The Egg
Author's note: Happy Mother's Day
The inhumanly sharp eye of a lone bird of prey picked out the shape of a tiny, red-brown animal on the mountain's slope a mile below. The distant figure climbed across a stark, desolate region of chasms and narrow stone walks. The bird circled once in order to descend, then did so again, until he flew on the same level as the land-bound species. He viewed the furry creature for a moment and then flew past it, crying shrilly, though much of the cry was lost due to the incessant, cold winds that swept across the region of tall peaks.
Rauv, a male Vulpelin in his prime, looked up as the bird flew past him, crying out a greeting to him, or some kind of warning perhaps. He watched the creature flap its wings twice in succession and execute a graceful dive into the lower air. It entered the depths of the valley, which appeared to be as barren as the upper mountain slopes Rauv was climbing. He lost sight of the bird as it soared over a field of gray and black boulders more than a mile below.
Rauv continued to climb. He halted suddenly, and a grin spread across his brown, fur-trimmed muzzle. There on the mountainside above him, its black branches standing out clearly against the white stone from which it grew, he sighted his prize: a tiny, dry, brushy plant called a keopsma which grew only at supremely high altitudes, and which he had found to be invaluable to those recovering from all manner of illnesses, not to mention that ingestion of the plant itself cured a number of serious diseases.
After picking the entire plant and stuffing it into his sack, Rauv headed further up the mountain. He saw no more plants growing at that altitude, but he was convinced that he would find more of them at higher altitudes. After scaling the slope for a time, he arrived at a place among the immense, time-shattered peaks that contained a vast, split mountain, where two looming walls of stone rose high on either side of him, enclosing him within a narrow ravine more than a mile deep.
Rauv hurried along a long, narrow ledge halfway up the wall of the ravine. He remained ever mindful of the lethal half-mile fall a few feet to his right, and he avoided going near its edge at all times.
Rauv turned a corner in the ravine and halted in mid-step, staring straight ahead. To the right of the narrow ledge, twenty yards ahead, he discerned a place where the opposite-side wall of the canyon bulged toward his side, coming close to the ledge. That part of the ravine was an extremely narrow passage between the two tall cliffs. Rauv almost could have leaped across the intervening space had he wanted to do so.
And there on the opposite side of the gorge was a reason for him to do precisely that: Directly across from the place where the ledge reached out furthest across the void, Rauv saw the biggest, darkest, healthiest keopsma plant he had ever laid eyes on. If he walked out onto the stone ledge, stood right at the edge, and stretched out one forepaw, he could have almost brushed its spiky branches with his claws.
Deciding that this prize was much too valuable to be dismissed without trying at least one time to remove it, Rauv walked out across the ledge until he stood at the edge. Only a few feet of empty air lay between him and the huge, magnificent keopsma he had found. It was only as he knelt at the edge of the precipice and leaned out across the void that Rauv came to the realization that he would not be able to reach the plant.
All at once, Rauv's frustration at not being able to reach his prize boiled over into a desperate act: he backed up several paces, ran, and leapt the narrow space. He landed on the opposite wall of the ravine and immediately seized hold of the keopsma plant in order to keep from falling. But the plant was too dry and brittle to bear his weight, and his slipping, struggling forepaws pulled it out of the wall. He fell wailing into the gorge, taking the keopsma with him.
The plant was still in Rauv's trembling forepaws when he landed in a stunned state, blinking in surprise. He had fallen onto another ledge, only a few feet beneath the one on which he had been walking. Blessing his good fortune for saving his life once again, the Vulpelin stood up and happily stuffed the keopsma into the bottom of his sack, and afterwards he turned to examine his surroundings.
Fear instantly crystallized his senses. Rauv's breathing stopped. He was not alone on the ledge.
A few paces to his right there stood a huge, dark, drum-shaped object consisting of thousands of interwoven branches and chunks of organic debris, including a number of old animal bones and several small glinting shapes which appeared to be the products of civilization: several buttons, a metal belt-buckle, and the steel eyelets of a lace-up boot, among others. It was plainly the nest of some sort of animal, and when Rauv approached it in order to examine it closely he heard sounds coming from within: a dull, thumping, repetitive pulse, which was accompanied by a noise which sounded like old wood snapping and creaking.
Rauv climbed up and over the side of the huge nest and peered down to view its contents. Two large yellow eggs, each one as tall as Rauv and more than four times his girth, lay at the bottom of a concavity of interwoven twigs and a few old bones. The two eggs were speckled with vivid red and green maculae, and both of their exteriors had a dry, leathery texture. It was Rauv's belief that one of them was near to hatching, because he had heard it moving earlier. No sooner had the thought entered his mind than the egg on the left started to twitch and wobble.
He gasped and scrambled back. When he dared to look again, Rauv saw that the shell of the egg on the left now contained a triangular hole, through which something was poking its snout. The snout emerged further, and Rauv was able to see that it was black and saurian, with a forked tongue that licked the shell repeatedly as it slowly gnawed its way out of its slimy confinement. He soon observed a pair of yellow, reptilian eyes and two long, swept-back horns crowning a small, viperine skull: the earmarks of a newborn dragon. The hatchling pulled itself the rest of the way out of the shell and began rubbing the slime off its pair of leathery, claw-tipped wings, so that it was soon able to flex them and test them against the air.
Rauv stared at the small dragon in fascination. He glanced at the other egg, which still had not moved.
At that moment the creature saw Rauv looking down from above, and it began to emit a number of high-pitched squawks. Before he was able to react, the creature flapped its wings and leapt up at the same time, hurling itself into Rauv and biting at his face. The Vulpelin defended himself by wrapping both forepaws around the hatchling's scrawny neck and holding its jaws at a distance. Then the beast began to make loud, crying noises of complaint. Using all his power, Rauv kicked both hind legs up towards his head and rolled backwards, rolling off of the side of the nest and taking the newborn dragon with him. He landed flat on his back on the ledge a moment later, and from there he continued to wrestle with the dragon, forcing shrill squawks from his throat as he choked it.
A shadow passed swiftly over Rauv at that moment, and the Vulpelin turned his eyes skyward. At the same time, the newborn dragon ceased all its resistance to Rauv's attacks and began to cry dolorously. Rauv quickly used this moment to subdue the beast and wrap both forearms around the underside of its narrow jaw, holding its horned head and wriggling, snaky neck tight against his chest.
As soon as he had done so, he felt an airy rush behind him and turned to view a colossal, winged shape as it landed on the ledge next to him. It was a great black-scaled dragon quadruped with sharp, violet claws and horns, long, snakelike belly-scales the hue of slate, and the same yellow eyes and swept-back pair of horns as the hatchling Rauv held in his paws. The creature stood on its hind legs, spreading its vast wings to maintain balance as it glared down at the two tiny creatures who occupied the ledge along with it. The dragon calmly glanced over to the nest, where the other egg had failed to move.
"Stay back!" Rauv warned. "Or I'll snap its neck!"
The dragon appeared confused at first. Then cold realization seemed to arrive on the creature's sharp-fanged, saurian countenance, and almost instantly the dragon adopted a fawning demeanor, and it spoke to Rauv as though every word was meant to talk him down from his threat:
"Please, there's no need to become--"
"Stop talking!" Rauv shouted, twisting the neck of the creature in his arms while his eyes made nervous sorties to the right and the left. The dragon saw the action he was about to take and made no move. He was in grave peril, he knew, but if he used his wits and made no mistakes he might survive.
Rauv already had the creature's undivided attention; now all he needed to do was distract from him it somehow.
From its appearance he had already guessed that this dragon was female, not to mention the haste it had shown in returning to the nest to investigate the cries of its young. He sought to use this to his advantage:
"Lie on your back! Go on, or I'll snap its neck!"
"I'm--" the dragoness began, but Rauv cut off the rest of her sentence.
"Now!" he shouted.
"Of course, right away," the creature answered, quickly folding her wings against her back and falling over onto her side.
Rauv kept his distance, watching the huge dragoness squirm around on the narrow ledge until she lay on her spine with her wings folded beneath her, and her head rested against the wall of the ravine and staring at him with one yellow eye.
"Now, what do the other dragons call you? What does your mate call you?"
"Th--Thevelain," the creature replied tremulously.
"Thevelain, lick yourself or I will twist this little bastard's head right off," Rauv commanded, cutting his eyes over to see if there were anyplace from which he might be able to climb down from the ledge. "Go on, start licking yourself. And I want to hear you enjoying it. Go on."
Bending her lithe, serpentine body into a near-spiral, Thevelain the dragoness proceeded to carry out Rauv's request. Her long tongue swept the scales of her slightly rounded lower abdomen, running across her sex and causing the distension of her vulval lips from beneath her lower belly-scales, which she licked desperately until she began to gasp, feeling the results of her own labors. Her sex organs soon started to glisten from her saliva and her own secretions, which she rubbed all over the scales of her belly with her claws, causing them to appear as shiny and slimy as her vulva.
"I didn't say to slow down!" Rauv shouted, still wracking his brain for a way to escape. If he tried to run, the dragoness would quickly come after him; there was no way he could escape from a huge, flying creature. "Unless," Rauv pondered silently, "I can somehow make her afraid to fly."
"All right that's enough," he shouted, and the dragoness stopped licking her own sex at once and leaned her head back against the wall in order to catch her breath. "Now, go and get the egg," Rauv shouted to her.
The dragoness obediently rolled over onto her stomach, went to the nest, reached inside, and took the egg in her jaws. For a moment it appeared to Rauv that she was going to swallow it, perhaps in keeping with some primitive, draconic belief that she would be saving her child from him, to be reborn from her womb at some later date.
"Set it down!" he cried, and the worried-looking dragoness hurried to comply. "Now get on top of it! Put it in you."
"Please," Thevelain pleaded with him, "I just know there's no chance that will work. If you w--all right, here I go," she reversed immediately when she saw Rauv twisting the crying hatchling's neck. The petals of her sex enfolded the top of the egg and slid down over its peaked summit, sending runlets of her viscous secretions down the steep surface. Thevelain growled with pleasure, and her black, spindle-shaped pupils floated to the tops of her yellow eyes while her long, muscular tongue slid back and forth over her lower teeth. She began to breathe heavily, gasping as the broadest girth of the egg approached her vaginal opening. Then it appeared as though no more of the egg would fit inside her.
"Have you another egg inside?" Rauv quipped, belying the nervousness that he felt at his own helpless situation. Unless he could trick the dragoness into sliding the egg all the way back inside herself, he would be unable to convince her not to take off after him in flight for fear that the egg would fall out of her from a height. The egg was, he observed, not yet halfway inside her sex, and would surely fall out of her before she left the ground.
"Keep going!" he ordered menacingly.
Gasping, the dragoness responded, "Please, it won't fit!"
"Won't fit?" Rauv snapped, incredulous.
Thevelain nodded her head frantically.
Rauv's mind worked furiously.
At that moment Thevelain's wide open eyes caught sight of something slithering up onto the ledge to join the three of them, crawling past her right hind claw, dragging its soft, moist belly across her scaly toes as it went past.
Rauv saw it at precisely the same moment as she, and his mind instantly stopped developing plans for an escape. Beyond identifying this new intruder, he simply had no idea how to respond to its arrival.
It was a rock python, a large, slow, and rather stupid species of carnivorous reptile that inhabited nearly every climate of the Extuorian continent and usually caught its prey by camouflaging itself among whatever kinds of stones were common to the region. It possessed one additional uncommon ability, that of being able to adhere to stone surfaces (including vertical and upside-down) by crawling along a "road" of adhesive slime after the fashion of certain gastropods. This slime was also a defense mechanism the animal used, producing copious amounts of the substance whenever it came under the threat of attack.
Clearly the creature had been drawn to that spot by the incessant squawking of the dragon hatchling, which undoubtedly would have been its prey. As soon as it had joined them on the ledge, however, the rock python detected a far easier meal in the egg which remained stuck halfway inside of Thevelain's sex.
Immediately the python unhinged its lower jaw and grasped the egg between its serrate teeth, gnawing and struggling as it slid its long body over the egg's lower parts. In a few moments the snake had half of the egg inside its mouth. It seemed to be oblivious to the presences of Thevelain, Rauv, and the hatchling; its sole interest appeared to be the egg, which it greedily devoured.
"Wait, no," Thevelain declared to the rock python, which obviously did not pay her the slightest bit of attention. "Stop that! No, snake, please--oh... mrrrgh..." The dragoness moaned as the hungry reptile slid its jaws over the rest of the egg, whereupon it thrust its serpentine head past the lips of her vulva and slid inside, pulling the bulge of the egg within its body against her sex and bumping into her repeatedly as its rippling, fleshy length pushed its way into her.
Thevelain gasped and wriggled, sliding her tail back and forth as uncontrollable pleasure flooded through her loins. Her jaws were slack, and a long, inert crimson tongue hung out of her mouth as she panted. But the rock python had not finished. No sooner had Thevelain climaxed the first time than she attempted to pull the snake out of her, forgetting momentarily about the rock python's slimy defense mechanism. As soon as her claws slid off the creature's slippery undersides, the python began to crawl further inside her (presumably in order to escape), and at that moment Thevelain saw the slime-glands begin to overproduce. Recognizing her mistake at once, the she-dragon made a sound of helpless desperation as she watched her insides overflow with the creature's slime. The snake continued to thrust its wedge-shaped head inside of her. At last, an all-consuming, beaming warmth filled her loins with wild, tingling sensation, which was followed by an explosion of pleasure so intense that when it first hit her she felt as though something had struck her hard in the stomach. Then all the juices flowed out of her, drenching the rock python's body and sending warm, viscous rivers down her trembling, scaly hind legs.
The amount of sexual secretions Thevelain produced soon rivaled the amount of slime produced by the invasive python, eventually causing the stupid creature to abandon its quest to crawl up through the she-dragon's birth canal and pull itself out of her. While it struggled to extricate itself, Thevelain gasped and climaxed several more times before it finally worked its way out of her. Thereafter, she continued to shudder and gasp with each sensual aftershock that went through her.
When at last the snake was gone, escaped over the ledge with its meal, Thevelain slumped forward onto her belly, enfolded her great, leathery wings behind her shoulders, and heaved a huge, sorrowful sigh.
Rauv, whose plans to escape had been stalled and thrown into sudden confusion by the rock python's unexpected appearance, now realized that the dragoness was close to exhaustion following her ordeal with the egg and its eager devourer. Now was his only chance to escape, while she lay before him fatigued and out of breath.
"I wish," Thevelain panted, coughing and trying to catch her breath, "that the snake... had not escaped. I could have eaten... both of them... together." Having said this, she immediately reached out with one fore-claw and snatched the dragon hatchling from Rauv's paws. A moment later she placed the squeaking hatchling in her mouth and swallowed him whole, while Rauv stood and stared in speechless horror. "And you, my little one," she continued in normal tones, "were I not so incredibly hungry, I should have liked to have kept you for my pet. I must admit to having always harbored this secret desire to writhe before you little creatures in helpless submission."
"Y--you would eat your own kind?" Rauv stammered, pointing toward the she-dragon's grinning jaws, as though the image of her swallowing the hatchling still hadn't left his mind.
"Of course," she replied, "we dragons eat our own kind. We eat all kinds."
"But f--from your own nest," Rauv protested.
Thevelain smiled sympathetically, displaying long fangs. "This isn't my nest."
The dragoness opened her huge maw and struck at Rauv as a snake strikes, giving him nowhere to run. Thevelain snapped at his legs, tripping him, and instantly the huge head returned to where he lay sprawled, lay down at his feet, and began to devour Rauv whole, starting with his legs. It was clear from the beginning that the dragoness had no desire to use her teeth on him. Using her strong, slippery tongue she drew Rauv's body between her huge, dripping jaws and pressed him against the ribbed, slimy roof of her mouth. Thevelain's tongue then pushed him to the back of her throat, where his legs were sucked down into her pulsing, heaving gullet. Rauv kicked weakly against the incredible constrictive strength of the she-dragon's neck muscles, and soon the slimy ring of flesh slipped past his thighs, to his waist, and then it was around his narrow, furry chest. Runlets of warm, viscous saliva flowed to the back of Thevelain's mouth as the dragoness tilted her head back, covering Rauv's head and filling his mouth with thick, ropy slime. Soon he could not breathe for all the slime that choked him.
The last image Rauv saw in his life was of his own two forepaws grasping at the soft, mucous flesh of the creature's throat, and then the top of Thevelain's gullet closed over him and he was pulled away from the light.
Her hunger pangs temporarily mitigated, Thevelain spread her enormous wings and flapped away into the sky, leaving the ledge, its nest, and the ravine behind, as she flew off in search of larger prey.
Written May, 2005 by Sluimarath