Way out
Way Out
By Strega
The lion was only slightly, if at all larger than normal, yet it was swallowing the armored man whole. Radiz watched wide-eyed for a moment, then looked for a way out of the room.
He glanced upward, but he'd heard the trapdoor snick shut and was unsurprised to find no escape route there. A crack in the floor on the far side of the room was perhaps large enough, but the stains around it and the smell meant it was likely the lion's toilet. Near that on the wall was a carven wolf's head, jaws agape and a dark opening for a throat. Wide enough to squeeze through? Perhaps.
He watched the lion again for a moment. The man being swallowed wore chain maille with a steel breastplate; the tassets of the plate armor disappeared as the lion lunged forward. All that was left was kicking legs now. The maned neck of the cat bulged and rippled as it continued, impossibly, to feed. Nearby lay a half-and-a-half sword, most likely owned by its meal; A long, shallow cut on the beast's flank seemed to show that it had gotten in close before the warrior could bring the sword properly to bear.
Another heaving, straining gulp and all that remained was red leather boots half-covered with steel scales. The lion's midsection swelled as the armored man began to fill its belly. That was when Radiz saw the outline of a doorway in the wall behind the cat, though there was no sign of hinges or latch.
In a moment the booted feet would be gone, but until the the lion was hindered by the great mass of meat and metal in its gullet. Radiz eyed the sword, considering his options: he'd rather take on the cat with that than his dagger and sling. The lion sensed his thoughts somehow, and claws like cruel bone hooks unsheathed on all four paws. It shot him a look promising an unpleasant fate if he interfered with its meal.
He edged toward the wolf's head rather than confront the beast, and shot a glance into the stony gullet. It sloped gently upward, then curved down out of sight. He was sure it wide enough. Radiz gripped the stone muzzle, hoisted himself up and slid his legs into the wolf. He could fend the lion off with his dagger as he wormed his way into the stone tube. It wasn't until he was in up to the armpits that he could look again at the lion, and that was just in time to see it finish its meal.
Red leather boots and steel scales appeared and disappeared as the lion's jaws opened and shut. Heels, instep and finally toes slipped in, dripping with saliva from the cat's ever-active tongue. Finally it lifted its muzzle and the leather toes vanished one last time. Rubbery black lips squeezed together and it swallowed laboriously. The last in a series of lumps worked their way through its maned neck as the feet went down.
Radiz watched in morbid fascination as the cat's belly expanded. Short furred and thin-skinned, the shape of the man and even the contours of his armor stood out. It took almost a minute and a series of additional gulps for the cat to get the man curled up in its belly. Even now he struggled, but the lion pressed one forepaw against its distended gut to quiet that. Eventually the cat let out a mighty belch and the man gave one last kick and stilled. Only then did the lion look at Radiz. Much to his surprise it spoke.
"Thank you for not bothering me during my meal," the big cat snarled.
With even his face inside the stone chute Radiz was confident enough to reply, rather than retreat. "Do you eat armored people often, then?"
"Not by preference," the lion said, and burped. "But he was the first one in through the trap."
"What if I had been the first one?", said Radiz, edging feetfirst into the tunnel as he spoke. He was sure he could wriggle far enough in now, before it crossed the room, that even the lion's claws could not reach.
"Then you would be the one in my stomach, naturally," the lion said with a grin. "Or both of you, if the warrior had tried to help, though that'd be an uncomfortably large meal." The cat shrugged. "Perhaps he would have killed me and freed you, fighting with a full belly is an awkward business."
It went unsaid that if Radiz in turn had tried to help the armored man, the lion would have made every effort to gulp down a second helping...and that gorged though the cat seemed, it was not safe to climb out of the stone chute.
"Right," Radiz said, and continued to wriggle his way feetfirst into the chute. It would be unfortunate should it prove to be a dead end. His view narrowed, but the lion, bored, stood up and ambled to the side so they could still see each other. The curled-up man in the drooping gut swayed like some obscene fruit.
Radiz was to the point the tube began to descend, the peak right at his rump, when he paused and spoke again. He was curious. "What about his armor? Will you digest that too?"
"Just the flesh," the lion said with a lazy yawn, "And some of the smaller bones. I will cough the rest up and the raccoons will collect it." He lay back down on his straw mat, his head now all of him Radiz could see.
Radiz felt his toes leave the pipe and poke out into open air, and he smiled. Still, even as he edged backwards he asked another question. "Raccoon people? Praka?" It stood to reason since he -- and presumably the ingested warrior -- had been caught by traps and deposited here below one of the Maker's keeps.
The lion yawned again, then rose majestically to his feet and padded toward the pipe. The great bulge of his gut swayed hypnotically with each step. "Whichever," the cat growled. "They are raccoons, albeit large ones."
"You don't eat them?" said Radiz, backing away from the lion. From the knees and below he was out of the far end of the pipe now. Without waiting for an answer he said "You are very smart, for a lion."
Right outside the pipe the lion smiled. "And you are dim, for a man," he said just as jaws closed around Radiz' legs.
Radiz' eyes went wide as he was jerked backwards. Suddenly he was half out the back end of the pipe, and the unseen jaws lunged forward to engulf his thighs. His feet sank into a fleshy chute most unlike the stone one, and a great contraction in the surrounding musculature sucked them deeper. He was being swallowed.
The pull was powerful but perhaps not irresistable, and as he was dragged along he dug his fingernails into the minute cracks of the stone chute. The moment he reached out to do that the lion extended a paw into the tube. It could just reach his fingers, and those hooked claws came out. One raked along the skin of his hand, the others caught on the dagger he held and pulled it from his grip. "You won't need that where you are going," the maned cat said with a purring chuckle. "Or rather you will, but I would rather you not be tempted to use it."
Radiz lost his grip and was pulled away from those claws. A last glimpse of the lion, then light: he was tugged out of the gullet of a carven lion's head. The room was much like the last at first glance, and he had no time for a second, for a wolf at least as large as the lion had swallowed him to the waist.
Radiz got a grip on the stone lion's head and clung as though his life depended on it, which it did. Rather than a bottomless precipice, the pit he hovered above had a distinct and squelchy bottom, but the result was the same if he slipped. The big wolf -- male or female he could not say -- made no effort to dislodge him. Instead it reached up a paw and tore at the gear hung about his waist.
On the second paw-thrust his belt broke and pouches, lockpicks and tools fell away. Then it put its forepaws on the wall and walked them upward, going from quadruped to biped and swallowing him up as fast as its head rose. Radiz felt the long muzzle thrust itself up between his shoulderblades, the black lips stretching around his ribcage, and worst of all the chute of gullet that tensed and rippled as the wolf swallowed him down.
He'd seen the lion do much the same thing and not understood it, but the feel of jaws distending around his body explained it too well. The wolf's upper jaw stayed intact as the lower seemed to fall apart, stretching both downward and to the sides to create a gaping maw easily large enough to engulf him. The force of the bite was almost nil, but the smooth tube of gullet took him in as easily as if had been an enormous snake rising up from below. Radiz clung to the stone lion and hoped it would give up and disgorge him when it realized he would not let go.
The wolf, unconvinced, continued to walk its forepaws up the wall until its lips encompassed Radiz' armpits. He had an excellent view down its belly now, and past the series of bulges his mostly swallowed body created he saw no sign of sheath. A female wolf, then, though it was hardly important. It was its digestive system he worried about as he hung there, his sandalled feet already in its stomach. As if on cue, the wolf began to gulp.
Each pulsation of its gullet tugged him powerfully downward. Up until now the tight throat supported him, but now his entire weight dragged at his arms, and more besides. Radiz was not the strongest of men, neither a professional warrior nor an acrobatic rogue. He clung to the stone lion's head as wet undulations of throat tried to suck him in, and bit by bit the strain loosened his grip. He did not -- quite -- let go, but his arms gradually straightened, and his shoulders were pulled into the wolf.
"Wait," he said, guessing the wolf to be as intelligent as the lion, "We can make a deal." But the wolf's fangs scraped over his scalp and things began to go dark as its cheeks took in his head. A broad, salivating tongue unfurled from below, slurping across his face and leaving a thick coat of drool. The wolf made an approving noise regarding the flavor of its dinner.
Radiz spat out drool and cursed. Ahead he could still see his hands, gripping the lion's lower jaw even as black wolf-lips appeared from each side and advanced up his arms. His field of view narrowed rapidly, only instead of the tolerant and sated lion he saw his increasingly white-knuckled fingers. Eventually the wolf's muzzle bumped gently into the stone lion. There was a moment's pause, then it swallowed.
The tongue pressed back against Radiz's chin and the whole four-foot length of gullet clenched as it tried to drag him down to the waiting stomach. With digestive juices already burning his feet he was highly motivated to not let this happen, and though his arms ached he did not let go. Staring past the wolf's fangs at his hands things looked bleak, but Radiz knew the wolf must breathe sometime. Sure enough, at the end of the gulp came a little gagging noise.
It couldn't bite him, swallowing hadn't worked, and backing away would let him pull back out, yet it wasn't ready to give up yet. The tongue unfurled once more, wrapping partly around his forearm as it reached out to caress his hands. Saliva dripped into the cracks between his fingers and Radiz' grip began to loosen. There was an uncanny slickness to the drool, almost like oil. When it swallowed again he found to his horror that he simply could not hold on. Tight though his grip was his fingers slithered over the stone lion's chin and popped loose.
"No!" His fingers curled and twitched in agony as the strain of gripping the lion was at last relieved, yet not in the way he'd hoped. No freedom for him, no slithering release from the sheath of gullet wrapped flesh-tight around his dark thief's clothing. Radiz grabbed at the wolf's lower jaw with cramping fingers, knowing what was to come next, but it was too late. It yawned wider to deny him that grip, the tongue came pressing back once more and the muscles all around him tensed and squeezed as the wolf swallowed. Something like a chuckle emerged from the huge canine as he slipped downward into darkness, his fingers scraping tracks in the wet tongue the last thing he saw before the closing jaws shut out all light.
The lion needed several straining gulps to settle its meal; the wolf needed only one. Radiz slid helplessly down into wet darkness, surrounded by the creak and pop of a ribcage that expanded unnaturally to let him pass. Past the tightness of the ribs was a wet, churning space he came to occupy, the wolf's stomach stretching and sagging to accomodate this large meal. His nails left tracks in the slime on the throat walls all the way down, but that was all the resistance he offered, and soon enough his hands joined him in the distended fleshy gut. He felt it sway heavily as he struggled.
The dagger at his waist was gone, he knew, and the one normally sheathed behind his back. That left the one in his ankle sheath, and his curled-up posture made it easy to reach for. Slick mucus covered him, burning where it had touched the longest; his feet must already be reddened. He felt for the dagger and it was not there. So, the wolf was smart enough to disarm him even as it fed, or perhaps the blade had come out of the scabbard and lay in the belly with him? If so, he did not feel it.
Radiz was trying to think how else he might discomfit the wolf into retching him up when from the inside he experienced what he'd only seen from without. The wolf burped, long and deep, and the few sips of air he had left were replaced with gurgling, caustic fluid.
The lion lay beneath the stone wolf's head and listened to the brief struggle. Eventually there was a panicked cry, more muffled noises, and finally a belch percolated through the stone tube. The lion smiled and unsheathed a claw. Scratched into the plaster was an arrow pointed away from the wolf head, and an arrow pointed towards. Next to the latter were five scratches to which he added a sixth. Lined out was a similar tally made by his predecessor, a large and hungry badger since killed by a thief.
"I still owe you one more," he growled, and an amused bark came back through the tube. There were seven scratches next to the arrow pointed away from the stone wolf.
"We can't control how many come into our rooms," the she-wolf growled. "I still say we should just eat all we can."
The lion shrugged. He could have caught the thief before the man made it into the wolf's head. "And yet you let them escape you, into the stone lion," he replied.
"It amuses me to see them think to get away," the wolf growled. "To go into a stone lion, not knowing they will fill the belly of a real one." Sometimes one or the other of them would gape over the carved head, and on the other end of the pipe a paw would poke in to force a hesitant thief partway out of a stone gullet and into a fleshy one.
The lion turned as the stone door slid open. Three raccoon-folk entered, having seen via peepholes that the thieves were no longer a threat. The male picked up the sword and eyed the floor for anything else that might have been dropped while the females came over to him. One gestured and murmured, and the cut along his side ceased to ache. When that was done she joined the third in massaging his belly. He knew that on the other end of the pipe the same was happening in the wolf's room, though she preferred the company of the keep's foxpeople instead of its raccoons. Neither much cared for the wolverines.
The stone door stayed open, for he was no prisoner. When no intruders needed to be disposed of he had as much freedom to wander as the raccoons and other inhabitants. Like them, he was a creation of and servant to the wizard who owned the keep, and acknowedged no other master.
This keep, the closest of the Maker's fortresses to Greyston, made quite a lot of coin selling used adventurer's gear. No matter how public it was made that the Maker worked for Lord Grey the thieves and adventurers kept showing up to loot the 'monsters'. The reclaimed armor would be worth a bit more if not etched by stomach acids, admittedly, but polished up and with new straps added to replace the ones dissolved away it still fetched a fair amount. Sometimes they even got magical items to sell.
The lion let out a pleased growl as skilful fingers kneaded his belly. Armored prey could make for an uncomfortable meal, at least until enough was digested to leave the bulky metal bits room to slosh around. A good rub helped his belly get used to the awkward shapes. The wolf had an easier time of it this go-round; while she'd still have to hack up a ball of clothing and bones, at least she didn't have sharp-edged metal plates jabbing her in the kidneys.
He did not object when the fingers, and eventually a raccoon's muzzle, made its way down past the bulge. He'd done his duty. A reward, while not required, was gratefully accepted.