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The Theatre of the Poisonous and Voracious
A commission for 
FurryEngineer42
The poison dragon’s career started pretty low-profile. To a well-plowed field where a patch of pumpkins had grown in a village of foxes, Sini went one day, and devoured twenty of the pumpkins without hesitation. They were rather large pumpkins—each was wider than twice the span of the arms of their fox farmer, and weighed over 70 pounds. Yet, the dragon, standing 13’2” tall and weighing over 5,000 pounds, ingested less than a third of his body weight from the binge, and could have filled his gurgly stomach with more. But at that point, he felt sated. And his purple stomach sagged and bulged with several plump, ovoid shapes, gurgling and churning so churlishly, so as to tremble the chair in which the owner of the field sat, a fox named Exo in his home; so Sini felt stuffed beyond measure, and fell then into a malaise. It was not the sort of malaise which makes complacent the afflicted, but the sort which made his gut abominably rowdy and queasy, and Sini too by association. With a sickly ORF, Sini slumped and grounded his belly, burying the bloated paunch in a pothole of his own make. The dragon lay there, looking bedridden, his abdomen letting out howls and bawls and queer ululations that set themselves to stirring the techtonics, almost; and the sorry beast flumped his tail against the fertile loam, again and again (with pauses for rest in between), as if to deter his mind from brooding what ailed his midsection; but finally—after his purple chyme sluiced the pumpkin shells into a pulp of the same sludgy, slippery consistency their squash guts had, and the decomposed foodstuff slushed and gyred long enough—there rolled through the gravid dragon belly the bumbling rumble of a geyser before the burst; then effervescence blanketed his lagoon of acids and spawned corpulent gas clouds, which chorused cacophonous borborygmi and dragooned the stomach, capacious as it was, into becoming gargantuanly cramped.
Grieving his good-natured innards, the dragon groaned, and grinded his belly against the walls of the pothole, hoping that the heedful fondling would coax his stomach to forgive him for his gluttony. Unfortunately, his grovelling just goaded the horrible gas to breach the sphincter of his gut. It burst through, ballooning his scaly throat and his black cheeks; and that was right before Exo—having come out of his house to demand to know why the dragon was on his property—saw the dragon’s ropy lips ruptured for a sneer. His dome cheeks jiggled quakingly, and out erupted this belch:
“BUWREAAAAH-UWWRRRRHP!”
The belch splintered the fence behind Exo, before it tore the wooden picks out of the ground and disintegrated much of the wood. Exo himself was swept off his feet, flung like a shadow of the belched-away fence particles. He thumped to the grass, skipping a couple of times on his flanks, and let out an OOF. The echo of the belch carried over the homes of the fox’s neighbours, followed by the plum-coloured haze of miasma. Through windows and ajar doorways, the stench of acids and meats and such came with curls of purple exhaust. These initially smelled horrendous to the foxes, but once the smell had marinated in their olfactories, their demeanors changed; and they became rather accepting and even accustomed to the smell. Furthermore, they yearned to know: From where did it come?
Mesmerized, their senses heightened by the heat of dragonbreath and the wafts of digested squash, they peered out from their doorways, then delicately made their way to the heart of the dense purple fog. Their eyes adjusted to the thick smoke, and they saw a dragon chuckling over a collapsed fox.
“Exo, is that you?” asked one of the foxes. “Oh dear, are you alright? Have you dehydrated?”
Sini nudged Exo to his feet, and with a YAP Exo straightened his posture and saluted his fox neighbours. “Oh, no! Don’t worry about me. I’m just … we’re just … well, this dragon is on my property, so I suppose he is my dragon.” Exo swiveled around and put his paws on his hips, leering Sini expectantly.
Sini raised a brow, then realized that he had eaten the food of this fox, and was expected to fulfill a debt. “Sure,” said Sini, “if you feed me for a couple of months, I’ll be your dragon.”
He thought that ownership of a Sini was a good bargain, considering that the fox only needed to stuff him with hundreds of thousands of pounds of food. Exo jumped, as if electrocuted; then sternly did he scrutinize Sini, as if unsure of whether he was being ripped off. After consideration, the fox said, “How about you help to tend the farm and keep thieves away? Then, I’ll gladly accept that proposal.”
“Done,” said Sini.
“Aww,” one of the fox neighbours said. “Exo gets a dragon for sixty days? I should have offered him my food.”
“You wouldn’t have been able,” said Sini, “since Exo has already offered you as food.”
“Wh-what?!” Exo blurted. “No, I never …”
Sini did not see any other food available, so he saw no other choice but to eat the fox’s neighbour. The maw of the dragon yawned. Spittle dripped on the neighbour’s face and his whiskers wilted in his terror. As the grin and the hot breath of the dragon spread, the neighbour dashed into the labyrinth of village homes. Sini stalled, as though letting the fox get a head start, then embarked after the fox, teasing the fox by chasing him with a dark, foreboding croon. With pretty, unrushed steps, carrying a drumbeat of thunder in his feet, Sini gained on the fox; and all about the village, the other foxes excitedly stampeded after the two, wanting to be there to see the dragon devour the fox. Then the game of cat-and-mouse came to an end, just as the crowd was homing in on the predator and the prey.
Sini had hopped alight to fly after the fox. He dropped in a graceful nosedive, and without touching the ground, he cleaved inches above the cobblestones and snatched the fox in his jaws with a SNARF!
Caught by the dragon, the vulpine made a finicky attempt to scramble out of the slimy lower jaw. But by the time his rump was slipping out of the ropy black lower lip, the ground plunged two storeys below, and Sini veered to ride a thermal as though it were an incline; this caused the fox to cry out and slip down the slobbery chute that was the maw. Sniggering, Sini flicked his tongue over the roof of his mouth and sentenced the fox to a backwards descent down his humid esophagus.
A few storeys above the village, the dragon could be seen hovering, a drooly and content look on his face. He gulped and flexed his purple neck to the rhythm of his relaxed wingbeats. His overhead position gave everyone, no matter where they stood, in the village a view of the mighty, gluttonous beast flicking his throat to thrust that bulge of the panicking morsel down the meandering curve of his serpentine neck. As high as Sini buoyed, there was broadcast over the village a sound of strong, saturated throat muscles strangling the fox’s squirms and squashing his frame with dribbly, peristaltic clenches to plunge him farther down.
For the village, the sight of the dragon sating his hunger and humiliating his fox prey aloft was a source of entertainment, like a large floating television. Still affected by the hypnotic perfumes of the dragon’s belch, all the foxes around Exo were swooning and asking their fellows who they thought would be the next sacrifice for Sini.
Well, Exo listened in on their conversations; and the gears in his head started churning capitalistically. Sini was his dragon (at least, for two months); and if he was entertaining like a television, then people would pay to see the celebrity perform, just how they would pay for satellite TV or Netflix. Already, Exo was getting ideas of a future that entailed both companionship and stardom for him and his dragon. Sini would do tend to the crops and do household chores for him, and perhaps let him in on fun dragon recreational activities (like flying, village-raiding and snuggling). And Exo would hardly have to move a muscle to reap the rewards of Sini’s servitude and their fame.
A plan formed in his mind. It distracted him as the fox bulge plummeted to the bottom of Sini’s throat, where the sphincter of the dragon snagged the fox and frisked him a bit, plunger-style, before the sphincter catapulted him into the underbelly region. Within the stomach, the fox met a horrid cavernous space, the purplish-pink walls squiggling with excitement as he plopped into a plum purple swamp of chyme. He flailed about, but he drowned; and above the village, Sini clasped his belly with a sickly look, for the meagerly rounded belly began to swell with gas and firm up and form a gurgly dome. The dome enlarged as did the cheeks of the dragon. At length, the itty fox forced the paunch of the dragon to grow even bigger than it had when he ate all the pumpkins, for foxes in these parts were exceptional gassy and gave whoever ate them a vicious bloat.
“HUUWRRWLEEEEEEELLLLCHH!”
From the sky, the flurry of belch fell and swept over the earth with the force of a meteor. The humid burp felt like a firestorm, it and its ghoulish miasmic stench; and from it, the foxes of the village were decked off their feet, and their heads filled with fogs of brief confusion. This … confusion segued into love and admiration; and when they rose, almost with the synchronization of a single unit, cheers and whoops and applause filled the village, and polluted the air: not that it wasn’t already polluted by a hot steam of toxic gases, which seeped off of roofs and cobblestones and wilted trees.
ALMOST EVERYONE was affected by the belch in this way. Everyone, except Exo. The fox did love and admire that belch, for sure, but he looked around and affirmed the opinion that his peers had an unhealthy obsession for Sini. He glanced up at Sini, who huffed the last exhaust fumes of belch from his maw, saw Exo then winked with a long eyelash. Exo recoiled, chuffed and blushed. Was this Sini’s doing? Was he granted immunity from some eructated, airbound drug?
GURRRRRRRGLE.
GROAAAN. GROOOOWWWL.
“BURROOOAHP!”
A whirlwind of gassy noise cycloned across the village, hurling foxes back onto their backs and shattering windows. Hay on roofs was gusted away, and trees and fields of wheat sizzled within the great heat of purple fumes. That purge of gas purged the purple bulge of the fox; and Sini’s metabolism returned his underbelly to lithe perfection.
Now, after this fantastic belch, the citizens of the fox village got up with greater fanaticism for Sini’s belches and Sini himself than ever. Demand for a third show arose. Sini opened his mouth to agree to perform, but Exo interrupted him.
“We’ll have an encore, alright. But first, a tithe must be given to the dragon! Eating people and expelling them as loud, mighty belches requires taxes the energy, after all, and so he needs lots of food to replenish it.”
Well, the foxes bought into this, quite literally, if one can purchase a service with food. The villagers at once scrambled into their homes and raided their pantries; and ran onto their fields, and harvested their crops. And ant-like lines marched toward the poison dragon, who had alighted in the square of the village. Foxes brought to him hands, baskets, barrels and wheelbarrows full of tomatoes, sweet breads, cabbages, corn cobs, berries and spiced meats. Sini hmphed smugly at the great hordes of folk he had hypnotised, then yawned his maw for the first person to pay their toll for the show. They placed an entire cooked hog on his tongue.
Each gulp of the dragon enlarged his belly again and again, until the gut was groundbound even before it had begun converting the great heaps of food into gases. Dozens of families sacrificed food for the cause of the show: And when Sini was absolutely engorged and his stomach rumbling up a storm, he bade them to clear a space for him. They did so, and gave the frontward radius around his maw a full arrow-shot’s length of space, then stood behind the firing line giddily. Then Sini started belching, but even the amount of space he had been given wasn’t enough; the huge, horrible belches thundered and rolled densely out of his uncouth mouth, rending the earth with deep cracks, from which purple gases smouldered. And every fox in the audience, even after the steam of belch had cleared from the air, reeked of belch and continued to steam the wafts from their coats, as though their fur generated the stenches of Sini’s burps.
They were marked as his fans, truly.
Weeks passed, and everywhere the fox villagers went, they carried the stench of Sini belch on their clothes and furs: Clearly, this garnered curiosity for why they smelled such a sweet, sour way; and that attracted outsiders to the village, where they brought new, exotic foods for the dragon to devour. And of course, the cacophony of the belches themselves also advertised the theatre of the dragon. Of course, mere people-food didn’t always sate Sini for the shows, and Sini would sometimes want people as food.
Always there were members of the audience willing to be prey, because of the hypnotic powers of the belches. And this trend continued, even as the audiences for the dragon’s shows of belching and devouring grew larger.
Everything worked out swell for Sini and Exo. Sini got almost all of the food and publicity that he could ever want, while in return for feeding the dragon, Exo got to spend plenty of free time with the dragon. They would go on long hikes and flights over the forest, and chat it up about either one of their professions, writing or engineering; or about food, or philosophy, or some other subject worth blathering about. Sometimes, the fox even received the privilege to tour the dragon’s insides himself, typically through oral means; though, unlike the other foxes, he had a habit of returning to the world of light after excursions through Sini’s digestive system.
When Sini wasn’t working by devouring anything that breathed or smelled delicious, he was entertaining Exo or tending to the fox’s garden and house, cleaning the exterior and eating pests and doing whatever other chores a dragon who couldn’t fit within the actual abode could manage.
Of Sini’s performances, word travelled to the big city. A suited entrepreneur fox visited Sini and Exo early one morning when Exo was making the both of them a cup of dark-roast coffee, brewing Sini’s coffee in a dragon-sized mug. The entrepreneur offered the two a deal they could not pass up: Sure, with their current gig they both got lots of food, fun and chores done; but they weren’t making any money. Consequently, they couldn’t buy flashy big city nicknacks, like fresh kicks (sneakers), wider television screens or Netflix subscriptions. (Granted, Exo did share wifi with the rest of the village because Xfinity gave them a good deal for a tithe of the crops they produced.)
Anyhow, the entrepreneur offered Sini and Exo three shows per day and twenty grand per show, which neither the dragon nor the fox could pass up. They accepted the deal even before the entrepreneur mentioned that they would be afforded a free five-star apartment in Furrywood, where the shows would take place; where all the A-list celebrities of popular shows and movies lived.
With their two-year contract, the two had more than enough money to hire a servant to tend to Exo’s village home and land while the two lived in Furrywood; so hire a servant they did, and a week later they moved into a spacious ultra modern apartment, which stood above a beachside and overlooked a glistening ocean. From that point on, Sini lived the true life of stardom: He even swapped out his regular round-lensed glasses for some dark tinted ones of the same shape, which helped him to look like a badass star.
Performance one was held in an indoor amphitheatre. The amphitheatre had plush crimson chairs and held twenty-thousand attendants; and many animal-people writhed eagerly in their seats before the show started. Then Sini arrived from backstage, and the acoustics of the room amplified a roar of applause. He bowed with the formalness of a classical music conductor, the lines on his forehead furrowed in a no-nonsense way; and his royal purple wings flittered behind him, resembling the cloak of an anointed knight.
A dozen animal-people, sacrifices who were hired for the show, lined up before his maw. Each was snapped up by Sini’s jaws, which received a close-up on three big, widescreen monitors: one that was above the center of the stage, and two above the stage’s flanks. High-quality speakers (the same kind that artists of the music industry use for tours) boomed a great deal, reproducing from a mic in Sini’s mouth the sounds of Sini’s slick tongue maneuvering, jowls flexing and esophagus clenching. The crowd shuddered with eerie delight and suspended fear. The natural instincts of the many prey attending the show were to jump out of their seats, initially; and yet the luxury of their seats, and the magic of the crisp, slick gulps and squelches and swallows on unbiased surround-sound speakers enraptured and spellbound them all. Every gulp, they could feel like the plunge of a roller coaster in their chests, thanks to the overhead audiophile subwoofers.
Then, the first of his meals slid into his stomach, and a microphone within the gurgly cavern clicked on and sent echoes of juicy feedback from the gut, involving the sounds of heavy sloshing and churning, as well as sizzling. Mesmerised enough to have been willing to sacrifice themselves to Sini in the first place, his prey choired with groans and hums of pleasure, though these vocalizations were majorly drowned out by the mighty borborygmi and burbling noises of Sini’s digestive juices. Throughout the amphitheatre rumbled heavier and heavier the dual-soundscape of the gulping dragon throat and the digesting belly, and no whip (ride/vehicle/car/etc.) in Furrywood could possibly match the volume and bass of the ginormous speakers, especially not when the dragon started to serenade to everyone.
“URRROOOOOOOOAAAAAHHHHHHHHUUUHHRRWWWWHHUUUURRRRGHHHPPPP!”
The sheer power of the belch buckled every seat and spine in the audience, causing hearts to hammer and drinks to spill over and the animal-folk to blush furiously. Everyone was shaken and slightly pallid, but despite how shocked they were, they were hooked and wanted more. The following belches, which coincided with the digestion of the next meals, thrilled the audience. Gradually, everyone adjusted to the leviathan bass, and their nerves became numb to some of the harsher tones which quaked the amphitheatre entire.
Show one was a bombshell. Every show afterward sold out. Sini’s popularity shook the streets of the nation, the news channels, and the social media outlets with commotion.
Exo never received any limelight himself, though. Although he would sometimes give an introductory speech and lead the meals to the stage, not once did anyone pursue him out of the amphitheatre for a photo or autograph. They did, however, swarm around the belchy dragon and rave around him with pens and paper-slips and camera phones.
What turned Exo against the poison dragon Sini is uncertain. It seemed that they would maintain a relationship far past their original two-week plan, yet Exo regarded the changes in Sini’s role and character in the following weeks with disdain, and perhaps a smidgen of envy.
The dragon hung with A-list celebrities at parties to which Exo was rarely invited. He dressed lavishly in regal robes of colours that matched his hide. When spotted with Exo in public, he would swing his nose the other way or shrug the vulpine out of his radius with a wing-flick. Partly did Exo feel remorse for the death of the dragon he had known: the full package of that dragon, in any case. Partly did he feel that Sini had too powerful an influence on crowds and on celebrities, on all people with whom he socialized. The dragon’s poison belches, even his mere poison breaths, were akin to the cries of a siren: They fastened emotional tethers around his acquaintances.
One day, the fox entrepreneur visited Exo and Sini. He happily announced that movie theatres had struck a deal with him and that shows from the amphitheatre would be replayed in iMax, should Sini sign another contract. New technology would allow his poisons to be sent to theatres, where they would be secreted at appropriate times during the shows.
The last thing we need is a global outbreak of poison dragon worship, Exo thought. The people in Furrywood are already out of their minds, so he hasn’t made much a difference with them; but sane people, I can’t allow him to twist their minds! I’ve made this mess and I must clean it up.
So before one amphitheatre show, during dress rehearsal, Exo decided to poison the dragon. That may sound impractical (trying to poison a poison dragon), but Sini only enjoyed ingesting natural poisons, like those from snakes and berries and plants; and Exo towed a giant crate full of booze and arsenic, artificial poison that was deadly to Sini, into one of the backrooms. If Sini keeled over early in his career, perhaps the world would not mourn him the way they mourned 2Paw or Biggie Paws.
The fox started dumping all of the booze and arsenic into a giant bowl of ramen. Sini was supposed to slurp it up at the end of the show. Unfortunately for Exo, one of the wolves slated to be sacrificed for the show, named Huffs, walked by this backroom, saw the door ajar and caught the vulpine in the act.
“ASSASSIN! KILLER! TRAITOR!”
“What?! Sir, no, you must understand—”
“Oh, I understand it enough! The rumors are true; you’re an envious fox, a cunning one at that.”
Huffs gave Exo zero time to explain himself. The wolf pounced on Exo, turned the two of them into a cartwheeling mess of dust; and winning the scuffle, Huffs swallowed Exo whole and impounded him in his gut, turning the grey sphere a slight reddish shade at the peak from its bloat and pushing out the belly button. A raunchy belch resounded through the backroom hallways, which drew Sini into the room with Huffs; but when questioned, Huffs only explained that he had filled himself up for Sini, and told the dragon not to eat the ramen because it was the cheap kind that college kids eat, and past the expiration date to boot.
So came the end of Exo the fox. He did not digest immediately. He squirmed and thrashed in that wolf gut, until the very end of the show, for the wolf was at the end of the line of worshipers. Sini swallowed the wolf with glee, for his rounded middle served as an unexpected treat, causing his craw to balloon and its bulge to fuss and fight on the way down. He reckoned, that wolf felt oddly willing and unwilling at the same time: an exquisite dessert that he enjoyed. It got stuck in his esophagus and required an extra seven gulps to be forced through the taut, silken tract into his stomach. The gut turned gravid and raucous; and the colorful palette of sound it splashed over the audience, conveyed by gigantic speakers, was what critics would later regard as “avant garde” and “multimedially sensational!”
“BUUUWWRRRHRRROOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAWWWRRRRRRRHHHRUUURHHRURHURRRROOOOAAAAPPPPPPPHHH!”
To Exo’s great dismay, he did not poison Sini, nor did he save theatre-goers from the dragon’s toxic theatrics. He only became fuel for another fuel, Huffs; and the fuel that Huffs became was an immense amount of toxic gas, which Sini unloaded. Then, the very stage upon which he stood trembled as if struck by a thunderbolt; the roar of belch split the stage, forged a fissure that zippered through the center seats of the audience and filled the amphitheatre with an impenetrable, unhatable fog. Whether he liked it or not, Exo elevated the encore of the show which would bring Sini’s fame to new heights. All the world would soon be under the hungry, poison-belching dragon’s spell.
What are your favorite parts? Least favorite? Comments and feedback are welcome!
FurryEngineer42The Theatre of the Poisonous and VoraciousThe poison dragon’s career started pretty low-profile. To a well-plowed field where a patch of pumpkins had grown in a village of foxes, Sini went one day, and devoured twenty of the pumpkins without hesitation. They were rather large pumpkins—each was wider than twice the span of the arms of their fox farmer, and weighed over 70 pounds. Yet, the dragon, standing 13’2” tall and weighing over 5,000 pounds, ingested less than a third of his body weight from the binge, and could have filled his gurgly stomach with more. But at that point, he felt sated. And his purple stomach sagged and bulged with several plump, ovoid shapes, gurgling and churning so churlishly, so as to tremble the chair in which the owner of the field sat, a fox named Exo in his home; so Sini felt stuffed beyond measure, and fell then into a malaise. It was not the sort of malaise which makes complacent the afflicted, but the sort which made his gut abominably rowdy and queasy, and Sini too by association. With a sickly ORF, Sini slumped and grounded his belly, burying the bloated paunch in a pothole of his own make. The dragon lay there, looking bedridden, his abdomen letting out howls and bawls and queer ululations that set themselves to stirring the techtonics, almost; and the sorry beast flumped his tail against the fertile loam, again and again (with pauses for rest in between), as if to deter his mind from brooding what ailed his midsection; but finally—after his purple chyme sluiced the pumpkin shells into a pulp of the same sludgy, slippery consistency their squash guts had, and the decomposed foodstuff slushed and gyred long enough—there rolled through the gravid dragon belly the bumbling rumble of a geyser before the burst; then effervescence blanketed his lagoon of acids and spawned corpulent gas clouds, which chorused cacophonous borborygmi and dragooned the stomach, capacious as it was, into becoming gargantuanly cramped.
Grieving his good-natured innards, the dragon groaned, and grinded his belly against the walls of the pothole, hoping that the heedful fondling would coax his stomach to forgive him for his gluttony. Unfortunately, his grovelling just goaded the horrible gas to breach the sphincter of his gut. It burst through, ballooning his scaly throat and his black cheeks; and that was right before Exo—having come out of his house to demand to know why the dragon was on his property—saw the dragon’s ropy lips ruptured for a sneer. His dome cheeks jiggled quakingly, and out erupted this belch:
“BUWREAAAAH-UWWRRRRHP!”
The belch splintered the fence behind Exo, before it tore the wooden picks out of the ground and disintegrated much of the wood. Exo himself was swept off his feet, flung like a shadow of the belched-away fence particles. He thumped to the grass, skipping a couple of times on his flanks, and let out an OOF. The echo of the belch carried over the homes of the fox’s neighbours, followed by the plum-coloured haze of miasma. Through windows and ajar doorways, the stench of acids and meats and such came with curls of purple exhaust. These initially smelled horrendous to the foxes, but once the smell had marinated in their olfactories, their demeanors changed; and they became rather accepting and even accustomed to the smell. Furthermore, they yearned to know: From where did it come?
Mesmerized, their senses heightened by the heat of dragonbreath and the wafts of digested squash, they peered out from their doorways, then delicately made their way to the heart of the dense purple fog. Their eyes adjusted to the thick smoke, and they saw a dragon chuckling over a collapsed fox.
“Exo, is that you?” asked one of the foxes. “Oh dear, are you alright? Have you dehydrated?”
Sini nudged Exo to his feet, and with a YAP Exo straightened his posture and saluted his fox neighbours. “Oh, no! Don’t worry about me. I’m just … we’re just … well, this dragon is on my property, so I suppose he is my dragon.” Exo swiveled around and put his paws on his hips, leering Sini expectantly.
Sini raised a brow, then realized that he had eaten the food of this fox, and was expected to fulfill a debt. “Sure,” said Sini, “if you feed me for a couple of months, I’ll be your dragon.”
He thought that ownership of a Sini was a good bargain, considering that the fox only needed to stuff him with hundreds of thousands of pounds of food. Exo jumped, as if electrocuted; then sternly did he scrutinize Sini, as if unsure of whether he was being ripped off. After consideration, the fox said, “How about you help to tend the farm and keep thieves away? Then, I’ll gladly accept that proposal.”
“Done,” said Sini.
“Aww,” one of the fox neighbours said. “Exo gets a dragon for sixty days? I should have offered him my food.”
“You wouldn’t have been able,” said Sini, “since Exo has already offered you as food.”
“Wh-what?!” Exo blurted. “No, I never …”
Sini did not see any other food available, so he saw no other choice but to eat the fox’s neighbour. The maw of the dragon yawned. Spittle dripped on the neighbour’s face and his whiskers wilted in his terror. As the grin and the hot breath of the dragon spread, the neighbour dashed into the labyrinth of village homes. Sini stalled, as though letting the fox get a head start, then embarked after the fox, teasing the fox by chasing him with a dark, foreboding croon. With pretty, unrushed steps, carrying a drumbeat of thunder in his feet, Sini gained on the fox; and all about the village, the other foxes excitedly stampeded after the two, wanting to be there to see the dragon devour the fox. Then the game of cat-and-mouse came to an end, just as the crowd was homing in on the predator and the prey.
Sini had hopped alight to fly after the fox. He dropped in a graceful nosedive, and without touching the ground, he cleaved inches above the cobblestones and snatched the fox in his jaws with a SNARF!
Caught by the dragon, the vulpine made a finicky attempt to scramble out of the slimy lower jaw. But by the time his rump was slipping out of the ropy black lower lip, the ground plunged two storeys below, and Sini veered to ride a thermal as though it were an incline; this caused the fox to cry out and slip down the slobbery chute that was the maw. Sniggering, Sini flicked his tongue over the roof of his mouth and sentenced the fox to a backwards descent down his humid esophagus.
A few storeys above the village, the dragon could be seen hovering, a drooly and content look on his face. He gulped and flexed his purple neck to the rhythm of his relaxed wingbeats. His overhead position gave everyone, no matter where they stood, in the village a view of the mighty, gluttonous beast flicking his throat to thrust that bulge of the panicking morsel down the meandering curve of his serpentine neck. As high as Sini buoyed, there was broadcast over the village a sound of strong, saturated throat muscles strangling the fox’s squirms and squashing his frame with dribbly, peristaltic clenches to plunge him farther down.
For the village, the sight of the dragon sating his hunger and humiliating his fox prey aloft was a source of entertainment, like a large floating television. Still affected by the hypnotic perfumes of the dragon’s belch, all the foxes around Exo were swooning and asking their fellows who they thought would be the next sacrifice for Sini.
Well, Exo listened in on their conversations; and the gears in his head started churning capitalistically. Sini was his dragon (at least, for two months); and if he was entertaining like a television, then people would pay to see the celebrity perform, just how they would pay for satellite TV or Netflix. Already, Exo was getting ideas of a future that entailed both companionship and stardom for him and his dragon. Sini would do tend to the crops and do household chores for him, and perhaps let him in on fun dragon recreational activities (like flying, village-raiding and snuggling). And Exo would hardly have to move a muscle to reap the rewards of Sini’s servitude and their fame.
A plan formed in his mind. It distracted him as the fox bulge plummeted to the bottom of Sini’s throat, where the sphincter of the dragon snagged the fox and frisked him a bit, plunger-style, before the sphincter catapulted him into the underbelly region. Within the stomach, the fox met a horrid cavernous space, the purplish-pink walls squiggling with excitement as he plopped into a plum purple swamp of chyme. He flailed about, but he drowned; and above the village, Sini clasped his belly with a sickly look, for the meagerly rounded belly began to swell with gas and firm up and form a gurgly dome. The dome enlarged as did the cheeks of the dragon. At length, the itty fox forced the paunch of the dragon to grow even bigger than it had when he ate all the pumpkins, for foxes in these parts were exceptional gassy and gave whoever ate them a vicious bloat.
“HUUWRRWLEEEEEEELLLLCHH!”
From the sky, the flurry of belch fell and swept over the earth with the force of a meteor. The humid burp felt like a firestorm, it and its ghoulish miasmic stench; and from it, the foxes of the village were decked off their feet, and their heads filled with fogs of brief confusion. This … confusion segued into love and admiration; and when they rose, almost with the synchronization of a single unit, cheers and whoops and applause filled the village, and polluted the air: not that it wasn’t already polluted by a hot steam of toxic gases, which seeped off of roofs and cobblestones and wilted trees.
ALMOST EVERYONE was affected by the belch in this way. Everyone, except Exo. The fox did love and admire that belch, for sure, but he looked around and affirmed the opinion that his peers had an unhealthy obsession for Sini. He glanced up at Sini, who huffed the last exhaust fumes of belch from his maw, saw Exo then winked with a long eyelash. Exo recoiled, chuffed and blushed. Was this Sini’s doing? Was he granted immunity from some eructated, airbound drug?
GURRRRRRRGLE.
GROAAAN. GROOOOWWWL.
“BURROOOAHP!”
A whirlwind of gassy noise cycloned across the village, hurling foxes back onto their backs and shattering windows. Hay on roofs was gusted away, and trees and fields of wheat sizzled within the great heat of purple fumes. That purge of gas purged the purple bulge of the fox; and Sini’s metabolism returned his underbelly to lithe perfection.
Now, after this fantastic belch, the citizens of the fox village got up with greater fanaticism for Sini’s belches and Sini himself than ever. Demand for a third show arose. Sini opened his mouth to agree to perform, but Exo interrupted him.
“We’ll have an encore, alright. But first, a tithe must be given to the dragon! Eating people and expelling them as loud, mighty belches requires taxes the energy, after all, and so he needs lots of food to replenish it.”
Well, the foxes bought into this, quite literally, if one can purchase a service with food. The villagers at once scrambled into their homes and raided their pantries; and ran onto their fields, and harvested their crops. And ant-like lines marched toward the poison dragon, who had alighted in the square of the village. Foxes brought to him hands, baskets, barrels and wheelbarrows full of tomatoes, sweet breads, cabbages, corn cobs, berries and spiced meats. Sini hmphed smugly at the great hordes of folk he had hypnotised, then yawned his maw for the first person to pay their toll for the show. They placed an entire cooked hog on his tongue.
Each gulp of the dragon enlarged his belly again and again, until the gut was groundbound even before it had begun converting the great heaps of food into gases. Dozens of families sacrificed food for the cause of the show: And when Sini was absolutely engorged and his stomach rumbling up a storm, he bade them to clear a space for him. They did so, and gave the frontward radius around his maw a full arrow-shot’s length of space, then stood behind the firing line giddily. Then Sini started belching, but even the amount of space he had been given wasn’t enough; the huge, horrible belches thundered and rolled densely out of his uncouth mouth, rending the earth with deep cracks, from which purple gases smouldered. And every fox in the audience, even after the steam of belch had cleared from the air, reeked of belch and continued to steam the wafts from their coats, as though their fur generated the stenches of Sini’s burps.
They were marked as his fans, truly.
Weeks passed, and everywhere the fox villagers went, they carried the stench of Sini belch on their clothes and furs: Clearly, this garnered curiosity for why they smelled such a sweet, sour way; and that attracted outsiders to the village, where they brought new, exotic foods for the dragon to devour. And of course, the cacophony of the belches themselves also advertised the theatre of the dragon. Of course, mere people-food didn’t always sate Sini for the shows, and Sini would sometimes want people as food.
Always there were members of the audience willing to be prey, because of the hypnotic powers of the belches. And this trend continued, even as the audiences for the dragon’s shows of belching and devouring grew larger.
Everything worked out swell for Sini and Exo. Sini got almost all of the food and publicity that he could ever want, while in return for feeding the dragon, Exo got to spend plenty of free time with the dragon. They would go on long hikes and flights over the forest, and chat it up about either one of their professions, writing or engineering; or about food, or philosophy, or some other subject worth blathering about. Sometimes, the fox even received the privilege to tour the dragon’s insides himself, typically through oral means; though, unlike the other foxes, he had a habit of returning to the world of light after excursions through Sini’s digestive system.
When Sini wasn’t working by devouring anything that breathed or smelled delicious, he was entertaining Exo or tending to the fox’s garden and house, cleaning the exterior and eating pests and doing whatever other chores a dragon who couldn’t fit within the actual abode could manage.
Of Sini’s performances, word travelled to the big city. A suited entrepreneur fox visited Sini and Exo early one morning when Exo was making the both of them a cup of dark-roast coffee, brewing Sini’s coffee in a dragon-sized mug. The entrepreneur offered the two a deal they could not pass up: Sure, with their current gig they both got lots of food, fun and chores done; but they weren’t making any money. Consequently, they couldn’t buy flashy big city nicknacks, like fresh kicks (sneakers), wider television screens or Netflix subscriptions. (Granted, Exo did share wifi with the rest of the village because Xfinity gave them a good deal for a tithe of the crops they produced.)
Anyhow, the entrepreneur offered Sini and Exo three shows per day and twenty grand per show, which neither the dragon nor the fox could pass up. They accepted the deal even before the entrepreneur mentioned that they would be afforded a free five-star apartment in Furrywood, where the shows would take place; where all the A-list celebrities of popular shows and movies lived.
With their two-year contract, the two had more than enough money to hire a servant to tend to Exo’s village home and land while the two lived in Furrywood; so hire a servant they did, and a week later they moved into a spacious ultra modern apartment, which stood above a beachside and overlooked a glistening ocean. From that point on, Sini lived the true life of stardom: He even swapped out his regular round-lensed glasses for some dark tinted ones of the same shape, which helped him to look like a badass star.
Performance one was held in an indoor amphitheatre. The amphitheatre had plush crimson chairs and held twenty-thousand attendants; and many animal-people writhed eagerly in their seats before the show started. Then Sini arrived from backstage, and the acoustics of the room amplified a roar of applause. He bowed with the formalness of a classical music conductor, the lines on his forehead furrowed in a no-nonsense way; and his royal purple wings flittered behind him, resembling the cloak of an anointed knight.
A dozen animal-people, sacrifices who were hired for the show, lined up before his maw. Each was snapped up by Sini’s jaws, which received a close-up on three big, widescreen monitors: one that was above the center of the stage, and two above the stage’s flanks. High-quality speakers (the same kind that artists of the music industry use for tours) boomed a great deal, reproducing from a mic in Sini’s mouth the sounds of Sini’s slick tongue maneuvering, jowls flexing and esophagus clenching. The crowd shuddered with eerie delight and suspended fear. The natural instincts of the many prey attending the show were to jump out of their seats, initially; and yet the luxury of their seats, and the magic of the crisp, slick gulps and squelches and swallows on unbiased surround-sound speakers enraptured and spellbound them all. Every gulp, they could feel like the plunge of a roller coaster in their chests, thanks to the overhead audiophile subwoofers.
Then, the first of his meals slid into his stomach, and a microphone within the gurgly cavern clicked on and sent echoes of juicy feedback from the gut, involving the sounds of heavy sloshing and churning, as well as sizzling. Mesmerised enough to have been willing to sacrifice themselves to Sini in the first place, his prey choired with groans and hums of pleasure, though these vocalizations were majorly drowned out by the mighty borborygmi and burbling noises of Sini’s digestive juices. Throughout the amphitheatre rumbled heavier and heavier the dual-soundscape of the gulping dragon throat and the digesting belly, and no whip (ride/vehicle/car/etc.) in Furrywood could possibly match the volume and bass of the ginormous speakers, especially not when the dragon started to serenade to everyone.
“URRROOOOOOOOAAAAAHHHHHHHHUUUHHRRWWWWHHUUUURRRRGHHHPPPP!”
The sheer power of the belch buckled every seat and spine in the audience, causing hearts to hammer and drinks to spill over and the animal-folk to blush furiously. Everyone was shaken and slightly pallid, but despite how shocked they were, they were hooked and wanted more. The following belches, which coincided with the digestion of the next meals, thrilled the audience. Gradually, everyone adjusted to the leviathan bass, and their nerves became numb to some of the harsher tones which quaked the amphitheatre entire.
Show one was a bombshell. Every show afterward sold out. Sini’s popularity shook the streets of the nation, the news channels, and the social media outlets with commotion.
Exo never received any limelight himself, though. Although he would sometimes give an introductory speech and lead the meals to the stage, not once did anyone pursue him out of the amphitheatre for a photo or autograph. They did, however, swarm around the belchy dragon and rave around him with pens and paper-slips and camera phones.
What turned Exo against the poison dragon Sini is uncertain. It seemed that they would maintain a relationship far past their original two-week plan, yet Exo regarded the changes in Sini’s role and character in the following weeks with disdain, and perhaps a smidgen of envy.
The dragon hung with A-list celebrities at parties to which Exo was rarely invited. He dressed lavishly in regal robes of colours that matched his hide. When spotted with Exo in public, he would swing his nose the other way or shrug the vulpine out of his radius with a wing-flick. Partly did Exo feel remorse for the death of the dragon he had known: the full package of that dragon, in any case. Partly did he feel that Sini had too powerful an influence on crowds and on celebrities, on all people with whom he socialized. The dragon’s poison belches, even his mere poison breaths, were akin to the cries of a siren: They fastened emotional tethers around his acquaintances.
One day, the fox entrepreneur visited Exo and Sini. He happily announced that movie theatres had struck a deal with him and that shows from the amphitheatre would be replayed in iMax, should Sini sign another contract. New technology would allow his poisons to be sent to theatres, where they would be secreted at appropriate times during the shows.
The last thing we need is a global outbreak of poison dragon worship, Exo thought. The people in Furrywood are already out of their minds, so he hasn’t made much a difference with them; but sane people, I can’t allow him to twist their minds! I’ve made this mess and I must clean it up.
So before one amphitheatre show, during dress rehearsal, Exo decided to poison the dragon. That may sound impractical (trying to poison a poison dragon), but Sini only enjoyed ingesting natural poisons, like those from snakes and berries and plants; and Exo towed a giant crate full of booze and arsenic, artificial poison that was deadly to Sini, into one of the backrooms. If Sini keeled over early in his career, perhaps the world would not mourn him the way they mourned 2Paw or Biggie Paws.
The fox started dumping all of the booze and arsenic into a giant bowl of ramen. Sini was supposed to slurp it up at the end of the show. Unfortunately for Exo, one of the wolves slated to be sacrificed for the show, named Huffs, walked by this backroom, saw the door ajar and caught the vulpine in the act.
“ASSASSIN! KILLER! TRAITOR!”
“What?! Sir, no, you must understand—”
“Oh, I understand it enough! The rumors are true; you’re an envious fox, a cunning one at that.”
Huffs gave Exo zero time to explain himself. The wolf pounced on Exo, turned the two of them into a cartwheeling mess of dust; and winning the scuffle, Huffs swallowed Exo whole and impounded him in his gut, turning the grey sphere a slight reddish shade at the peak from its bloat and pushing out the belly button. A raunchy belch resounded through the backroom hallways, which drew Sini into the room with Huffs; but when questioned, Huffs only explained that he had filled himself up for Sini, and told the dragon not to eat the ramen because it was the cheap kind that college kids eat, and past the expiration date to boot.
So came the end of Exo the fox. He did not digest immediately. He squirmed and thrashed in that wolf gut, until the very end of the show, for the wolf was at the end of the line of worshipers. Sini swallowed the wolf with glee, for his rounded middle served as an unexpected treat, causing his craw to balloon and its bulge to fuss and fight on the way down. He reckoned, that wolf felt oddly willing and unwilling at the same time: an exquisite dessert that he enjoyed. It got stuck in his esophagus and required an extra seven gulps to be forced through the taut, silken tract into his stomach. The gut turned gravid and raucous; and the colorful palette of sound it splashed over the audience, conveyed by gigantic speakers, was what critics would later regard as “avant garde” and “multimedially sensational!”
“BUUUWWRRRHRRROOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAWWWRRRRRRRHHHRUUURHHRURHURRRROOOOAAAAPPPPPPPHHH!”
To Exo’s great dismay, he did not poison Sini, nor did he save theatre-goers from the dragon’s toxic theatrics. He only became fuel for another fuel, Huffs; and the fuel that Huffs became was an immense amount of toxic gas, which Sini unloaded. Then, the very stage upon which he stood trembled as if struck by a thunderbolt; the roar of belch split the stage, forged a fissure that zippered through the center seats of the audience and filled the amphitheatre with an impenetrable, unhatable fog. Whether he liked it or not, Exo elevated the encore of the show which would bring Sini’s fame to new heights. All the world would soon be under the hungry, poison-belching dragon’s spell.
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Category Story / Vore
Species Western Dragon
Size 120 x 120px
File Size 711.5 kB
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