The gnoll and the foxtaur
The gnoll and the foxtaur
By Strega
A cold, thin rain was falling as Avak entered the town. The low palisade wall would pose little problem for an enemy determined to take the place, but he was here on peaceful business. He shifted the pack on his shoulder and grinned at the guards, but only one of them bothered to smile back, and it a half-hearted smile at best. Even here, in the sphere of influence of Monstertown, gnolls were not the most popular visitors.
Welcome to Wolf Kill, the sign next to the gate read. All are welcome.
"Right," he mumbled. "Some are just more welcome than others."
It was only his second visit to this little town, but he already knew all he needed to know about it. Though the population was almost entirely human - there were a few dwarves, a halfling or two, one family of praka raccoon-folk - the town's bylaws let all species in. Typical of the farming towns hereabouts, really. The ones close enough to the trade road to make a bit of coin would let anyone in, the ones who couldn't profit from visitors were more insular.
He noticed the ringing bell only peripherally, lost as he was in his thoughts. There was a bronze bowl on the wooden sidewalk, and a monk was beseeching alms with his bell. Avak flipped a copper coin into the bowl without looking.
"The poor thank you, brother."
Avak realized three things at the same time. First, the voice came from far over his head. Second, what he had thought was a pillar was covered in brown-black fur, and ended in a paw the size of his chest. And third, he knew that voice.
"Hialfi!" He tilted his head back, and got a raindrop in his eye for his trouble. Avak stood over seven feet tall, but the creature he looked up at was at least twice his height. Hialfi was a foxtaur - maybe the foxtaur, as Avak had never seen nor heard of another. His lower body was that of an enormous fox, easily as high at the shoulder as the gnoll was tall, and where the fox's head would be was instead a humanoid upper body. This part of Hialfi resembled a volpa foxman grown to a giant's stature, and though his upper body was slender and foxy as the lower, he was still a massive and powerful creature.
He bore scars Avak had seen before - deep grooves though his chestfur, a pink-purple scar down his forehead and cheek (it must have just missed taking out his eye, Avak thought), and his poor ragged ears. One had a deep notch halfway up, the other was missing its tip entirely. Elsewhere, other old wounds showed as irregularities in his pelt. He was still a handsome creature, with his orange and chocolate and white fur. A coat of thin, oiled leather kept the worst of the rain out of his fur and extended along his lower torso like a horse-blanket.
A new addition was a brown monk's hood. Rather than wear the full robe, which would have been awkward on his frame, the hood extended only to his shoulders. A staff leaned against the wall nearby, though had Avak not seen the foxtaur he might have thought it a new flagpole.
"What's with the getup? Are you scamming this town for donations?"
It'd been a year and a hundred leagues away he'd last seen the big fox, all the way over on the Wild Coast. Hialfi had been working as a high-speed messenger, trotting from town to town, and Avak had been with a band of gnoll mercenaries-come-bandits. They'd clashed a time or two, Hialfi mostly sprinting away from any serious fight, before they'd finally met and talked in a neutral town much like this one. Avak had bought the always-penniless foxtaur many a mug of ale, and they'd become friends. When last they'd talked, some of those scars had been fresh.
"It's not a scam, friend," Hialfi said with a smile. "I joined a monastery a few months back. I work with the poor here and a couple other towns, collect donations, make sure they have a place to sleep. That sort of thing."
"I don't believe it," Avak snapped. "You, a monk? The fox so desperate for loving he covered a griffoness and a sphinx?"
Hialfi rubbed the grooves in his chestfur, a gesture that had the look of habit. "That was what started me down this road. You know there aren't any other fox-taurs? There's just me. After the sphinx, winter was coming on. I was running a package down the foothills of the Lortmil mountains, and a blizzard was coming on...."
The snow was deeper with each passing mile. Hialfi's winter pelt was fully grown in, but the wind was cutting through it and chilling him in places he hadn't known he had. The snow was coming down so hard now he wasn't completely sure he was still on the road. He knew this part of the forest well, though, and he thought...yes! That darker smear on the hillside had to be the old ogre's cave. Nothing had moved into it as of his last pass-by, just days before, so he would risk it.
He was shivering when he entered the cave. It was no warmer here, but at least he was out of the wind. His ragged ears swiveled, seeking any threat, but it was a scent that made his whiskers stand out straight.
She padded out of the darkness, white as death, white as the snow blown in around his feet. A great wolf bitch, not as large as he was, but big and strong as a horse. He did not have to look to know her gender, he could smell it, for she was in heat.
She must have been desperate for a mate, for she took one look at him, in all his strange non-wolfness, and then turned away. But not to run. She stood there, and she moved her tail aside, offering herself.
In Hialfi there was a dichotomy - the clever foxman, and the feral fox. It was the latter that stepped forward, the latter that hooked its forepaws over her haunches. She whined as his weight bore down, and then she yelped.
It was the shock of cold as he entered her that brought the foxman back into control. Cold, so cold around his maleness, cold enough to hurt. But once started, the feral fox was difficult to stop, and the foxman could only ride along as his lower half humped. The white wolf yelped and whimpered as the too-large fox had his way with her, but still she remained still and let it happen.
When it was over, the foxman was finally back in control. And that was when he realized the gravity of his situation. It was normal, at this point, to not be able to end the encounter. He would have to wait until the tie diminished to the point that he could pull out.
What was not normal was the solidity of the tie. He wasn't merely knotted to the wolf bitch. He was frozen to her.
Hialfi sighed. "Apparently she was a winter wolf. I should have known, but I was cold and my lower half - "
Avak burst out laughing. "And you froze your dick!" He glanced at the fox's belly, a simple matter since Hialfi was sitting. "At least you didn't lose your sheath."
"Things eventually thawed out enough that I...but enough of that. My lower half, my lust, got me in trouble. Weren't the scars enough? Why didn't I learn?"
"So you joined a monastery."
"Not for months after that. There were other...problems first."
It was raining harder. A halo of droplets surrounded the fox's hood and raincoat, but Avak had no such protection.
"I've got to sell this stuff and then hit the inn. Good luck with the...monk thing."
Hialfi waved. "Go well, brother."
Two weeks later the met again. In broad daylight Hialfi's scars were more evident, and Avak found himself wondering if the fox combed his fur to emphasize them. Today the foxtaur wore a harness that supported a dozen saddlebags. Avak waited until the other monks unloaded the packs and left before he approached.
"Still working as a packhorse, eh, foxie?"
Hialfi smiled. "I have the back for it. I see you are also a pack mule today."
Avak tugged on the straps of his pack. "More trade goods to sell. You said that the winter wolf wasn't the last problem you had. What other misadventures did your dick lead you on?"
Two old ladies on their way past glanced up, shocked, and hurried on their way. Hialfi winced.
"It was a few months after that. I was between delivery jobs and was getting by doing some hunting. I was using bolas, you remember I could never find a bow big enough to use. Sometimes I would just run stuff down. Then I ran into this farmer, he said something had been raiding his livestock and he'd give me a barrel of beer if I could chase it off. Well, it turned out to be a 'them' instead of an 'it'.
He recognized them on first sight:catlike body, bat wings, gross, fanged mouths. Most of all, tails that ended in mace-like spikes. There were three of the manticores. Normally he'd shy from such a fight, but the town he'd left yesterday had a bounty on manticore tails. Three of those, and maybe a bit more luck, and he might be able to afford some real healing. His wounds from the griffoness and sphinx had healed, but the scars still ached when the weather changed.
They had not seen him, and the first cast of his bolas wrapped the largest's wings to its body in mid-flight. With a panicked yawp it plummeted to the ground. Hialfi was leaping upward even as it fell past, and his club - a heavy and practical weapon he'd hacked out of a tree - slammed into the belly of the second.
They were nasty creatures, but he was larger and they were not brave. As he dropped down to the ground the one he'd clubbed flew off with an echoing screech. It flicked its tail as it fled, and iron spikes flew at him. But one of his ragged ears bore a gold earring, taken from an evil but minor mage who had not needed it for his trip down a foxy gullet, and that earring gave the fox protection from such missiles. Three of the spikes hit Hialfi and glanced off, not even scratching his pelt.
The third manticore, confused or panicked, managed to tangle itself in the branches of a towering oak.
In passing he stomped on the one that lay tangled in his bolas. Already badly hurt from the fall, it coughed blood and succumbed. A leap, and a brief trot, and he'd cornered the one tangled in the tree. It managed to squirm free, but dropped to the ground. A hedge blocked any escape except past him, and the evil, hissing thing looked him in the eye. Suddenly he realized it was a female...
The memory was painful. Hialfi covered his eyes with his hand for a moment. "And then she offered herself to me. I don't know if that's how they picked mates, by threatening until the female gave in, or if she was just panicked and wanted to show submission so I wouldn't kill her."
Avak was giggling. It was that typical gnoll sound, cruel, gallows humor. He knew what happened next in the story. Hialfi went on anyway.
"I'm not even sure if she was intelligent, though she made noises like speech. But she offered herself, and my stupid lower half..."
He was humping, humping, and his lower half was dead-set on keeping at it. He had borne the smaller cat-female down under his weight and mounted, and she let out long yowls of what he hoped was pleasure.
A stabbing pain bit at his flank, and his humanoid half swung around. Had the third manticore returned?
It was the female's tail. In her pain, or passion, or panic it lashed back and forth. His earring, in the perverse way of magical things, offered no protection from the spikes as long as they were still attached to the tail. It lashed again, and he yelped as the sharp spikes stabbed him, but his fox half was well into its rhythm and nothing as minor as repeated stabs from dagger-sharp spikes would distract it.
Normally he could at least enjoy the mating, even if his feral half was in charge of the operation, but both his flanks were lacerated now. Her tail lashed him like a scourge, and he yelped again. Stupid fox half....
The big foxtaur groaned. "At least I wasn't stuck in her for most of an hour like the winter wolf. I guess it's not just the knot, it's something in female canine anatomy too. So I got one manticore tail, which I turned in for the reward, but the farmer saw the other two fly off, and I didn't even get my beer."
Avak was still giggling. "Hialfi the rapist! You dog, you."
That hit a nerve. "I don't know if it was rape! For all I know it's how they pick their mates. I told you, a female offers my lower half her rump, it takes over."
The gnoll patted the pillar of a fox-foreleg comfortingly. "There, there, I'm sure she flew off and had her litter of fox-manticores in peace. No harm done."
Hialfi groaned again. "I don't want to think about it."
"And then you joined the monastery."
"No, it hadn't occurred to me yet. I was just a bit depressed, after I bandaged up my flanks."
"What, there was more?"
"Unfortunately, yes."
Months after his meeting with the manticores, and many leagues south. He'd heard rumors that giants were raiding out of the mountains, and he kept a wary eye out. Running was always his best defense, for he had yet to encounter a creature that could match his speed. He dreaded the day a dragon spotted him, for he must appear to be a fine meal to a fast predator like that, but landbound creatures he could outrun.
His luck had been mediocre lately. He'd kept himself fed, barely, but had no luck saving enough money for high-level healing. He had almost gotten used to the scar across his eye, but every time he saw his ragged ears reflected in a pond he grew angry. He had _ told _ the sphinx about the knot, she had no call to take it out on him when he was tied to her and couldn't even run.
He shrunk back into a copse when he heard a battle ahead. Metal weapons on metal armor, and he was protected only by a few weak magical devices he'd picked up. He saw a huge sword fly up, then chop down behind a tree, but there was the thunder of magic, too. Whoever was fighting the giants was holding their own.
Then a great black hound appeared,its equally dark chain-maille armor hanging from it in shreds. It was as large as a draft horse, its eyes glowed red, and its tongue was like a lick of flowing lava.
Crouched down in the trees to wait out the battle, Hialfi did his best to be inconspicuous. The black hound sniffed him out, though. And such was his faith in his perverse luck that he correctly predicted what he would smell, and what she would do next.
He smelled her, and she was in heat. And she turned away, moved her tail aside, and offered herself to him.
"All right," he said as he stood up. He was still in control. "I don't care any more." With that he stepped forward, and it was fox-man, not mere feral fox, that mounted her. Then and only then did he let his lower half have its way, and he let himself enjoy it as feral side slammed its member into the smaller female.
But he did not enjoy it for long. He should have known. He had seen the glowing eyes, the hot tongue. The giant's hunting-dog wasn't a dog. It was a hell-hound.
"OW! Hot! Hot!" And getting hotter. "Ow! Dammit!" But he could not dismount, his lower half would have none of it. He would swear he could hear his flesh sizzling, his sausage cooking in her oven.
"DAMMIT! OW!" And then the fight behind the trees was over, and a band of human and elf adventurers, attracted by the noise, came wide-out from behind the trees. And they saw him frantically humping the big black hound, his tail thumping the ground, and all the while his humanoid half was yelling and complaining.
They could have killed him easily, draped over the hell hound as he was, but they didn't so much as raise a weapon. No, what they did was much, much worse. They laughed, and then they laughed more as he knotted in the boiling hot hound and sat there whimpering. Eventually the knot let go, but by then they had left, taking the scraps of his dignity with them.
"And then you joined the monastery."
"No, not yet."
"Gods, man, what does it take?"
"I used what money I had saved up for some healing, because I had blisters on my...I had blisters. I went back up North away from the giant raids, and then one day -"
"Look, this is terrific stuff, you should get a bard to write a song about it."
"One already did."
"But I have to go, I have goods to sell." The gnoll waved, and left the foxtaur by his donation pot. As he walked away, Avak giggled.
Avak didn't see Hialfi for months after that. He was busy in other places, and he sold his goods in other towns. Winter was coming on when he finally returned to Wolf Kill. In the meantime he had learned why the town was called that - a typically exciting, and probably untrue story about werewolves. Avak much prefered towns with more non-humans. Willowby, for example: a joint halfling/praka village. They still looked at him funny, but a couple of silver pieces would get a raccoon-woman's (or -man's) muzzle wrapped around his dick.
Hialfi looked bigger with his winter fur growing in. He almost looked plump, which he never was in Avak's experience. He was still on the street corner next to the poorhouse, begging for coins from passing travellers. Avak shouldered his pack and walked over to the big fox.
"Hola, foxie. You know, with your winter coat you'd make a terrific rug for someone's hearth."
"You wouldn't, Avak. Your fur is too mangy."
Avak grinned and slapped the fox's foreleg. "So what did make you join the monastery, if almost burning your dick off didn't do it?"
"Thank you, brother," the fox said automatically as a coin landed in his bowl. He waited until the passer-by was out of earshot.
"After the hell hound, there was a long drought. Even if I," he searched for the right word, "Help myself when I am too lonely, I daydream - and dream - about meeting the right female. My lower half gets more and more anxious. It'd been a long time since I met the hell hound, and I almost wished I would meet her again. Which should give you some idea how desperate I was getting. Then one day...."
It was another farmer who told him about the creature. Hialfi was not a monster hunter, at least not a large monster hunter. (Small ones often ended up in his belly when he could get his hands on them. Thus the bolas, which were of easily digested leather and could be swallowed along with whatever they were wrapped around). This was supposedly a pretty big monster. Not as big as him, thought, the farmer said, and the offer of actual money for getting rid of it finally got him on the hunt.
So he found himself standing in a cornfield, watching the ground go up and down. It was unnerving. There was something under the ground, tunneling around. A dire badger? No, this was bigger. Not a purple worm, surely.
Then it surfaced a ways away, to snap at a raven that had incautiously settled to peck at a corncob. The raven got away, but he got a look at the armadillo-like beast. It had thick, plated armor, a huge jagged beak of a mouth, and thick clawed legs like an evil rhinoceros.
It saw him, and moved in his direction. It was fast, faster than a man, but he could outrun it easily. But he didn't. He could smell it. Smell her.
"It's a curse," he said as she drew close to sniff him. "It has to be a curse." But it had been a very long time since the hell hound. The bulette turned away, and moved her tail to the side. Still muttering to himself, he let his feral lower half do what his feral half did. At least he enjoyed it. No spikes, boiling-hot vulva, or frozen wolf snatch. Just an armored back his claws scrabbled at as his rump went up and down.
Of course, the farmer walked out of the woods and saw everything. The bulette left afterward, and he tried to explain that the beast had just sought a mate and that he had accomplished the same end as if he'd killed it.
The farmer was not sympathetic, and Hialfi earned no coins that day.
"And that's when I knew that I had a problem. I was desperate. With no mate of my own, I had gotten so...open-minded that I happily humped a bulette. A bulette! A landshark! And now I was up to six females that could be bearing my children, and I wouldn't even know it. Not even counting these two volpa women once -"
"So you joined a monastery."
"I joined the monastery. They taught me meditation and breathing exercises, ways to distract even my lower half
from, well, thinking about women. The abbot tells me I'm making excellent progress, so I get to help out here in town."
Hialfi's truncated right ear flipped around as he heard the clatter of weapons. There weren't many men in Wolf Kill's town guard, but most of them came running into the town square. "There he is! There's the gnoll!"
Avak turned to run, but a huge paw slammed him to the ground. He tried to squirm out from under it, but Hialfi applied more pressure.
"Let me go, Hialfi! They'll kill me!"
The fox tilted his head. "Now, why would they do that?"
He found out. The guards surrounded the pinned gnoll and tugged his pack out from beneath the paw. It proved to contain not trade goods, but jewelry, weapons, trade notes, bits of elaborately enameled armor. Some of the items were inscribed with the names of their owners, owners who had gone missing after caravan attacks up and down the coast.
"We've been looking for him for months, since the pawn shop owner recognized a sword he sold," the constable said. "He sells caravan pickings in lots of towns. Some of the people from the caravans show up at slave sales in Grayston - Monstertown - and the orc lands, too."
"What do you plan to do with him?"
"Let me go!" Avak struggled beneath the paw, but there was no budging it. He was more than seven feet tall, with a wiry strength in his mangy frame, but there was just too much weight behind that paw.
The constable was joined by the mayor. "Will you dispose of him for us, sir monk?"
Avak looked up at the fox from between the pads of Hialfi's paw. The foxtaur replied. "Are you sure? It cannot be undone once done."
"We're sure. He's in league with the bandits, and they all have the death mark on them."
The big fox picked Avak up. He struggled, briefly, but clawed fingers plucked away his mace, dagger, and even his clothes, Avak was strong, but Hialfi was much bigger and stronger.
"I'm sorry, Avak, but helping the townpeople is why I am here. I help the poor, but I also help the constables." He leaned down and looked the gnoll in the eyes. "I enjoyed our conversions, and I'm sorry it has to happen like this."
"But Hialfi -" The words were cut off as a guardman stuffed a ball in his mouth. Avak bit down hard, but it was made of some yielding material that he could not bite through. The guardsman ran strips of leather around his head, tying the ball into his jaws.
"I'll miss our talks," Hialfi said, and then his jaws gaped wide.
Avak kicked and squirmed, but the foxtaur's fingers were each as thick as his arms. The huge hands stuffed him into the wide-open maw, and the gnoll closed his eyes as he waited to be bitten in half.
Instead the hands jammed him in further, and his face was suddenly enfolded in a wet, slippery membrane. Avak's eyes popped open just in time to see the last light blotted out by his shoulders, which rammed against the tightness at the back of the fox's jaws and resisted - briefly - further progress. In the time it took Avak to realize that the slimy skin wrapped around his face was the fox's throat, Hialfi turned him so his shoulders were straight up and down in the jaws. The maw gaped yet wider, and a firm shove sent Avak's shoulders, too, into the slimy tunnel of fox throat.
Avak remembered watching a volpa swallow a large rat whole, and how he had slid his maleness effortlessly into a drunk volpafemme's gullet. The foxpeople's jaws could accommodate amazingly large objects, and what was Hialfi but a massive, four-legged foxperson? As his upper arms were taken in by the hungry gullet, he remembered something else. Hialfi had said, more than once, that he tried to be "tidy" with his feedings. The huge, yet cowardly fox didn't like to leave evidence of his meals behind. And other stories, about how humanoids disappeared when the fox was in the neighborhood. Orcs, kobolds...gnolls. Sometimes their weapons were found, and huge fox tracks. He had always thought Hialfi had carried them off on his back, to turn them in for a reward perhaps.
Hialfi bobbed his head, and Avak was swallowed to the waist. His maleness lay atop the fox's salivating tongue now. Reflex action made him go hard as the bumpy organ slid slickly over his cock, but then the tongue bunched up behind his rump, ready to send him deeper. Avak knew now that the missing humanoids hadn't ridden off on Hialfi's back. They had been carried off, yes, but they had been under the fox's spine, not atop it. He had always wondered how the big fox made enough money on his messenger runs to feed himself!
A snap of the Hialfi's muzzle, and his legs kicked from either corner of a foxy mouth. Avak was wrapped to the thighs in wet gullet, with rivulets of slick saliva dripping down from the tongue to lubricate him for swallowing. Another snap, and he felt fangs scraping across his footpads. Any hope that Hialfi might relent and let him go was fading. His own weight was enough to carry him downward, now; as Hialfi gathered himself for the final gulp, Avak could feel his wet fur starting to lose its grip on the surrounding gullet. The big fox didn't need to do a thing.
But Hialfi did, anyway. He tossed his head back as his tongue pushed at Avak's feet, and there was one last, wet gulp as he sent the gnoll to his fate.
Avak slid down in utter darkness, through the innards of two tons of fox that had been his friend. He was slick with saliva, and though his hands could turn and try to grip the gullet, the thick layer of lubricating mucus kept him from getting any purchase. He left long scrapes in the slime as he slid down the fox's throat, but if it caused Hialfi any pain, there was no sign. The pressure of slimy gullet sliding past his now fully hard cock was maddening.
With a bump and a lurch he arrived in what must be the fox's stomach. Heavy, slimy folds of flesh pushed out of the way as he settled, and he could feel the sudden droop he created in the belly. It had unfolded just enough to make room for him, and that space was half full of a disgustingly thick fluid similar to the lubricating mucus. Avak squirmed around in the hot squelching space, aware that he was doomed yet unable to simply give up.
There was a smell, or smells. Hot bile, to be expected. Besides that, the stink of wet fur, and not just his. As he pushed his way through the hot fluid, forcing folds of stomach to move out of the way, he encountered wads of matted hair or fur. He forced his muzzle clear of the goo for a moment and sniffed one: gnoll fur, and half-digested bone. Another: kobold scales. Bits of previous meals that had yet to exit the stomach.
So, as he had guessed, he was not the first humanoid to end up here. Others had been here just recently. Others would presumably follow. From his perspective, now, the fox resembled a tube. Into one end go humanoids, gnolls apparently being a favorite, and out of the other end emerged fertilizer. The foxtaur monk's secondary purpose was evident: He saved the town the trouble of both executing and burying criminals.
He was weakening. As he sank into the pool of digestive fluid he noted that the leather straps holding the ball in his mouth were softening, dissolving.
Unfortunately, so was he. With hope lost, he grasped his maleness firmly and began to pump. One last moment of pleasure, then. Hialfi might be a monk now, but he was sure the fox wouldn't mind.
*****
The gnoll made a remarkably heavy bulge in the foxtaur's belly, given their respective sizes. Hialfi was as slender as any fox, and the lump two hundred and fifty pounds of gnoll made is his midsection was nearly alarming.
The constable, mayor, and the fox watched the vague squirming beneath the white fur. It started slowly, reached a peak. A last sudden jerk, and it was quiet.
Hialfi muffled a belch. "Pardon me." He considered the bulge. "He was a friend of mine, you know. If you want to have someone watch me until you're sure I'm not keeping him alive in there somehow, I'll understand."
The constable placed his hand atop the bulge. He felt the foxtaur's heartbeat, but more than that, he felt the churning as the big fox's stomach began to digest the gnoll. The was no doubt in his mind that this gnoll, like half a dozen others he had seen disappear, would soon end up in the village's midden. It was a much more efficient method of recycling than burying or burning the bandit's bodies.
"We trust you, sir monk. And thank you. Had you not identified the gnoll, we might not have realized it was the same one each time."
"I serve as best I can, brothers."
A pair of volpafemmes, caravan travellers young and pretty, caught Hialfi's eye. They were peeking around a corner at him, pointing at his sheath and giggling. Fully erect, his penis was more than half as long as they were tall. There was one time, several years agone, that a pair of grateful volpafemmes like them had rubbed themselves against his maleness until -
Hialfi turned his thoughts firmly to safer subjects. It would be undignified to let his lust show. Lust could be controlled, to some extent.
He burped again, and tasted gnoll. Life as a monk had its drawbacks, but at least he was eating better these days.