The Feast of the Mountain King

Glaz beamed to the crowds below. Hundreds of people had come to greet him and to revel in his company; to experience the awe of witnessing the feast of the world’s most gluttonous fox.

This was not coincidental. The feast was well publicised, taking place thrice a day and billed as the must-see tourist destination in an otherwise empty patch of countryside. Glaz had seen to it that there should always be a crowd in preparation for the show.

The location was not coincidental either. In the countryside he could camouflage his greenish hue amongst the valleys, his thousands of billowing rolls much less threatening when they were disguised amongst the foothills. He was still unmistakably gargantuan, there was no hiding that, but pushing a few tens of thousands of tons out of view seemed to help the psyche of the visiting groups at least a little—even if his size was part of the draw. Add to that the rivers of sweat and discoloured patches of dirt and he settled quite nicely into the country aesthetic.

He had watched the crowd swell over the last hour. They were anticipating a feast, after all, and were so instructed to be timely lest they miss out spectating Glaz’s voracious appetite at work. This was all an engineered sham of course. There would indeed be a feast, but their role was to be of much greater importance than a mere onlooker.

His hunger was growing. Losing patience, Glaz focused his energy onto the amassed crowds. A tendril of thought passed from his mind to theirs, implanting within each of them a small piece of himself—his overpowering desire to feed.

The crowds stumbled over themselves as they fought to get closer, congregating around the base of his stomach. Their rational minds gone, they started to grasp at the accumulated filth that poured from him, desperately pushing it into their starving maws. The effects of the gunge were instantaneous, the nearest rows growing heavier with each desperate mouthful as they clambered for more.

Already impoverished, the rear of the group took to climbing upon him, targeting pools of sludge on the higher plateaus. They too grew heavier and more needy as they fed, finding themselves sinking into the fox’s soft, malleable flab and getting stuck in his folds. Soon those sources too were deprived, the whole gathering dragging themselves higher up to richer sources of the filling sludge. Their bodies changed rapidly, the narrowest of beanpoles were turned into 300-pound hunks, while simultaneously a notable clique were outgrowing the rest by some margin. Those, Glaz knew, were folks who would probably have fallen to his whim even without the little hypnotic suggestion—just hedonists weighed down by inhibition. Freed.

They worked their way upwards on their inconsolable feast, Glaz focusing himself again as they neared the base of his chins. Another thought wormed its way into their heads, this time not a feeling, but an instruction: Feed.

Pandemonium broke loose as hundreds of bloated bodies cascaded towards his face. The crowd submitted themselves to his hunger, a willing sacrifice of flesh to help sustain the greatness of the corpulent fox. The first to meet his eyes was a fellow of surprising size, nearing almost half the size of Glaz’s cheek (a very impressive feat, relatively speaking) who wasted no time in pushing his head and hands into Glaz’s salivating maw. Glaz greeted the sacrifice gracefully, embracing the obese blob in his mouth for a moment before swallowing him whole; a fresh addition to his magnificence.

At last his body awoke from hibernation, the feast begun. A river of slick drool sprung from his maw, pouring down his chins to lubricate the oncoming crowds in preparation for his gullet, slobber coating all who stepped near it. A lavish belch spread it further still, plastering his mountains of rolls and much of the ground before him in warm moisture.

Still the crowds thundered onwards. The clientele ranged from 500 to 5000 pounds in weight, morphing anywhere from the most apple to the most pear shaped of personas, each of them demanding entry into the fox’s starving, hungry muzzle in the most forceful of ways.

He welcomed each morsel eagerly, his desire knowing no bounds and appetite no end. He filled his mouth with their sacrifices, his fat cheeks swelling even rounder as people desperately fought for entry. Every few minutes another extravagant belch would burst out from deep inside him, shaking his mass with its reverberations and blasting some of the nearest bodies back down the hillside.

The largest did not come until last. Those who were gluttons even before their visit, and who had taken the time to gorge themselves to monstrous proportions before slowly, painfully trudging towards their inevitable doom. There were four this time, a rabbit, a bat, an otter and a dragon. Each of them dwarfed those who had come before him, easily twice the size of the fellow who had come first, all pushing the limits of their very mobility as they forfeited themselves to the beast who had granted them one last meal. Glaz licked his lips and opened wide, engulfing them all one by one and filling himself with their rich seams.

He concluded with one final thundering belch and allowed silence to fall. There was nobody here but him and the soft whistling of the breeze. He rested himself, contented in his hunger and his size. Mobility may have been a long gone luxury, but he napped comfortably, safe in the knowledge that the relentless advertising around the world’s most gluttonous fox would draw in a new crowd in a few more hours. After all, he could be pretty persuasive.