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Uvuzi and the dragon

By Strega

It was of course Nyoka who asked the question. Uvuzi, smaller and (most would say) prettier of the sisters, was less focused on all things food.

"What's the biggest thing I've ever eaten?" Uvuzi sat back , her upper body using her coiled furry-snake lower as a human would a beanbag. "That's hardly fair, sister. I can't compete with you. It's simple mechanics." She gestured at her sister. "Your jaws are much bigger than mine, for one thing."

"I didn't mean it like that." Nyoka hissed with a smile, the long curl of pink lip extending well back past her cup-shaped ear. The sisters were both half skunk, blue with white stripes, but Uvuzi inherited enough of her father's nature that she could be mistaken for a humanoid if she were seen from the hips up. From there on up she was a sleek and well-curved skunk-woman with a mane of wavy white hair. Only below her groin did the thick column of furry-snake body begin. From nose to skunk-tailtip, down at the end of her lower body, she was twenty-four feet long, and she weighed as much as two big men.

Nyoka took a silvered cup of wine from one of Uvuzi's faithful kobold attendants. The little dog-man humanoids worshiped her sister almost as a god since she had freed them from a cruel band of gnolls. Once they realized she was not to be feared the kobolds had been overjoyed to help the smaller sister get the hyena-men alone, and one by one the gnolls had disappeared down the smaller sister's gullet.

Had it been Nyoka, once she ran out of gnolls the kobolds would have been next on the menu. Small though they were they were still, as far as she was concerned, ambulatory protein. Still, she had to admit there was something to be said for having loyal followers. Uvuzi almost always had someone to watch her back, brush her fur, or bring her wine.

"I didn't mean it as competition," Nyoka hissed, and adjusted her coils. A kobold leaned away as the thick column of her muscular tail swayed close, but she kept her manners. Unlike her sister, she was almost entirely furry-snake; a great wedge-shaped head with a waterfall of smooth white hair topped a thick shaft of neck that merged seamlessly into her great snakey body. Slender arms and six little teats were the only nods to a mammalian nature, much less a human one. Her fur was a lighter blue than Uvuzi's, her coils thicker and longer, her huge eyes a clear green to her sister's yellow. Most importantly, her head was much larger, her jaws longer and wider, her gullet not restricted by a humanoid torso. She was twice her sister's mass, with an appetite to match.

She was especially tolerant of the walking food that served her sister this day as she was well fed and lethargic. Her sister, a good hostess, had made sure a suitable meal was ready when Nyoka showed up for her visit, and the massive bulge in the middle of her serpentine body had been an entire horse an hour before. Though her half-musteline metabolism was much quicker than a true serpent's, and would correspondingly consume the horse that much faster, she would still not need to eat for at least a week.

"I myself," she said as she swirled the wine in its cup, "Have had any number of meals larger than you, sister, and a few larger than me. Ogres are a recent favorite, and I have my eye on one of the smaller hill giants whose shoulders I think I can just work past. Twice I have eaten other lamias...or nagas, the two are so close I have to ask when I meet one to see which it calls itself!...larger than myself. One I fed humanoids until he was too full to resist when I started on him. It helps that the snakier ones eye me much the same way the humanoid males eye you."

"And griffons of course," Uvuzi purred. "You are good at seducing the eagle-lion males. They never seem to grasp until too late that you hug and love them only until you can get your jaws around their head."

"I do like my griffons," Nyoka hissed. "They are filling, and energetic lovers. You should try one yourself."

"One of these days one will fatten you in a way you don't want," her sister purred. "It happened with mother and the skunk-man, and so here we are. Oh, I do enjoy the company of my meals, smaller than yours though they are. But never in that exact way."

Nyoka flicked her fluffy skunktail and a kobold scampered out of reach, nearly dropping a serving tray. "You are avoiding the question, dear."

Uvuzi sighed. "All right, let me think. I like khardaki lion-men, and some of them are bigger than humans. I ate a lion once, a regular old lion, and a really big otter . A couple of minotaurs -- I had to saw off their horns -- hm, and a bear. There was this...horse man, I don't know what he was, except he was very big and challenging to get down. But the biggest?"

She settled deeper into her coils and thought. The bulge in her midsection was more subtle than that in her sister, but her upper body's weight exposed it. A mere orc, no bigger than a man and already mostly digested after a day. Two kobolds began to comb her skunk-tail as she pondered, picking out leaves and bits of twigs from an earlier her trip into the woods. The smaller sister preferred an immaculate pelt when at all possible and the attention relaxed her. "There was a really, really big werewolf, I think he was a werewolf. Real 'eyes bigger than stomach' moment...." Suddenly she looked up.

"I have it. I'd almost forgotten about him, which is odd considering how weird a meal it was. Maybe I forgot because it was so dangerous. This was just before I met my friends the kobolds here, so it would be about five years ago...."

*****

She lay curled up in a shaft of sunlight, still half asleep and contemplating where to hunt today. It was several days since her last meal, and that a mere goblin foolish enough to stray from his tribe to investigate a flicker of blue and white fur. He had found the flicker, the tip of her skunk-tail, but before he realized what he had found two coils of her lower body squeezed the breath from his lungs. She had swallowed him still alive, as was her habit, moving her coils just enough to let her hands pick away any weapons or armor just in front of her advancing jaws. Like her mother and sister, she relished the feel of helpless prey squirming all the way down. Still, enjoyable though it had been, a goblin was not a very filling meal.

A day before that her meal was a mere raccoon, not even a praka coonfolk but an actual raccoon. The pickings were sparse here in the foothills. It'd been better by the lake, but there was too little cover and she was not the stealthiest predator, what with her sky-blue fur and white stripes.

What she needed to do, she told herself as she stirred from her rest, is find a place where she might meet males under the pretext of courtship. In her limited experience lonely males thought with their groins, given her pretty humanoid upper half. The problem was that places with lots of two-legged prey also had too much law and (perish the thought) civilization for her to hunt freely. She might easily overpower and swallow a single man, or even a couple, but more than that and there could be real trouble. Even one skilled fighter could be a big problem if he was armed.

Now, if she could disguise herself somehow to appear fully human -- or whatever -- she might blend in and hunt that way, changing back to herself only when the time was right to feed. Her scaly mother used such ruses, as she could both create Illusions and force her will on the weak-minded. More than once Uvuzi had seen a hapless male climb right into Walaji's maw. Sadly, she hadn't inherited any of her mother's magical powers.

Her best bet was down by the stream. It might not be the most entertaining meal, but if she lay a coil across a deer-trail and got lucky, she was not too proud to work her jaws over a deer or --

Her peaceful contemplation was shockingly interrupted. The branches overhead exploded into twigs and flying leaves, and a red shape struck the earth only yards away with such force all four taloned feet sank deep into the earth. Suddenly there was a hissing red dragon -- an actual dragon! -- looking her over.

It was her worst nightmare. A large predator, too big to fight and much too fast to outrun had spotted her in her forest nook and taken her completely by surprise. Instinctively she threw her lower body between her humanoid torso and the scaly beast, ready to lift her tail and give the dragon and a good spraying. Skunk-musk was her last resort, as she had a limited supply but more importantly because some of it might get on her.

"No," said the dragon, and pinned her tail to the ground with a talon. "No spraying." Tongues of nearly invisible flame leaked from either side of its muzzle, and any thought she had of trying to wrap it up and constrict fled. Though it was a very small dragon, not much larger than herself, it was a dragon. It was strong, fast, sharp-clawed, and it breathed fire.

It was also, she realized as the first shock passed, very drunk. The flames weren't its natural ones but were rather alcohol vaporizing and ignited as it hiccuped. Somewhere this Red had found and consumed what must be gallons of extremely hard liquor.

"You're a skunk-snake-woman-thing," it slurred. "Never seen anything like you before." He had known enough on sighting her to pin her tail, though, and that was more than occurred to most people. Unlike a two-legged male he didn't focus on her curves, just on her overall form, and those double stripes spelled skunk.

She didn't know what to do. It paced closer to her upper body, gripping into the pelt of her lower with those cruel talons, until they were face to face. Panicked, she retreated until her back struck bark. She was going to have to wrap him up, and it would almost certainly fail, and he would kill her.

Then a taloned forefoot reached up behind her, pulled hard on her hair, and as her muzzle involuntarily opened the Red stuffed his snout down her throat.

*****

Nyoka blinked, and Uvuzi spread her hands helplessly. "Don't look at me like that, sister. It surprised me as much as it would you. What possible reason could a dragon have to do that? I was so shocked that his head and neck slid almost to his shoulders into my throat before I reacted. By the time it occurred to me I might be able to swallow him I also realized it was a terrible idea. Red dragons breathe fire and his limbs were all free, I'd have been burned from the inside and clawed to bits. So I didn't try, and he began to pull back out. Luckily his horns weren't very big and they curled close to his neck, so he slid back up almost as easily as he went down. In a moment his head popped out, all wet and glistening from my throat, and he sat back on his haunches to look at me. It turned out he wanted to talk...."

*****

It was a strange sensation, Vartag thought. The skunk-snake's gullet had expanded smoothly over his scales, jaws stretching wide and little inward-hooking teeth scraping his bony armor. Though there was resistance as her musculature and flexible ribcage distended around his skull and neck, it was as he had suspected: despite her humanoid half, here was a creature that swallowed its prey whole. He had pushed in far enough to know that her stomach was not in her humanoid half, and that likely meant a capacious belly down in the thickest of her coils. He thought about what had happened to his mother and was torn between rage and depression. The liquor helped lean him toward the latter.

"Why...?" slurred the lamia, then twisted her head until her lower jaw popped back into place.

"My name is Vartag," he said. "And I am alone, now. A day ago I lived with my mother, still too small and weak to claim my own territory. Who would challenge a great Red like my dam? Only another dragon...."

He sighed and hung his head. Muscles moved beneath the doublestriped pelt under his claws as the lamia tried to creep away and he tightened his grip. "We will talk, snake-skunk, or we will fight. Which will it be?"

A gout of flame curled the tips of her belly-fur and she pressed her back to the tree. "Talk, talk it is. My name is Uvuzi, great Red Dragon."

The Red snarled and spat out a tongue of flame. "Not so great. Just a little dragon. Little, baby dragon."

It wasn't going at all the way Uvuzi expected, but since she'd expected to be torn to bits or immolated that was not so bad. "You don't look little to me." In fact he was perhaps a little longer than she was, nose to tailtip, 25 or so feet to her 24 -- and her length included the long fur on her skunktail. Without that, he had maybe four feet of length on her. There was something, maybe the slightly too large look to his paws, that made her think he was quite young. Still, he certainly didn't look like a baby to her. He was sinuous in the way of dragons, but he was much bulkier in the chest that she was, with muscular limbs and jointed, membranous wings. All and all he must weigh twice her seven hundred pounds.

Just the same, as her fear ebbed -- at least a little -- she could not help but eye the scaly curves of its chest and wonder what they would look like with a coating of fine blue and white fur. Though he was bigger than anything she had even considered eating, he was perhaps not impossibly broad at any point. She thought she could probably work her jaws over him, if she could get his wings folded right.

Of course there was no way to overpower him without putting herself in deadly danger, but he'd stuck his head down her throat once. He was obviously very unhappy with his lot. Was it inconceivable that his angst might lead him to do it again? He was drunk and depressed; might she add digested to the list? An unsafe line of thought, but she'd awoken hungry and having his head down her throat had only whetted her appetite.

"A baby that should still be with his mother?" It was a shot in the dark, but his hiss of anger and grief told her it'd struck home.

"Who no longer has a mother," he growled. "Who did, until just hours ago." He lowered his head. He was actually saddened by the loss! She had heard that the 'chromatic' dragons -- red and blue and so on -- were so evil and greedy that the death of another dragon meant only the chance to loot its hoard. Apparently that was an exaggeration.

"It was a Gold dragon," he growled. "Great and snakey, almost like you in shape. No humanoid parts, of course," and he gestured both at her woman's torso and her exposed sex. He hadn't shown any interest in her sexually, assuming she was right in thinking he was a he, and that was maybe just as well. She wasn't sure she was up to seducing and devouring someone this dangerous.

"He killed your mother?" She put all the sympathy she could muster into her voice, which was more difficult than it should have been. It'd have been easier if she cared whether her own mother died or not. Still, he seemed to believe her.

"I was asleep," he said, and unconsciously he kneaded her pelt with his talons. Like a cat settling down to sleep, she thought. "There was a great thunder as the wall of the cavern came down. The force it must have taken to break in! The Gold was immense and serpentine, half again larger than my mother, and she torpid from a long nap. By the time I was fully awake the Gold had its coils around her, gripping and squeezing. She clawed at it and I saw magic flare; atop its armored scales was an armor of magic. Then her flame, but Golds breathe fire too. It did not even wince when it caught a faceful, though silver and gold coins melted to a puddle around them. And then...."

The Red swayed, hiccuped up a tongue of flame and a smell like a distillery. Whatever it had drunk was taking full effect now. Not enough to put him under, but he grew maudlin and clumsy. He staggered, but his claws did not leave her thickest coil. After a moment he continued.

"He got his jaws around her head, cutting off her screech of rage, and he started to swallow her. Bit by bit her neck disappeared. My brothers and sisters, the whole clutch of she'd let live there until we were old enough were awake now, and the bravest attacked the Gold while it was vulnerable. It was pointless. So thick were his scales that our little claws" -- he held up a paw with claws as long as man's fingers, curved and black and cruelly sharp -- "Just slid across the surface."

He paused again. "It didn't seem long at all before the Gold, while ignoring us, had swallowed our mother all the way to her shoulders. The roots of her wings were gone and for all her strength and struggle it was clear that soon she would be just a great bulge in the Gold. A living, squirming bulge. He swallowed her alive. She was just food to him."

Almost a whisper, now. "My clutchmates fled, except for two. They attacked again where the scutes beneath his neck were stretched apart by my mother's bulk. My eldest brother actually drew blood. The Gold rolled atop him, and the weight of two great dragons crushed him to a pulp."

"I fled, finally. The Gold had my mother half swallowed and though it would be swollen with her when he was done, I knew I would die if I remained. Perhaps I would be an after-dinner snack, or just an annoyance easily dispatched."

"How horrible," said Uvuzi, unable to keep the purr entirely out of her voice. Luckily he did not notice. She would dearly like to see such a monumental meal, were not either of the combatants likely to take her as a snack -- the Red out of sheer malice and the Gold because it would sense her own amoral and predatory nature. She knew, as the Red here perhaps did not, that the Golds did not hunt and kill just any other dragon. Some of the greatest Gold Wyrms set out, if bards' tales were to be believed, to limit the population of the evil dragons by the simple expedient of dispatching the mother and father dragons to their stomachs. Supposedly some Golds ate nothing but the occasional gem and, every few years, the largest evil dragon they could stuff down their serpentine gullets.

Somewhere across the mountains a great Gold lay distended around the Red's mother, its ponderous but efficient digestion making a lengthy work of digesting its meal. No doubt it busied itself counting and cataloging her hoard as its stomach went about its slow work.

"And so I flew. I knew only a few leagues around my mother's lair, but I kept flying. I stooped on an isolated house to vent my rage, but it turned out to be some human hermit's still-shack. He was so old and fragile that I hardly enjoyed killing him at all. But then there was a great drum of his brew, top aflame where my breath touched it."

He hiccuped again. "Afterward I spied you from the air...that drink was good. It was very good. I wish I could have shared it with my dam. But she is down a Gold's throat now. I wonder what it was like." He looked up at her unsteadily. "I wonder."

It was going to happen. The drunken dragon climbed up over her lower body, approaching her face to face once again. She feigned fear, pulling back against the rough bark, even as he once again grabbed her hair and tugged. Her mouth opened, and this time she did not flinch as he pushed his muzzle into her gullet.

*****

"You lucky skunk," Nyoka hissed with genuine irritation. Uvuzi just smiled.

"It was a terrifying time, sister. He could have killed me! The claws on that dragon, he'd have torn me apart if I tried to constrict and swallow him. I hoped he would just leave, but it is always tempting to take advantage of others' foolishness. If he'd fallen asleep -- that's what I was hoping for -- I was going to carefully squeeze the strength out of him and then test the limits of my gape. But that poor dragon was drunk and saddened. He wasn't thinking straight. Frankly, I wasn't either. If he changed his mind and breathed flame inside me I'd be terribly injured, even if he waited until he was in my stomach. But you know how it is. I was hungry."

*****

There was the now familiar fleshy slickness around his head as Vartag pushed his muzzle into the skunk-snake's throat. The wet, tight expansion around his armored skull, the scrape of fangs over his horns before the chute of gullet slipped down to begin engulfing his neck. The grip of muscles around his cheeks as the first gulp helped ease him deeper.

It different this time. He did not pull back. He slipped in his head, then his neck to the shoulders, and when he felt the scrape of little snake-teeth against his wing-roots and chest he did not stop. He kept pushing, digging his claws into the grass between the snake-skunk's coils and forcing his snout ever deeper into the unfolding tube of throat.

And this time she helped. She did not coil around him and squeeze, but a loop of her thick furry-snake body cradled his rump and gave her leverage to add her own push to his. And she swallowed; great, rippling contractions in the surrounding musculature pulled at him, sliding him deeper inches at a time. Little hands, feeble and short-clawed compared to his own but strong in their way, grabbed the membranes of his wings and helped fold them back against his sides.

The Gold had done that, too, reached out its mighty claws and trapped his mother's wings to her sides. The sizes were not quite right for it to an accurate reenactment; the Gold had been larger than his mother, while he was larger than this female. That did not stop him from leaning forward into the abyss of her maw and it did not stop her snakey jaws from ratcheting wider, bit by bit, until the stretched pink of her lips took in the broadest part of him. Flesh and fur stretched drum-tight over his shoulders and wing-roots, and for a moment it seemed she could go no further. Then she heaved, and strained, and one side of her lower jaw crept forward until the great obstacle of his shoulder was overcome. Powerful ripples in the flesh of her gullet helped push him down her throat, and now both of his shoulders were gone.

As her jaws inched over his wing-roots his nose entered her stomach. Muzzily he calculated distances; it was perhaps six feet from her nose to the entrance of her belly, some three feet past her sex and well down into the thick part of her skunk-snake body. The less-tight environment was welcome after the gripping flesh of her gullet, and he let out a pleased hiss as a strong shove of his hind claws forced his head entirely into her gut. The force of his push drove a pained squeak out of the distended skunk-snake.

But she did not stop swallowing, and he did not stop pushing even as his forelegs were pushed back against his sides. Until this moment he could have pulled out without much difficulty. The female was smaller than he, and he had smelled her fear. She would not resist if he straightened his legs and pulled back. No longer, though; his forelegs were now pinned to his sides, her jaws trapping them in place even as her teeth dug in between scales. First one side of her flexible maw would advance, then its teeth would dig in, allowing the other to move forward in turn without allowing him to retreat. Her lips were to the midpoint of his forelegs now and it was approaching the point where it would be entirely her decision as to whether he became just a great bulge in her midsection. Vartag was convinced, now, that this snakey creature could swallow him up, and he did not object to the thought at all. It had happened to his mother, and seemed right he share her fate.

When his nose reached the back end of her lengthy stomach there was nothing to do but allow its undulations to turn his snout to the side. Gradually his head was bent back against his own neck, which in turn allowed that much more of his body to enter her gullet and stomach. It only began to be uncomfortable when his nose encountered his own shoulder, for she had swallowed up so much of him now that even his chest had begun to enter her gut. Half of him still remained outside, his claws still dug into the dirt even though his ability to help her feed was very limited now.

As her jaws worked their way over his ribcage, engulfing his body and wings bit by bit, a delicious warmth began to spread across his groin. Her little reaching hands had crept beneath him to secure a grip for further swallowing, and there they found a long ridge of sheath. While he referred to himself as a baby, dragons have different standards in these areas. He was in fact a fully functional male, it was just that no dragon female would settle for such a puny lover. Nor had he the chance in his limited travels to force himself upon a female of some other species. It was from such couplings that many half-breeds rose, but he'd not fathered a one. No, his only sexual experiences to date had been by means of his own muzzle and tongue.

He had not planned to resist in any case, and now there was further reason to help her swallow him. He shifted his hindpaws wider to get his claws dug into the grass as her hands began to rub, then leaned forward once more as padded hands gripped what began to unsheathe from his belly. It turned out he could still push himself deeper if sufficiently motivated, and he began to ram his hips forward to thrust his cock into her soft hands.

*****

Uvuzi shrugged. "Sex is a tried and tested way to distract one's meal, after all, and it turned out he wasn't as much of a "baby" as he'd said. I think you would have liked him, sister. He was quite well endowed, and a very enthusiastic lover. Just your kind of man. Of course, all that thrusting just helped push him deeper...."

*****

When Vartag's lust exploded against her thin-stretched pelt he was up to his haunches in gullet. It took her several minutes to get that far from the moment her hands found his shaft, more than long enough for even a drunken dragon's passion to rise and peak if strong soft hands are pumping his shaft. With a shudder, a muffled roar, and a lash of his tail he spurted messily across her sex. He could not know the worry it would cause her, for it was as close as a male would come to impregnating her for many years. So lengthy was his shaft and so awkwardly swollen was her humanoid half that she had not realized his tip was mere inches away from actually entering her even though the root of his cock was just beneath her chin. Dragon goo dripped from her belly and sex and when she found it crusted there later she would worry for months.

In the comforting warmth that follows orgasm, Vartag drifted toward sleep. Sturdy as is a dragon's metabolism, he still needed to breathe, and the skunk-snake was stretched so tight around her enormous meal that barely a sip of air lay trapped between his scales and her stomach walls. Much of that space was occupied by her belly acids instead, and they tickled at his scales most amusingly. A mammal would be in pain by now, but just as it would take the Gold months or even years to digest his mother, so his tough hide would slow the digestive process of the skunk that had eaten him.

She was working her jaws over his haunches, now, his paws finally leaving the ground as his hind legs, like the front ones, were pushed out straight to fit more comfortably into her gullet. Folded double in the drum-tight stomach of the skunk, with almost half of him still either in her gullet or hanging out into cool evening air, Vartag found peace at last. It was not too late to breathe a tongue of fire, which would surely cause her to retch him up, but he decided he would rather sleep. When he woke, perhaps he would be with his mother.

Later, Uvuzi would guess that he'd died shortly after he came. Though he continued to move for hours afterward, the frenzied kick and roar of lust was the last thing she could positively point to as signs of life. Perhaps he moved after that in mere reflex, as a lizard's tail moves once severed.

At the time she had other things to think about. His legs gave a last kick as her lips reached his ankles, then were still. Finally she had his hindpaws in her mouth, and working them in cautiously to avoid the claws she swallowed them down...whereupon they made it as far as her gullet and stopped. Ten feet of dragon tail, thick as a man's thigh hung out, plus wings, but she just could not swallow any more.

Her stomach could contain six-foot-long prey without much distension, she knew from how neatly a man-sized meal fit inside. It could stretch somewhat in length and rather more laterally, which allowed her to swallow two or even three men at once at the cost of a great awkward lump in her middle. The dragon was another story altogether. Her belly was stretched to its utter limits to contain the Red, but though his head was bent up against his belly, only about half of his entire length fit into her gut. Her pelt had reached the limits of its elasticity and it was impossible to fold the dragon over yet again, which meant that he was in her stomach only to the rump. His muscular thighs extended up her throat, his ankles proceeded right up through her humanoid half, and those claws she so feared now ticked the back of her tongue.

It was a nervous situation. Though she theoretically had the dragon where she wanted him, swallowed whole and ready for digestion, she didn't know enough about the species to know if he was suffocated, asleep, or just playing dead. A human-sized meal was easy to control even if it struggled in her gut, and she often allowed such struggles for her own entertainment. Sometimes she even swallowed air to keep them going for that much longer. This was another thing entirely. If he started to squirm, he was just too massive to control. She wouldn't be able to keep him from clawing at her innards. Then there was the possibility he might breathe a gout of fire. Even a little flame would do terrible things to her delicate stomach lining. If forced to do so she could regurgitate him, but that would put her back in the original situation of wondering if the dragon would kill her. Uncomfortable as the situation was, the safest thing was to see if her belly could deal with him.

She slithered laboriously out of the clearing his terrifying entrance had created. Ten feet of dragon tail and his protruding wings went with her, for though it might fit into her gullet it was too stiff to fold up and swallow. The red-scaled and sharp-spined member, thick as a big man's thigh as by itself as massive as most of her meals would hang from from her jaws for days. She'd have gagged were her glottis not extended nearly out of her mouth to allow her to breathe.

Gorged to her limits and uncertain whether she had scored a unprecedented meal by sheer luck or had made a terrible error, Uvuzi settled down in the undergrowth. At least she wasn't hungry any more, and wouldn't be for quite some time.

*****

"I just could not swallow any more. I was stretched tight as a furry drum, my whole body cavity crammed full of drunk suicidal dragon, and I couldn't manage another inch. I didn't even burp. It was such a tight fit almost no air went down with him, and of course there was no fur or clothing to trap it."

Uvuzi stroked her pink-padded hands down her belly, almost to her sex, as she remembered how thinly stretched her fur had been. "Only half of him was in my stomach. The good news was I wasn't hungry any more. The bad was at the time I didn't know if he was dead or playing possum -- what do I know about dragons, anyway? -- and I was so full I could barely slither. I managed to get back into the undergrowth, where I was less obviously an easy target, and there I settled down to digest the biggest thing I ever ate.

"It was three whole days before I managed to swallow the last of that tail. Within a few hours the lower part of the great tight bulge developed a slippery feel beneath my pelt, which I'd seen before. It means the hide and skin have dissolved on a mammal -- I had to retch up a partly digested khardaki once, so I know -- and that told me his scales were probably loose from the now-dissolved skin. At that point I was almost entirely sure he wasn't playing a prank. Still, in the back of my mind I saw this red dragon ripping its way out of me. I slept badly, but each time I woke the bulge was less bumpy and more streamlined. When I swallowed the last of his tail he was a great smooth bulge that took up the whole middle half of my body, and I was finally convinced he was dead."

Nyoka shook her head and slapped the lumpy bulge of horse with her own padded hand. The bulge didn't have that inner sliminess to it yet, but it was getting there. "I can't believe my little sister ate a dragon. A dragon! I haven't even had one of those."

"You would have wrapped him up the second he appeared, sister," Uvuzi said. "And maybe he would have burned you, but you are much stronger than I am. He was probably no bigger than that horse in your stomach right now, and you might had lost some hide, but just the same he would have ended up as a bulge. You would have had room for the whole thing, not like me."

"And I might have lost an arm, like Mother," Nyoka hissed. "You had the right of it. I know I sometimes think with my stomach. We all do, you and Mother and I, but you are the most cautious of us all. I guess the rest of that meal is easy enough to figure out, yes?"

Uvuzi nodded. "It took longer than usual, but eventually he made his way through. There were undigested scales mixed in with my droppings, and after perhaps a week I heaved up everything that didn't pass through. A great mass of scales, claws, and teeth came up, which I left for the scavengers. I put on a lot of winter weight with that one meal, but I've never tried for anything that big since. Only the werewolf I talked about came close, and I seduced him. The dragon was the biggest, oddest thing I ever ate, and the only meal I can think of who could easily have stopped me and yet readily offered himself to me. I guess even a dragon can be food, if you are hungry enough and he's drunk and depressed enough."

Nyoka said nothing, though her hand explored the bulge of horse. The undigested skull pressed out through her pelt, and her fingers traced the shape of the eye socket. In a day or two the shape would be gone, but it was clear as a bas-relief now.

"You're jealous, sister," Uvuvi said with a smile.

"Of course I'm jealous. My little sister ate a dragon. Now I have to find one."

"Actually," Uvuzi purred, "I may have an idea. There's this place I go, sort of a cursed swamp. Many predators meet there to hunt prey that is trapped there by the curse. There's a black dragon who goes there too, and he's been eying me from the start. There is a certain...well, foolishly friendly attitude he has, especially around women."

Nyoka's tongue flicked out to taste the air. It could be forked or straight as the occasion demanded, and this time the tip split for an appropriate serpentine tasting of the air. "Go on."

"He's much too big for me," Uvuzi said. "And much too dangerous for even you to take by force. But as I said, foolishly friendly, and he likes females a little too much. If the two of us were very polite and very, very friendly...."

It was Nyoka's turn to smile, then look down at the great bulge in her midsection. "You make me regret taking your earlier gift. I won't be able to eat for days."

"Then cough it up, by all means. It won't be much digested at all, and my kobolds have cooked up less savory things for their dinners. They like the taste of horse."

Nyoka nodded, and began to flex her coils in preparation for pushing the bulge of her earlier meal back up to her jaws. She read her sister's statements to mean that they would have to seduce the dragon, and that he would almost certainly have to go willingly down her throat. That was fine; if she had to lick, suck, or offer her sex to the Black, she would do it so long as she got her jaws around his head in the end.

Uvuzi smiled. She'd never hunted with her sister before, but very soon the two would go out and track down a dragon. A very friendly dragon, a nonthreatening, even slightly submissive one. Just the same he would take a lot of convincing. She fully expected she would know the taste of dragon seed by the time all was said and done, for after all, what better way to distract him from the jaws working their way over his body, then to swallow something else?

"It isn't a a good habit to get into, hunting dragons." She purred, and took a cup of wine from a kobold. "But just this once."