It was something that was so commonly accepted as a fact of life yet nothing could have prepared the rabbit for the reality of it.

It was common to hear of others disappearing into the jaws of a hungry predator. It was not unheard of for one to hop off from the burrow in the morning only to never return that evening. Friends, aunts, siblings, uncles, and parents would never become too attached outside of the vague notion of “family”. Everyone in the colony accepted the fact that one day they might just be gone.

Recently an elder rabbit passed away in his den. The colony paused it’s routine daily life to lay him to rest while the remainder of the day was a festival dedicated to celebrating his life complete with music, dancing, and a feast of all sorts of leaves, fruits, and roots the rabbits have worked hard to gather and grow.

It was rare for a member of the rabbit colony to pass in old age. To live long and leave a body to bury was considered an honor worthy of such communal celebration. Such events would stick with all young bucks and does throughout their lives and would serve as a reminder to revere the fragility and fleeting of life.

Of course most would not receive such an honor. Often one would be mangled in front of their peers and kin who would then be forced to flee, other times one would pass from a contagion alone and isolated from the rest of the colony, but too often one was simply never seen again and then everyone would just accept they were “gone” and move on.

“Gone”.

No one would dwell on what that word meant any deeper than a passing thought. It was hard to conceive of what it truly meant for you to just be “gone”. The weight of such a simple word doesn’t hit one until they are the one who is now “gone”.

Despite the common wisdom no rabbit ever truly did think it would ever be them, indeed everyone thought they were invincible in their own ways, the young buck rabbit included. And even though it was a commonly known fact of life nothing could have ever actually prepared him for the experience of being “gone”.

He was out in the woods with his wicker basket gathering roots and herbs to bring back to the colony while whistling his tune like he usually did. It was simply a normal routine day of gathering, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. But then while he was face-down digging for beetroot it happened.

It was lightning quick. He was knocked flat by the shock of a bigger creature pouncing on him causing him to drop and spill his basket, he looked up to see the form of a red fox standing over him staring at him with a hungry gaze. Before he even had the chance to plead or bargain the fox had him firm in it’s jaws, soon after he found himself being forced down a constricting wet tunnel.

The rabbit was deposited into a slimy squishy chamber, he made a splash as he dropped into the pool of fluid covering the bottom of the room. He tried to orient himself but the seemingly chaotic motions and darkness of the fleshy chamber made it difficult. His paws pushed into a strange mushy muck and he felt hard objects as he struggled to sit up. Eventually after some time struggling he was able to sit upright.

He sat in a state shocked with adrenaline for some time. As the shock began to wear off his mind slowly started to realize the situation. The first thing that came to his clearer mind was the stench: he held his nostrils to prevent the awful deathly smell from entering his nose. The second thing he noticed was the thick slime dripping on his fur and the sloshing pool of fluid coating his pelt in rhythm with each movement and oscillation of the room and it’s walls. The third thing he noticed was the sounds: the sounds of the organ churning about, the sounds of the fox’s’ heart beating, it’s breathing, the sounds from the outside, as well as the fox’s’ own occasional muffled speech.

Then he finally realized the severity of the situation. He was gone. After all the times he heard it throughout his life he finally truly knew what it meant to be gone, to disappear into the jaws a predator, something that most bunnies only give a few seconds of thought to before moving on with their day.

His eyes adjusted to the darkness until he could make out what he could of the space he was in from whatever light bled in from the outside. When he finally saw the piles of mush and the solid objects he had put his paws into earlier and he was filled with horror: the solid shapes were bones. Rabbit bones. This only could have meant the mush he stuck his paws into was…

He instinctively convulsed in disgust and retreated pressing against the opposite end of the chamber while still holding his nose. He knew that what he was staring at, what he had touched. It was what was left of someone else who was now also “gone”. It was what he would be in little more than a couple hours.

The rabbit also knew that he, and the poor individual who came before him, would not receive any honorings or festivals. They would get a mention and a silent prayer or two at best, but ultimately they would simply be names scratched off the census list by the colony scribe. Everyone would move on, and they would be nothing but faint distant memories with no one giving a single thought to their last moments.

He dwelled on these thoughts and wanted to lash out at and curse his own kind, but queasiness from the rapidly dwindling oxygen supply and building up fumes was starting to set in. This was only accelerated by the fox letting out an audible burp which was followed by forceful movements caused by the fox’s paw repeatedly slamming on his belly from the outside knocking the rabbit down into the pool on the stomach floor.

His mind started to become foggy and things began to fade. He knew at the very least darkness would take him soon and he didn’t have to suffer being digested alive, and he was thankful for that. But he still wanted to loudly curse the fox with the breath he had left, but then he heard voices coming from the outside.

“Oh sweetie, you’re back!” It was the fox’s mate. “I always worry about you when you are off by yourself for such a long time”.

“Yeah, luckily I was able to find and catch a couple of rabbits by some fortune of the spirits,” the fox said, “Sorry I was gone so long, you know how prey has just been so scarce lately”.

The rabbit listened to the conversation and with some of the last bit of rational thinking in his brain he rescinded his desire to curse the fox. After all the fox wasn’t his enemy, the fox wasn’t evil, the fox had friends, the fox also had a family. The fox was really much like him. The fox had a will to survive and also probably had the fear of one day being gone.

The rabbit knew there was no point in resisting, he was now among those who were gone. As the world around him faded he simply took peace in the fact that the fox can power on and stay with those they care about in part because of him. In the end the forest is a peaceful and serene yet brutal and unforgiving place, but it is also a fair place governed by one simple rule: when two creatures with the need to survive cross paths one gets to go home, the other is gone.

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Thanks for viewing my latest art and story! Found some time in my classwork to do some longer writing finally, and I ended up getting the inspiration and desire to write something dark. This is a bit darker and more serious than my usual stuff, but sometimes I do like to think about the darker aspects of vore we usually either handwave off or gloss over and wanted to write about it.

I also do enjoy the idea of the natural struggle as a setting as it blends in well with different types of anthro and feral settings, not to mention it’s just damn perfect for vore, and is something I’ve included in several of my own works already. Nature is something beautiful that I enjoy, but it has it’s dark side in a form of what can be described as contrasting poetry. And when your species is nature’s cuddly hoppy hotdog life is as rough and uncertain as it is cute and playful.

So I wanted to show and describe the last laments of a prey accepting their demise as well as some of the darker implications of certain anthro and animal settings. Also I wanted the opportunity to show some grosser interiors. The idea of the “prey swimming with the digested bits of the previous prey” is an idea that I’ve always wanted to see more of but don’t see people do too often, so I did it myself. LOL

Art/Story © Me

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