The Gluttons' Ironies

The swamp was deader than a catacomb after nightfall, save the squelching hoof-falls of a boar demon as he navigated its sodden, fog-mantled terrain. The hog trudged along a miry path sentineled by sloping ruins and rotten woodlands, whose branches (though leafless) were too tightly interwoven for moonbeams to breach the eerie canopies and brighten the way below them. Fortunately, the trees' gnarls oozed trickles of mildly fluorescent sap, bright enough to guide the not-so-weary traveler's steady albeit dim advance. The dripping goop also fattened the gastropods inhabiting the exposed portions of the woods' thick, moldy rootage. The molluscs' mucosity exhibited the same lavender sheen as their diet, a display the shirtless tusker found delectably inviting, so he scooped up a mouthful with his jowl's imitation of a bulldozer then guzzled the lot, sloppily savoring the slugs' slimy tangs before resuming his trek.

Added to his stout, eight-foot lumber, the bipedal trekker shouldered a crude pike fashioned from a whetted strut. The weapon's terminus jutted from the still-bleeding mouth of a ghoul, who gurgled in anguish as his body dangled limply from the impaler rooted in its rectum.

"Lament not, my truffle," the hog feigned sympathy for his quarry. "Just a bit further and we'll simmer all that agony away in a piping hot crucible, along with the meat from your bones!" His sadistic guffaw joggled his paunch, which his unarmed palm ineffectively held at bay, but the mirth brought on by his own joke abruptly muted when he noticed a figure up ahead, a concern he halted to gauge whilst still afar.

Though obscured by the murky air, it didn't take long for the brute to remember where he'd seen that type of silhouette before, and a hot flash of fury overtook him. He plunged his spear hilt first into the ground, then leapt into a raging charge on all fours. The swamp resounded with what could have only been the clamor of tusks colliding with an armored exorcist.

The boar stood, snorting in victory, yet poised to smash what remained of his assumed adversary. Yet, when the fog rolled away, all he could do was squeal in disbelief. Mud dripped into an abraded helmet's hollow core while a dented chest plate and a pair of gauntlets missing their finger guards all laid half-submerged in peat. Despite the upshot evidencing the threat was purely imagined, the hog scorned relinquishing his guard but lowered it enough to hone his senses and probe the environs beyond the immediate area.

His ears perked to the screeches and wing beats of faraway vampires. The scent of mildew drew his sniffer to a discardment of cracked pots at the base of a broken altar, while ghosts floated the still-functional receptacles missing from the pile into the forest's darker depths. The breeze was muggy, carrying the chars of a hag's cauldron used seasons ago, but otherwise pleasant against the boar's grapey skin. Annoyed at his apparent paranoia, he gave a low grunt before turning his back on the empty armor.

Suddenly, a hoard of Mycelians burst from the mire and surrounded him. The beast flinchingly squalled at his tittering, pint-sized ambushers, but his alarm quickly flared into rage when he identified their leader, smugly leering from the rooftop vantage of a shrine as crooked as his physiognomy.

"Goombosh, you moron," the hog fumed from his snout, "What the hell do you think you're doing? You and your boys itching for a pummeling?"

The shortest and grottiest of the limbed toadstools was still casting his shadow of supremacy over the ambush when he chortled at the question before responding from his rumpled lips.

"My apologies, Gourmandu, but you're the only morsel we've seen in days since the elves began their snatchings," his twangy inflections befitted his sickly form, "And our hunger's gone unsatiated for far too long."

"Your hunger deems me a morsel?" Gourmandu raised a sarcastic brow while the other remained furrowed. "Am I meant to believe this sad excuse for bushwhacking was brought on by malnourishment? Ha! Get your funk out your brains and back up your arses, you clods, or I'll stew you along with that ghoul!"

Goombosh flashed a devious grin. "We prefer our meat smoked."

At their leader's signal, the circle of ambulatory shrooms belched forth a storm of effluvium and the plumes engulfed the boar in an instant. He squealed and thrashed about the magma-hued smog until it choked him to his knees. Eight fingers clung to the morass, desperate to anchor their clammy soma as it convulsed through a fit.

His skull and neck shed their bristles; his tusks withered into dust; his legs rapidly fattened, tearing their britches to shreds; and his squeals grew shriller and shriller as his flesh visibly bubbled with boils. The sores ballooned ever larger, not with pus but mushrooms surfacing from his agonizing dermis until honeycombed heads exploded into the night. The creature's hide flourished with shrooms as his innards clumped together, followed by everything else.

The swine mutated into a gigantic morel, completely devoid of any piggish semblance (or sense of self) save the ropy belt girding its waist turned stalk as it towered inanimately above its growers. The toadstools huzzahed as their leader slid down the monument's facade and into the jubilance.

"Let's tuck in," Goombosh spoke aloud, hungrily rubbing his mitts together as he addressed his appetite. Unfortunately, his minions mistook his words for a benevolent command and mounted the fungal steeple almost altogether, crippling its purchase with the ground.

"Wait, you muppets! I didn't mean..." Dread cut him off as the morel leaned towards him in its topple. His lips kissed the fungus's stalk sooner than they could impart a last-minute curse. The fungi voraciously cannibalized their prey, blissfully unaware that their superior was being crushed under the revelry's collective weight.

As the evening progressed, munches and crunches composed a gluttonous cacophony that echoed throughout the wetland, but the sounds of the feast were soon outdone by a guttural rumble. The noise came from the point along the path where their game was originally duped into charging to his doom, the sharpest fungus pointed out, and his heeding kin fixed their attention there. They gasped when they saw it--the hazy form of a naga. Its head bobbed in front of the abandoned ghoul (not unlike a snake heeding its charmer) then gobbled him up like a kebab off a skewer.

The creature moaned in satisfaction, her sultry tones cementing the toadstools deep into the marshland. They were eager to see if she looked as desirable as she sounded. They held their breaths as she loomed towards them. Her advance was sensually deliberate, gradually revealing the enormity of her stature (that of a double-storey house) yet the troop remained fixed in their enthralment.

At last, her face parted the fog like a bride risen from her veil. Her milky complexion was paler than the troop's generally twiggy frames; her quaint nose was marked with delicate slits for nostrils; and her gaze was an ecliptic black that matched her lips, from which a forked tongue occasionally flitted. The toadstools swooned, mesmerized by their guest's exotic allure, until one of them mustered up the courage to offer her a taste of the banquet. But sooner than he concluded his approach, three more identical heads appeared, freezing his toeless stubs for feet.

The toadstools gawked at the beauty that had quadrupled above them, its tongues flitting synchronously. Without warning, the impish fungi broke from their trance into a frenzy, with each purple-capped wooer vying for the morel's best pieces to shower the bewitching quartet. The nagas' womanly faces remained unblinkingly expressionless as the bedlam unfolded: a chaotic meld of tug-of-war and fisticuffs that hurled muck in every direction. The observers broke from their orderly row to dodge a volley of loam as they moved closer to the action.

Now completely unshrouded by the fog, it was frightfully easy (in every sense) to attribute the quadruplets' intimidating tallness to their lanky necks. As expected, each head was mounted on the curving length of a scaly, serpentine cane. Yet, all four lengths converged from the single body of a wingless dragon, for they didn't belong to nagas at all. The scene froze beneath the hydra's shadow as each of its heads unhinged its jaws, dripping with venom, before striking the mob like lightning.

All four targets were devoured at once; the remaining eight scattered for their dear lives. The hydra spun right around, launching its tail. Its appendage not only whipped the bolts out of the bolters, but also catapulted a fifth set of fangs at the furthest runner. The head on the tail end found its mark as effortlessly as its sisters did theirs prior and another victim was chuted to the siblings' shared stomach.

The monster realigned its bulk so that the greater sum of its heads faced its scrambled dinner, each repast still dazed from its lashing. The predator then lowered into a leonine crouch before leaping into the air with a kickoff that shoved Gourmandu's would-be carcass right off the toadstools' chief.

"You ungrateful maggots!" Goombosh coughed out bits of quag as he surfaced. "When I get out of this, I'm going to throttle you all one by one until you photosynthesize!"

Meanwhile, the lackeys he was admonishing had just regained their footing when the hydra's seismic impact sent them stumbling once more. He cleared the gunk from his eyes only to have the same organs nearly burst from their sockets when he witnessed the next four subordinates being chomped up and swallowed down after piercingly shrieking against the inevitable.

Goombosh shrieked in turn (but like a pinched wallflower) before deftly diving behind the nearest tree trunk for cover, narrowly avoiding the hydra's rear head on the lookout.

"By the wings of the Unholy Lord, what's this abomination doing so far from the river?" he mumbled, peeping from his refuge. That's when he spied his last three underlings desperately scaling a tree of their own. "Hurry, you ninnies," the hidden leader urged his clambering stooges sotto voce. Alas, they were still three-fifths short of the full climb to the treetop when the hydra caught sight of them as well.

The beast reared before sinking its front claws into the trunk's base. The mighty clutch nearly jolted the climbers from their fingerholds but ultimately served as the prod that hastened their ascent. Providentially, the hydra was already primed, even thrilled, to pursue its ​​prey skyward.

Its main heads began to slither up the flaky trunk, their scales like rivers of gravity-defying milk flowing over the coarse, wooden grain. The toadstools' perspirations were limy in both color and hindrance as they labored to rise faster than liquid death was closing in.

"Climb, climb, climb," Goombosh chanted under his breath. Yet, despite his clerical zeal, the cantillation was conveyed in vain as the hissing pursuers unceasingly dwindled the gap between themselves and his henchmen's heels. Eventually, his mantra was silenced, zipped tight by his angst-induced cringe when the heads had finally snaked into striking range.

Without a moment's hesitation, they sprung at their quarries, fangs bared. The trio winced at the darting daggers, but the nips never came; they were just an inch too far above the snapping ivories, whose necks had already stretched as far as they could.

"Yes!" Goombosh fist-pumped, while his toadies pulled bratty faces at the disgruntled snakes below them. It was a premature celebration on both ends for the head with the longest neck hadn't given up just yet. She realized that the chunkiest shroom was slightly lower than his brethren (and much closer than her initial target). She recoiled, then launched at her new mark. Her palate clamped down in less than a heartbeat, cleaving the dumpy goon at his waist.

The screaming half that remained spritzed the hydra's empty but eager traps with its tantalizing juices, and the refreshment spawned an idea that reinstated the gargantuan reptile's four-legged stance. As the able-bodied pair shimmied down to aid what was left of their comrade, one of the middle serpents ejected a jet of high-pressure venom and the impact dropped the two-and-a-half mushroom men like wet flies.

Goombosh speechlessly stared as they plummeted. He wasn't petrified by shock but rather strove to uniquely immortalize his myrmidons by scarring his memory with their demise. Nevertheless, he was forced to retreat from the rear head's surveillance yet again--sooner than he witnessed the fallers' fatal nadirs, which their devourers deliciously received.

"Sons of spores couldn't even taste my wrath one last time before getting themselves eaten," he groaned, slouched against the tree, but the hydra's wanton sibilations quickly ceased his grief. Despite having ingested a small army, the gluttonous lizard still uttered its hunger for more, prompting the troop's leader (and sole survivor) to affirm a more realistic resolve than commemorating the fallen just out of reach from the belly they were being digested in.

"I better move while I still have the chance," he murmured. But before he could set his getaway in motion, the bark he was resting on began to writhe across his already frigid spine.

The grisly sensation involuntarily pirouetted him to face its inducer and he beheld the unnerving dilation of one of the trunk's knots. The hole continued to swell until it revealed--a nebulous vortex--glimmering like hope in a child's eyes (or in this case an anthropomorphic shroom's beady optics) as it spiraled.

Goombosh gawped, hesitant and drenched in cold sweat. The vortex's eldritch aura was unmistakable. It was indeed a portal--the perfect means of escaping the fate that befell his troop--albeit too perfectly timed in its appearance. How could he be sure there wasn't something more sinister than a hydra's gullet lurking on the other side? Yet, before he could take the chance of his own accord, a pallid hand shot from the swirling mass and ensnared his face.

The mushroom braced himself with a reflexive stomp, snapping a nearby twig, which altered the hydra to his position. The monster slung its nearest head like a flail, hooking its neck onto the tree and propelling its unhinged jaws at the target around the bend. But when its fangs snapped shut, they bit into nothing but air. The head peered into the knot, now regularly sized once again, but all it saw was an abyss as dark and soulless as its own gaze.