand. “N-no, my wife at home! What will she do without my salary?!” cried the officer, now being coiled by the gryphon’s tail and lifted to the beak of the gryphon. Out of that a tongue slickly whacked off his hat.
“You have a wife too, huh? Well, she’ll be doing the same thing you’ll be doing once the two of you move into your new home: my gut.”
And with that, Zane devoured the officer whole. The guy’s shoes rolled off of the surface of Zane’s gut. Zane frowned as his belly rippled in minute expansion. It felt as though a void within his stomach was eating away at him, and if he did not eat the void first he would fall prey. But he couldn’t eat the void, could he? So he would do the next best thing: He would eat everything around him.
He gave a dastardly snigger and rubbed his paws together, the sight of a police vehicle extremely appetizing to the inebriated glutton. He clamped his paws around the front bumper of the car, then began heaving it into his maw with a strength he had not realized he possessed; all of the consumed protein was giving him a surge of power—that, as well as the adrenaline from his eating curse.
Minutes later, the car was sliding down his esophagus, his lower jaw balancing the vehicle with unexplainable skill. The gigantic rectangular piece of iron rolled down his throat, bulging his gastrointestinal tract cartoonishly until it began vanishing into the almost-perfect hammerspace of his stomach. He gulped hard. The back bumper joined the digesting police force and tavern attendees. He decided he liked the taste of new cars and rubber—or, perhaps he was so hungry that everything tasted heavenly? He was eating the second car a few minutes later, and then the third.
His stomach bulged out a couple inches farther; his belly was expanding less and less, the more egregious his diet became.
The sight of the tavern made his stomach rev like a great underwater motorcycle. He pounced on the front facade, and his maw crashed into the door. His hunger awarded his beak with extreme flexibility; so his beak stretched over the wood and the roof tiles; and soon he was dragging himself along the roof, burdening his trumpeting belly with square foot after square foot of the property.
*“Yeah, I heard you the first time,” Sini the guardian dragon blurted into the massive walkie talkie. The 200’-tall dragon received an earful of wrath from Defense Dispatch. “I said YES! I HEARD YOU! I just don’t believe your claims. A tiny little anthropomorphic gryphon does not simply eat an entire police force by himself, forget an entire tavern. But since you insist, and I’d like you to be happy, my partner and I will go to investigate.”
The black and purple dragon hung up.
“Dispatch?” asked his partner, a 200’-tall ruby dragon named Sanders. The two of them stood on the fringes of the metropolis, their mere presences guaranteeing that any invaders from foreign countries would be warded off.
“Yep. This time, they insist that there’s a wee bird who ate three police vehicles and a tavern.”
“To be fair, even if the bird is like a hundred feet tall, he’s ‘wee’ to us, Sini.”
“Fair enough. Anyhoo, let’s not keep dispatch waiting. This bird is purportedly devouring more buildings around the area of that tavern Barrels.”
So both dragons spread their leviathan wings, and engulfed the noon sky in a plethora of membrane folds. Not even a couple of minutes had passed when storm gales brewed and gusted the rooftops of the buildings around the circumference of Barrels’ former position. Around the tavern’s previous site, it looked like a small nuke had gone off; so many more buildings should have flanked the group of streets here. Had the gryphon really eaten them all?
Both guardians scrutinized the area devoid of buildings, until a gastric groan rumbled so strongly, the noise gave both Sini and Sanders chills, even though their aerial heights were about twenty storeys off of the ground.
“There.” Sini jabbed a claw at a supernaturally distended beak: It was worming its way over a liquor store.
“Great spotted eggs,” Sanders cursed. “Look at his pace. Look at his gut.”
Even with his round spectacles, Sini needed to descend and be closer to the city to see the gut. He lowered himself a few storeys, a few more, and groaned. “Science be damned. How is this possible?” He witnessed as the stomach failed to expand in proportion to the mass of the consumed building. Sini shook his head incredulously, and when he looked again, the whole building was gone, and the gryphon was suckling on the knobs in the centers of his fingers, apparently getting the alcoholic flavor of the ale store off of each of them.
“Why—this is snake oil!” Sini cried. “I refuse to have my eyes sell me illegitimate shit! I will get to the bottom of this!”
And indeed, Sini set off to get to the bottom of it, just how an alcoholic gets to the bottom of a beer bottle. He eased his wingbeats and docked in the clear space of seemingly eaten buildings. Since he was so huge, he lost sight of Zane: But then, he checked between his legs, and there the gryphon was, moaning like a maniac and caressing Sini’s megalithic foreleg.
“Holler if you need me,” echoed Sanders’ voice from above.
“Rawr, hey! You can’t be going around eating buildings,” Sini barked at the gryphon.
But the gryphon paid no mind to the scolding. All of his mind was particularly involved in the appreciating of the savory flavor of the dragon’s scales. Plum and blackberry flavors served as the bassline for the dragon’s exquisite taste, the quality high enough to satiate the avian connoisseur. Cataracts of drool overflowed from the gryphon’s beak; and the gryphon could not bear to fondle this foreleg any longer. He needed to eat every pound and scale of the juicy, live dragon. His belly demanded it. Its acids churned away his previous meals with a slow maelstrom and needed more sustenance than he had stuffed himself with thus far.
So, Zane skipped to Sini’s foreclaws, hefted one up and stuffed the spear of tasty scales down his gullet.
“What, no! You can’t be eating me either! Get off, pesky bird! Agh!”
Up lifted Sini’s forepaw, and the dragon flailed it. The gryphon flapped like a ragdoll, but the more of the claw he swallowed, the less flappy his body became: But at the same time, he was swallowing the other foreclaws, and flapping with his wings to assist his esophagus in snarfing up the entire paw.
The dragon threw his head high and honked a beckon of distress to the sky; and the ruby dragon, hearing the black and purple dragon’s holler, called back, asking Sini if he legitimately needed help (Sanders wasn’t aware of what was going on because he was browsing funny cat pictures on his large cellular phone). But Sini didn’t hear that question; he was busying himself trying to yank the gryphon off of his ankle using the free forepaw. But Zane was not stifled in his voracious plight. The bird swallowed whole the megalith paw, claws and pads and scales and all. He pulled himself up the length of Sini’s foreleg like a jungle animal climbing a coconut tree. Now Sini’s cries of distress barreled over the adjacent streets, and shook vehicles and knocked pedestrians over; and he was rolling over the empty plot of land, kicking that half-eaten foreleg with surprising force, suffusing the air with cannoning thuds.
Now, these thuds interfered so jarringly with Sanders’ cell phone reception, he looked up from his cellular screen sporting a grimace of pure malice. Sini—you’d best quit fussing about and fucking with my signal before I jam this 5g phone up so far up your vent! The thought of speaking these words weaved into perfection. But before he could speak them, he saw an anomaly which made his foreclaws eerily uncontrollable. The giant phone fell to the earth, smashed a vehicle into pieces.
That gryphon had devoured Sini’s entire foreleg. The lack of a fitting stomach bulge tested Sanders’ perception of reality: The leg stretched Zane’s esophagus to widen its breadth, aye, but the belly had swelled only a couple of inches. The belly’s hammerspace cast the illusion that Sini had been amputated. But then, Zane’s beak opened abominably wide—the gouts of drool rolling over thousands of great hind scales; and the illusion was broken, for Sanders could see for himself how Zane was making limbs disappear. That maw climbed over the base of the lashing tail. Sini whipped it as hard as he could, but the maw’s stretching was certain and steady. The tail could cease the beak’s expansion no more than a mortal can abort the expansion of a black hole adjacent to their homeworld.
And then, hollering Sini’s name nonsensically, Sanders was sliding steeply from the heavens with easier wingbeats; and he eructed a stream of flames to purge Sini’s tail of the hungry gryph; but the flames harmed the victim more than the aggressor, for Sini bleated, “Ow, ow, why are you attacking me?!” while the snakes of fire slithered down the tail, half of which was now dressed with the gryphon’s digestive system. Zane swallowed and swallowed. Flames ate away at his feathers, baptismal flames which signified his new role as an eater of guardian dragons.
*The sheer scale of what Zane was eating—or, rather, the sheer scales—baffled him. Even as his claws drove through the great furrows between black scales in Sini’s tail base and pulled him closer to the dragon’s hindquarters, his whole cramped digestive tract ached as though he had neglected eating for days. Had he?
All the ale blurred the events of the evening. The clearest thing to him was his hunger. The second clearest thing was the orgasmic struggling of the great dragon. Zane could feel Sini massaging his guts and throat as he gulped over the haunches and the belly. His feathers had been roasted thoroughly from the unchecked flames, but those same flames were smoking out as his stretchy beak began bending backwards to engulf the dragon’s wings with the meticulous movements of a voracious slime.
The ruby landed on Sini, and tried to wrestle Zane off. Instead, the flavor of the ruby dragon only inspired Zane to keep gulping, so that he would sooner be able to devour whole his second course. Soon, a belly not much bigger than an exercise ball featured miniature bulges of Sini’s entire body attacking the belly walls, while a ginormous head jutted out of Zane’s beak. With slurps, Zane zipped up that dragon neck with esophageal flesh in turtleneck fashion. One last gulp bellied the dragon entire; and he then turned his attention to the second dragon, who suddenly looked as though he had made a grave error not to flee while he still had the chance.
The ruby whirled around to race off into the sky, but Zane pounced on the scaly tail using his maw; and the gluttonous feasting of round two commenced. He gulped and gulped, and the dragon protested and squirmed but nevertheless found his haunches slipping toward the maw. The avian snaked over his leviathan prey, and stashed that draconic muzzle away behind his beak before making one last gulp. The belch that resulted from his duo of dragon meals trembled the whole city.
A city which did not last long, alas. Zane’s hunger consumed him. It knew no limits: So, he began chomping up the concrete and the trees, chomping up the rest of the apartment complexes and liquor stores and grocery stores and shopping outlets and government buildings in the district. His belly growled and goaded him to eat even more districts of the city, and he did, until the entire metropolis was stewing away in his stomach. The whole feast toiled into midnight. In the crater of the city that used to be, Zane lay atop a purple hillock of gut, groaning in pleasure, belching up crunched-up cars and corroded steel beams and building materials from time to time. Amongst the gastric litter of things expelled rested the great bones of the former city’s guardian dragons; skulls several storeys in size sat in the rubble amongst Zane.
Had he not tired, his voracious eating session might have continued. But with one final throaty belch, he passed out from the needs of his flesh and bones; and when he awoke, a severe headache hung over his mind like a sickly miasma. Despite that he felt like someone had dragged him out of the grave and played yahtzee with his skull, he felt incredibly well-nourished. He was also definitely pudgier around the middle; his plum belly measured larger than before, as well as his hips and his buttocks; and two new slash marks had appeared at the top left of his belly, signifying that he had eaten a portion equal to two small cities. That explained the crater in which he sat, along with all of the bones.
Yet, Zane could not remember for the life of him what city he ate while he was drunk. Was it an unimportant one? Although he felt guilty about the ordeal, if he could go back in time and repeat whatever happened last night, he would do so eagerly. After all, life’s greatest joys require great sacrifices.
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Category Story / Vore
Species Gryphon
Size 120 x 120px
File Size 427.1 kB
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