The last place they'd look

By Strega

He stood sixteen feet tall from his clawed feet to the tips of his upright ears and though he was slender in a foxy way he weighed a good two tons, with handsome reddish fur, white belly and darker 'socks' on his legs and forearms.  He had four of the one and two of the other, for Hialfi was a foxtaur - as far as anyone knew, the only one. There were rumors of others but no one who wasn't deep in his cups would claim to meeting one, whereas pretty much everyone knew the friendly foxtaur who brought the mail by twice a week.

He was big and he was fast, trotting twenty-plus miles a day with little effort even with mailbags hanging from his harness.  He didn't have much else to carry, just a leather harness he'd made himself to carry huge rolled-up blankets cobbled together from man-sized ones.  Add a few pans, tools and scavenged weapons mostly rather smaller than they should be for someone his size and you were looking at pretty much everything he owned.  Hialfi slept curled up in the woods most nights for lack of a house and it was common knowledge that he ate goblins, various other humanoids and monsters and even bandits of more civilized races. He'd swallowed dozens if not hundreds of humans whole and alive, not to mention all the other thinking beings who'd perished in his stomach.

Just the same the residents of the five villages around Rand Mountain liked him and trusted him, because in ten years they'd never seen or heard of him hurting someone who didn't deserve it. He was a big fox and ate as much as twenty men, so until a job cropped up that one very large fox could do that paid enough to feed him, he'd keep eating bandits and whatever else he could catch. If anything the villagers regarded it as a public service, just as no one objected to the druid's giant badger who was often fat on meals of bandits and monsters. Like Thistlefur the badger Hialfi was a monster, but a friendly one you could trust around your kids.

So it was with evident surprise that Hialfi drew up short at the intersection of two well-traveled dirt roads. He had just turned east, away from the ring road that connected the five towns and toward the distant Lortmil mountains when he saw the roadblock.

There were a dozen armed men there, half with bows and half with spears.  Hialfi paused at the intersection and looked them over from a hundred yards away.  He recognized one of them as a local militia captain and others were also wearing surcoats that marked them as militiamen.  One of the remaining men had an obvious tail, marking him as nonhuman, but Hialfi couldn't make out his species.

He could go around them or leap right over their barricade if he weren't worried about arrows. He could cut through the woods and bypass them altogether but the captain was waving at him.  Hialfi shrugged and padded toward the roadblock. It would look suspicious to do otherwise.

"Ah, captain Tyler," he said with a smile.  "It's rare to see someone out here, much less a whole squad."

"You know why we're here, fox." Tyler adjusted his helm and craned his neck to look up at a foxtaur more than twice his height. Hialfi took a step back and sat, noting as he did the nervous grip the three strangers in the squad had on their weapons. The one with the tail turned out to be a lizard man, a species Hialfi had rarely met before. Supposedly there was a tribe in the marsh near Willoughby but though that little village of raccoon-folk and halflings was only a dozen miles from his mail route he'd never visited it.

"I don't," Hialfi said.  "What's this all about?"

"We're here because Yarik was spotted in Adelberg, not two leagues in your wake. He's a wanted man, a wanted gnoll rather.  And you're his friend."

Hialfi shrugged.  "I've played cards with him, sure.  And shared a drink or two. Haven't seen him in a year though."

"So you say," grunted the captain.  "We'll need to search you."

Though he could have most likely overpowered the lot of them easily, or failing that leap past them and outrun anything with legs, Hialfi just watched as a militiaman approached him from each side of his feral lower body and began rifling through his gear.  He accommodated them by lying down, since his lower half was seven-plus feet tall at the shoulders.  It was his day off and there were no mailbags on his harness but they poked and prodded his bedrolls suspiciously.  To be fair those were big enough that even a seven foot tall gnoll could have been stretched out in one, but they soon found there was nothing there but cloth. Those were the only things he carried big enough for someone to hide and he smiled and sat back up as they turned back to the captain with empty hands.

In his summer fur Hialfi was properly slender for a fox, slim and muscular, and he sat confidently awaiting permission to leave. This was slow in coming, though, as he realized the captain was staring at his belly, which thanks to a recent meal wasn't as slender as it might have been.  Tyler sat tapping his foot and staring suspiciously.

"You can't possibly think he's hiding in my stomach," Hialfi said.  "I've had gnolls in there before and don't come back out looking the way they did when they went in, believe me."

"There's ways around that," the captain grunted, and Hialfi was surprised to see the lizard man begin to take off his armor.  Underneath it were smooth green scales and a lighter-colored belly and Hialfi realized he had no idea how to tell a male lizard from a female.

"This is ridiculous," Hialfi protested, but the captain just grunted again.

"I know you could escape," Tyler said.  "You're the fastest thing on four legs. You run for a living," which was accurate enough considering Hialfi's job delivering mail.  "Or you could just step on us.  Might get a few cuts but you'd win.  I don't think you will though, and if you run I'll report you for helping a fugitive escape."

Hialfi sighed.  "Fine.  What do you want from me?"

The lizard man, now nude, was oiling itself up with some sort of too from a jar. It made its scales glitter and gave the whole lizard a slimy look.  Hialfi realized what was what going on.

"Did you bring this guy all the way out here so I could swallow him?"

"It's not too much to ask, is it?  How many people have you swallowed?"

Hialfi's great fluffy brush of a tail stirred at that, and for the first time he was angry.  "How many people have you killed with your sword, Captain?  Every person I've eaten was a bandit, monster or threat to the villages.  Maybe a few were redeemable but can you tell me with a straight face that every man you've killed deserved to die?"

Hialfi didn't say there was one bleak time in his life when he'd eaten the innocent.  When you're in a cage and the people you are fed would die whether you did the deed or not, you eat them and hope you can one day forget what you had to do. He still woke up sometimes remembering their faces. And then there were the werewolves, who assholish as they'd been probably didn't deserve to be eaten.  That was a long time ago, though.

The captain tapped his foot and grimaced.  "Look, fox.  People around here trust you.  I don't.  But swallow Cogu here down and he'll make sure you're telling the truth. I'll admit I was wrong then."

"Fine," Hialfi growled, and snatched the lizard up in one hand. The slime spread on its scales didn't make it as slick as he'd expected.  "On your head be it if he comes out as fox shit."

He looked at he lizard, who smiled back.  Probably.  He wasn't up on lizard expressions.  Hialfi shrugged and stuffed it into his jaws.  

Hialfi was a big fox, but the captain and the others still watched with a mixture of fear and awe as he snapped his muzzle upward, swallowing the lizard to the waist.  The opening at the back of a fox's jaws is surprisingly wide for the width of the muzzle and it happened that something as broad as a man's shoulders fit neatly through and into his throat.  With another toss of his muzzle there was nothing left but a bulge in his neck and a green tail tip hanging from the corner of his mouth.

There was nothing for it but to swallow and that's what he did, sending the bulge through the white fur of his neck into his chest. An unnatural creak signaled its passage through his ribs and his humanoid belly swelled briefly as the lizard man arrived. It didn't stop there, though, for Hialfi's stomach, along with most of his organs, were in his feral lower half. The slick chute of gullet gripped and pushed the lizard past the sharp bend where anthropomorphic and feral halves met and after another slide through the tightness of a second ribcage the lizard was deposited in the foxtaur's stomach. For all his size the fox was a slender creature and the addition of another hundred and fifty or so pounds of meat to his gut made it sag noticeably. 

The existing bulge doubled in size and a moment later Hialfi let out a belch that was amplified by his size to an almost painful volume.  Captain Tyler shot him a look of disgust.

"I knew you could do that, but I've never seen it before.  Why do you eat people alive, anyway?  If you're going to eat them, can't you at least cook them first?"
Hialfi shrugged. "First, I'm a terrible cook. Second, spices are expensive and without them I might as well not bother.  Third, its a fast way to eat them, as you've seen, and people are less likely to have to watch. And last, it keeps my fur clean.  No blood, no mess. If it helps, I do often kill them before I eat. Just...neatly, like breaking their necks."

The look of disgust had no left the captain's face.  "You're sick.  A cannibal, and sick."

"I do have to eat," Hialfi began, then groaned.  The bulge in his belly was moving in a way horrifically suggestive that some sort of internal parasite was worming its way around beneath the fur.  This didn't appear to surprise Captain Tyler and he watched with interest as the bulge sloshed back and forth. The shape of the lizard's muzzled head stood out for a moment as it wriggled through whatever partially digested mush was in there. Hialfi grunted, looking deeply uncomfortable, but at the same time a pointed pink tip as thick as a man's thigh appeared at the end of his sheath.

"Really, fox?  That makes you hard?  No wonder you eat people."

There was no denying that the foxtaur's leg-sized cock was stiffening in its sheath but Hialfi's face was twisted in discomfort at the same time.  He tried to speak and gagged, managed "And does your dick always obey you," before gagging again.

The captain gestured urgently to his men and they backed off just in time. The rising nausea overpowered the foxtaur and he hacked, heaved, and regurgitated the lizard.  Up with the scaly meal came all that was left of a previous one, a good-sized deer reduced to a half skeletonized frame and gallons of pink mush.  Mixed in were gobbets of sodden brown fur digested loose from its body .  Also to be seen were three hard rubber balls each the size of a man's head, each perforated with the wrist-wide hole.  Nothing in the vomitus showed any trace of two-legged prey, much less the intact gnoll they'd half expected to see.

The clear slime the lizard had smeared on itself had done its job.  It climbed out of the stinking mass seemingly unhurt by a brief exposure to stomach juices that would have otherwise started to do to it what they had done to the deer.

Hialfi coughed, wiping his snout on a bedroll he rudely grabbed up from the camp the men had set up while waiting for him. Absentmindedly he plucked the rubber balls each from the mess, wiped them on the same borrowed bedroll and stuck them in a pouch.  Eventually he recovered enough to speak.

"I was wondering if you expected me to throw him up on command," he said.  "I guess you had that planned out too." The protective slime had a double purpose, it seemed.  "Are you happy now, Captain?"

The captain wasn't, judging from his expression, but he grudgingly nodded.  "Fine. I was wrong.  I still don't like or trust you, fox." He shot a look between Hialfi's forelegs at the still visible, and now dripping pink tip.  "And you're disgusting."

Hialfi stood up, stamped a foot, and said "I try to like everyone, Captain.  Maybe I'll even learn to like you one day." With that he started forward, patience exhausted, and the men scrambled out of the way lest a two-ton fox "accidentally" step on them. His effort to leave with dignity was somewhat spoilt by the pile of half digested puke in his wake and the swollen sheath that bobbed below his now sunken-in belly, but depart he did. He stalked off, tail rigid with indignation, not even bothering to trot.  His slow departure - for him, anyway - showed how little he cared about what the captain thought of him.

Captain Tyler shook his head as the foxtaur disappeared around a bend in the trail. "I was so sure he was helping that gnoll escape."

The lizard man, still wiping himself clean, flicked his tail. There was a hiss to his voice when he spoke, fangs showing. "Maybe  he was a decoy."

"If so the other patrols should spot Yarik.  He has to get out of the district somehow, and when he tries, we'll be waiting."

Half an hour later and miles away Hialfi padded off the track and into a grove of trees that offered concealment even for someone his size.  He sat, tall upright ears swiveling alertly, seeking any indication he was observed.  Only after several minutes of looking and listening did he curl around himself and reach into the thick fur of his tail.

Hialfi's tail was close to fifteen feet long and four feet thick, a great brush of long fox-scented fur that served many functions.  It balanced him when he ran or jumped, kept him warm at night, and left a smell of fox when it touched anything thanks to a gland above its base.  Under all that hair was a spine thick as a man's waist, with all the bone and muscle such a huge tail needed to operate.  Wrapped around this shaft was a harness of handmade leather straps and buckles, with rings and loops where he could carry many things. At the moment they held only one, but that was an intact, naked and very much living gnoll.

"I can't believe that worked," Yarik said as Hialfi unbuckled him.  There had been a time when the fox stored meals there for later, but he got tired of the screams, the whining, and of course of the hapless goblin or whatnot pissing on his tail. Foxes were smelly enough as it was without that contribution.

"It could have gone wrong in many ways," Hialfi said.  "You stayed silent, that was good, but if they'd had someone with a better nose...."

"How could they not think to look?  Your tail is the size of a dozen men!"

Hialfi handed over a bag from his harness, and from this Yarik dug out some rags that made the gnoll passable clothing. One of the scavenged polearms Hialfi used as javelins was the right size for a seven-plus foot tall gnoll.

"Because they were looking at my belly, thinking I'd somehow managed to hide you in there, and then they were distracted by my, well, my lower body has its own ideas about what is arousing."

Yarik grinned.  "Thanks a ton.  I don't see my money pouch in this bag, though."
"I had to leave it behind.  They know I'm poor and if they had found your armor or what, five hundred Lunars in assorted coins on me they'd have known something was up."

The gnolls happy expression fled as he realized what had just happened.  "Damn it fox, that's all the money I had."

"Yes it was," Hialfi said, "And if you hadn't raped that barmaid," he held up a huge hand as Yarik opened his mouth, "Or gotten into a situation where she could claim you had, you would still have it.  I told you to be careful. You know how little people trust gnolls around these parts.  And sometimes for good reason.  Do you remember what happened to Avak?"

"You ate him," Yarik said.  "When you were living at that monastery.  Before your dick got you kicked out."

Hialfi winced.  "The point is that I had to eat him because he was condemned and it was my job at the time to dispose of criminals.  He was guilty.  I don't think you are, but the mob with torches and pitchforks isn't going to listen to me."
Yarik opened his mouth again and Hialfi cut him off.  "I'll try to run the money and gear out to you when things have cooled off.  I'm not going to rob you, Yarik. You're my friend."

"But," the big fox said, "You can't come back. If I see you in the five villages again I'll probably have to eat you.  I put my reputation on the line to get you out and eating you would be maybe the only way to clear my name.  So don't come back."

Yarik sighed.  "You're probably right.  See you again sometime, fox."
Hialfi sat and watched as the gangly hyena-man made his way down the road.  When he was finally out of sight he stood, curled around himself and rubbed the base of his tail.  Big and strong as he was, trying to keep the movements of his tail natural with a gnoll strapped to it had given him a cramp.

He needed to kill a day before he could go back, lest the patrols ask, quite reasonably, why he went out of his usual haunts only to double back so quickly. And he was hungry, having coughed up his morning meal.  Hialfi drew out one of his bolas, three hard rubber balls each the size of a man's head connected to a metal ring by handmade leather straps. It was a weapon for entangling prey, and those three colored balls had proven able to survive many a trip through his guts when the bolas was tangled to easily retrieve.  The leather didn't fare as well but though his huge hands couldn't do fine enough work to sell to normal sized creatures, he had been a leather worker when he was smaller and bipedal and he hadn't forgotten those skills. When the balls reappeared after a meal he just made new straps.

He set out to hunt, peering over the shorter of the native trees while keeping the bolas ready. He was hungry enough to eat just about anything now.

He wasn't as sure as he'd like to be that the gnoll hadn't raped that barmaid. Gods knew he had been led around by his cock before, though at least he had his feral lower half to blame for that. A hole is a hole to a dog, and a fox is just a slender, reddish dog when it came down to it.

Hialfi sighed.  He wanted to believe Yarik.  He really did.  He'd put a lot on the line to get the gnoll away from the law.  But if it came down to it he'd eat his friend.  It wouldn't be the first time he'd done that, and it probably wouldn't be the last.

His ears perked up as he saw movement in the distance, and he readied the bolas.  Someone or something was going to end up in his belly this morning.  He was just glad it wasn't Yarik.