Work Text:
"I'm starting to get tired...of wrong answers."
The announcement growled out of the Sphinx as she stifled a belch into a wagon-wheel sized paw. Her eyelids sank to half-lid and a the pink of her tongue hung over her lower lip. The beast was the size of a house, a leonine figure sprawled on her side with feathered wings loosely folded on her back. In contrast to her bestial body, a human head topped the thick neck of a predatory big cat and a soft, furred bosom hung bare from her chest. But what stood out the most was her stomach, a brown-furred mountain of quivering, angry flesh that jutted from between her four legs. Deep, gurgling noises escaped the distended thing as the sphinx looked over the quivering figures before her. Thirty thieves had come to try their luck raiding the tomb she guarded. When their blades broke on her invulnerable hide, they'd agreed, at clawpoint, to test her in a game of riddles. One by one they'd failed. One by one she swallowed them, bound by the arcane rules that kept her chained to the tomb as its guardian beast. She'd swallowed her victims with ravenous delight at first, but she packed each would-be-tomb-robber into her mouth just a bit slower than the last. A rolling, bone-deep nausea had taken her as her stomach ballooned with squirming, writhing meat.
She was full. And she didn't like it.
She looked down balefully at number 28 in line. At this point, terror had blanched their faces bone-white and robbed them of their wits. The robbers had shouted ever odder, wilder answers- some merely cried out that they wanted to just leave and pretend this never happened. That wasn't, by the rules of the spell, a correct answer.
"HRRP- alright..." She moaned, kneading the side of her face with her massive paw. "I stand tall in my youth, and grow short with age. Doing my work makes me soft. What...what am I?" She hesitated, before a visible lump rolled up her throat and she wetly hacked a lump of acid-worn cloth onto the ground, splattered drool vanishing into the sand.
Number 28 winced at the sound, looking back to the other two. Hesitantly, he looked back at the nauseous sphinx.
"Uhm...is it...Man?" offered the trembling man. "Or-"
His attempt at a second answer was interrupted by the swift descent of a massive pair of jaws, snapping shut around his midsection. The great beast lifted its head, snapping the rest of her victim into her jaws- cheeks puffed, the Sphinx paused, her slitted eyes half-closed, nauseous sweat beading on her cheeks. Her rasp-covered tongue slid around the squirming victim in her mouth, the house-sized mythological beast's mouth perfectly sized for his shoes to be bumping the backs of her foreteeth, his head dangling over the descent into her gullet proper. She tilted her head back- he fell forward into her throat, the lump of his squirming body sinking down her gullet with a languid, halting series of peristaltic pushes.
Her jaws swung back open, steaming breath escaping in a visible cloud, thick streams of drool connected her lowered head to the road as she panted. The lump in her throat sank behind her collarbone, vanishing- and her impossibly distended stomach let a keening complaint of indigestive noise as another victim made its way inside.
The two survivors murmured amongst each other as the Sphinx audibly gagged, tears streaming from the corners of her yellow eyes. Voice ragged, she looked to them, eyes bleary and expression showing her nauseated misery.
"N-no...The answer to- Mngh-" Her cheeks puffed out, and a muffled retch echoed in her mouth before a long, sickly belch disgorged another cloud of steaming air alongside saliva-coated empty shoes onto the floor.
"Uorgh. Wasn't man. Candle. It was a candle. The wax...melts- Uhm- O-okay..." She kneaded the side of her head with one massive paw, a low groan escaping her as she tried to gingerly stroke her heaving belly, which visibly clenched, liquid squelching echoing out from within.
"...Y-you guys know...okay. Uhm- Why the chicken...crossed the road?" She ventured, a weak, sheepish smile on her face as she hoped they'd know THIS one.
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