You never wanted to be a bandit. You didn't want to be a soldier either, and faced with four year's mandatory service once you hit 18, you decided running is a better option. Raised on tales of wandering heroes winning fortunes from dragon's lairs and forgotten crypts, you set out to be an adventurer.

You don't tell your family. They wouldn't approve. You leave the little city-state you were born in and wander. There's a lot of wilderness, not many towns. The nearest real city is weeks away, at least. Turns out becoming a legendary hero without training and equipment is hard. Eventually, out of hunger more than anything else, you and other lost souls turn to banditry.

Caravans are too strongly guarded, so you and your rotating cast of "friends" tackle solitary wagons and raid farms. Desperation leads to cruelty. You don't want to kill people, but it is the only way to survive now.

You can't stay in one spot for long lest mercenaries or guardsmen find you. The penalty for banditry is hanging or worse. Yes, there are worse fates than hanging. Somehow, you manage to find one for yourself.

In the pastoral little backwater called the Five Villages by its inhabitants you corner a farmer on his wagon. Only two of you are here for this raid. You don't need many people to mug a farmer. You need more than that to tackle a dragon, though. Even a little one.

Your companion - what was his name again? Hertzog? They come and go so fast - has his crossbow trained on the farmer as you step up to search the wagon. The farmer looks up, surprised but not afraid, and a sudden shadow falls over you. There is a rush of wings and a thump. Something slams you to the ground and you pass out for a moment.

You wake pinned to the ground by cruelly curved talons. A dragon with coppery scales is arched over you, its foreclaws holding you down. It's not big as dragons go, maybe twenty-five feet nose to tail and about a ton of slender, noodley frame. But its strong. You can't move a muscle under its foreclaws and it has your companion hoisted off the ground by his collar. Absently it picks up one foreclaw and rakes it over him, tearing away the quiver of crossbow quarrels and his short sword.

He's struggling, but there's no leverage to be had when you're hanging from a dragon's mouth and facing away from it. The dragon looked alertly past its prize at the farmer. "Mmm?"

"Thank you, Sir Dragon," the farmer says. "Bandits, you know."

The dragon tilts its scaly head the other way. "You are sure?" Its voice is a hiss, like a talking teakettle.

"Very sure," replied the farmer. "A band of a dozen or so is in the area lately according to the druid. I wouldn't lie to you, Clack."

Clack. The local name for a copper piece. You can buy a loaf of bread or a mug of cheap ale for a clack. Not much of a name for a dragon, but it does make sense. Copper dragon. Clack.

The dragon gave the farmer a long look, appearing to consider.

"Very well," hissed the Copper. "Waste not, want not."

Your companion lets out a high-pitched shriek as the dragon heaves its head upward. You hadn't realized you were standing next to a woman. Dirt and grimy leather cover up a lot. Suddenly quite a lot of that dirt and grime disappears. With a snap of its toothy muzzle the dragon engulfs her to the waist.

You watch in wide-eyed horror as the dragon bolts her down. Three snaps of its jaws and a set of kicking boots are all that is left. Sharp yellow teeth close around them and the Copper lifts its head, allowing the squirming bulge to slide down its long neck. One gulp is all it takes.

You can't look away. It's not a particularly large dragon and the scales stretch apart as the bulge goes by, exposing pale leathery skin. Its underside is protected by curved plates that also stretch apart, then snap back together as the bulge passes. Your companion slides down a dozen feet of scaly neck and ends up as a long bulge in the dragon's middle. Even there the swelling is obvious and man-shaped. Woman-shaped. Whatever. The lump is big enough that the bulge of her feet presses against your legs. You feel her move under the belly scutes. Horrible.

The farmer watches it all, fascinated and only a little taken aback. "Armor and all?"

"I wouldn't call that armor," said the dragon. "And I am a dragon, after all."

You remember what the drunk old mage used to say at the bar, back before you fled your home. "Dragons are magical beasts," he said. Their bellies are like furnaces, consuming nearly anything they eat."

Maybe steel armor would give its belly trouble. Boiled leather, not so much. Human flesh and bone, even less so.

The dragon's muzzle twitches as it lets out a belch. It doesn't look magical. It looks like a winged, four legged snake with a lump in its middle. A wriggling lump, at that. Under the coppery scales your companion kicks, desperate to escape in a way that doesn't involve a trip through a dragon's bowels. Small hope of that. She's dragon food now.

"Which brings us to you," the dragon hisses. It curls its head down and looks at you upside down.

"Wait," you protest. "I didn't want to be a bandit!"

"I didn't want to be a farmer," says a man who knows that he at least won't end up as a bulge today. The dragon shoots him a look.

"No need to be smug," says the Copper as its jaws open for you.

You're still pinned under its claws and a hot breath scented of bile rolls over you. Coppers spit acid, you remember. That doesn't bode well for what it's going to be like inside the beast.

Its head is some three feet long, its jaws wide enough to fit easily over your shoulders. It does just that and clamps down, digging its inward-curving teeth into the thick leather of your breastplate to hold you still. That lets it use its claws to rake away your gear just as it did your companion's.

Your armor is a patchwork of bits you found or stole. Mostly thick leather with a padded gambeson underneath. You don't really have much in the way of weapons and you lost your spear when it landed on you. You feel its claws scrape over you as it pulls away your belt, your pouch with its few coins, the hatchet you have as a backup weapon.

While that's going on you get an all too close look at the inside of its mouth. Sharp, strong teeth curve toward the back of its jaws, toward the throat. The way they latch into your armor leave no doubt as to their function. They can pierce and tear, but for prey your size their job is simply to trap and hold prey so the dragon can swallow it whole. The tongue is long and muscular, suited both to reaching out for small prey or pushing larger morsels into the waiting gullet.

Waste not, want not. The dragon heaves its head up and the momentum sends you sliding into its gullet. Slick flesh expands over your shoulders and slides past your face. You kick and squirm, but it already has your arms pinned in its jaws. As far as it is concerned you aren't a man any more, just a meal it hasn't finished eating. It is hard to argue that it isn't right. The inward-hooking teeth make it impossible to pull out of its jaws and all too easy to slide past, into the waiting gullet.

There is a creak and groan as its neck expands to let you in. From inside its throat you actually feel the scaly armor stretch into a series of bumps as the bulge moves down its neck. A thick layer of mucus on the walls of the gullet slicks you down for easy swallowing. With two more tosses of its muzzle your feet are in its mouth.

"Stop! No!" You didn't want to be a bandit. You wanted to be an adventurer, a hero. If it heard you, it doesn't care what you wanted. It only cares that it wants a meal. The throat tenses and squeezes in as the copper dragon lifts its nose. The slick gullet becomes a steep, slippery slope with nothing good waiting at the bottom.

You're bulkier than its last meal. When it swallows, you slide half a body length deeper and stick in its craw. Before hope can blossom you feel it arch its neck, then straighten it and point its nose at the sky. The dragon knows what it is doing. You aren't the first awkwardly large thing it's eaten. Muscles creak as it gulps again and you slide heavily down its throat, propelled by a great contraction of its swallowing muscles.

You saw the traveling bulge your companion made as she was eaten. Now that bulge is you. It's a surprisingly noisy process when heard from in here, with the metallic scales rattling as they spread apart and shrink back together once you've slid past. Ribs groan, pressing in against you as you move from the neck to its long lanky body, and a deep calm pulse drums through you as you slide past its heart.

A big wyrm could gulp down a man like a minnow and not even show a bulge afterward. Then there's this dragon. A muscular valve opens in front of your face and the throat squeezes you past, into a long fleshy chamber that stinks of acid. Your companion still struggles weakly, though her leather armor is already softened. A thick layer of slime coats everything, including her, and this isn't like the lubricating mucus in the throat. It stings wherever it touches and there's a lot of it.

The dragon's stomach is long enough to hold a stretched out human, or two in this case. Though it's as heavy as a big warhorse it is a snakey thing with a narrow torso and you feel the great bulge two whole people make in its middle. It absently adjusts its footing to leave the bulge room to droop. It's only a few inches between you and daylight but that distance is made of dragon stomach, muscle and armored scales.

You wish you had a dagger. You couldn't cut your way out in time. No fooling yourself there. But at least you might hurt it before you die, if you could get the knife into its belly. You're not sure you could with the belly stretched tight around the two of you. Much of its long body is a lengthy stomach and that stomach is packed tight with the dragon's meal.

"I told you we needed more people for this job!" Somehow your companion is still alive, though her hand feels slimy and partly dissolved when she punches you. She hasn't the room to pull her hand back much and the blow doesn't hurt. It wouldn't matter if it did. You have much bigger problems than a punch or two.

You suck in a breath of air that went down the dragon's throat with you. It stinks of bile and stings your nose. The digestive slime is everywhere. Ironically, the copper dragon's stomach juices taste like copper. You squirm as you feel over your armor, seeing if the dragon missed a weapon. It didn't. You're so coated with slippery belly slime you're not sure you could grip one anyway.

"That would just make a bigger meal for the dragon," you reply. You imagine three, four men crammed in here. Maybe even five, bulging it so it can barely walk. A sixth and even a seventh stretched out in the throat, waiting their turn. It could manage almost your whole bandit gang in one meal, assuming it didn't care about having to just sit there and digest the lot.

Two people fit rather neatly into its gut,. The growing gurgle and churn as the juices move around you leave no doubt that the dragon will digest you easily. Time to find out if the "Belly like a furnace" comment is accurate, first hand.

You wanted to be a hero. Sometimes heroes end up as dragon food.

Past the gurgle and thump of dragon pulse you hear a hiss of conversation. The dragon and farmer are still talking. They don't sound excited. It's just another day for a dragon. A bit of drama for the farmer and a story to tell in the inn. That's all. Two less bandits to worry about. Two whole humans. A good meal, but not much of a challenge for its stomach.

The dragon pauses, stretches. The belly squeezes in tight and the air leaves in a rush. A dozen feet away you hear the long belch. More digestive juices come flowing in to replace the air.

Your companion in misery is silently dissolving and you can feel your armor softening. Soon it will be your turn. Maybe your chainmail bracers will make it out of the dragon in a recognizable form. Probably not. Gold would probably make it out, if you had any. You don't.

You hear the farmer laugh, and pull your leather hood up around your face to protect you from the acid. For all the good it does you.

*****