The tears that distilled from the creature's eyes were thick and brackish, carving pale, visceral tracks through the crust of ancient soot that lined its basalt hide. It wept with a low, rattling wheeze that convulsed through its mountainous bulk, its blind, milky stare fixed upon a dim silhouette rising amidst the grey mists of the valley. In the turning of a single heartbeat, the present dissolved, utterly consumed by the iron reek of fresh slaughter and memories an hundred and fifty winters dead.
PART I: THE GILDED HARVEST
The morning broke sweet and pristine, a pale golden light spilling over the high ridges of the eastern hills like spilled nectar. Along the rutted, dust-choked track, the rhythmic, wooden groan of rotating wheels fractured the solemn silence of the dawn. It was a heavy bullock cart, its iron-rimmed wheels churning the summer dust into a fine, shimmering haze. Within the flatbed sat an old peasant, his hands calloused and blackened by the plow, his faithful wife clad in humble homespun wool, and their lad—a child of barely ten summers, his eyes bright with the unblemished youth of the world. Behind them lay several coarse sacks, bulging to the brim with the golden grain of a bountiful harvest.
The father turned his weathered visage toward the boy, a rare, bright smile breaking through the thickets of his grey beard.
"Look at it, lad," the old man said, his voice thick with the gravel of the fields. "The gods been good to our soil this year. There be bread enough here to keep the frost out of our bellies, and the rest'll fetch good silver at the market. With the coin that falls in my hand, I'm gonna get ya proper boots and a new kurta for the feasts."
The old man laughed, a hearty, rustic sound that echoed off the ancient timber. "Ya need leather to tread them stones, don't ya, little un?"
"Aye, Father!" the lad shouted, his small voice full of glee. Beside him, his mother let out a soft, bubbling laugh, her hand resting gently upon her boy's shoulder.
By the hour the sun reached its noon-height, the cart rolled into the bustling square of the nearby walled borough. The boy tugged at his father's grease-stained sleeve, his stomach giving a loud, hollow rumble.
"Father," the lad whined, his lower lip trembling. "The hunger bites sharp. Can't we find some tavern to eat?"
The old man smiled down at him, patting his small hand with rough affection. "Aye, child, the belly whines, but my mind's on the grain. We gotta rid ourselves of the sacks first and get our silver, then we'll eat whatever ya want. Just hold on a bit. Right now, I ain't got naught but a few coppers. While I go to the stalls to make our deal, go with ya mother and grab the salt and oil. When it's done, meet me right by this post."
The lad nodded, content. The old man called his wife, bidding her keep a watchful eye upon the crowd. He was a man of small means, but rich in his kin. Unloading his family from the wooden flatbed, he lashed the oxen and drove toward the market-stalls.
PART II: THE SHADOWS OF THE BOROUGH
A few hours lifted, and the old man returned to the trysting post, his leather purse clinking with the sweet music of silver coin. His wife and son awaited him, their baskets laden with the modest provisions of the hearth. Together, the three clambered back into the flatbed, their hearts light as they sought an ordinary—a clean, modest house of meat and ale.
They found a tavern of good repute just short of the town's western gate. Stopping the team, they went into the cool shade of the common room. For an hour, they ate their fill of roasted mutton and flatbread, the world forgotten in the joy of a full belly.
When the platters were scraped clean, the old man wiped his grease-bitten fingers and looked to his wife.
"Go on out to the cart with the young'un," he murmured softly. "Sit on the bench while I settle up with the keeper."
His wife took the lad by the fingers, and they stepped out into the bright yard. The old man reached into the deep pocket of his woolen kurta, drawing forth his newfound store of silver. He counted out the pieces onto the scarred oak counter. The tavern-keeper took his share, sliding the remaining coins back across the wood.
The old man scooped up the silver, blind to the predatory eyes that watched his every turn from the dark corners of the taproom.
They were footpads—thieves of the worst sort, who lived by the iron they carried. Among them sat a woman of cold, hard countenance, her eyes sharp as a skinning knife. She was clad in a grease-stained jerkin of boiled leather, studded with rusted iron rings. She was the captain of this lawless band. Unconscious of the doom he had drawn upon himself, the old man tucked his silver away, stepped out into the courtyard, and turned his bullock cart back toward the valleys of his birth.
PART III: THE FORKING WAY
The cart crawled along the royal road until they reached the great fork where the ways divided under the gathering gloom.
Two paths lay before him. One was the wide, paved highway by which they had journeyed in the morning—safe, but long and winding. The other was an unmade track that plunged directly through the thick, ink-black depths of the ancient forest.
The old man pulled the reins, the oxen halting with a low snort. He computed the hours in his head. If he took the high road, the midnight bells would toll ere they saw the smoke of their own chimney. If he dared the forest path, they might sit by their own hearth by the first watch of the night.
He turned his head to consult his wife. "What ya say, wife? We take the morning road and risk the deep dark of midnight, or we take this shortcut through the woods and cut the trip in half?"
The woman looked toward the dark canopy of trees, her brow furrowed with instinctual dread. "Ya ever gone down this path before, husband?"
"Aye," the old man answered. "I come and gone through these trees when I was young. It ain't naught but a dirt road, rough on the wheels, and that's why the big merchants stay away from it."
The wife turned the matter in her mind. There was the evening meal to be dressed, the hearth to be cleared, and a dozen chores awaiting her hands before the moon grew high. If they took the highway, when would she find the hour to feed her family?
"Let's take the forest road then," she said, shifting her bundle. "So we get to the hut before it gets too old, and I can make our supper in peace."
With a nod, the old man shook the reins, and the bullock cart plunged into the green twilight of the woods.
PART IV: THE FLICKERING LAMP
No sooner had they passed under the great, overhanging boughs than the sun dipped below the rim of the world, leaving the forest in a sudden, suffocating darkness. A great wind arose from the north, howling through the branches like a dying wolf. The air grew thick with the ominous cries of night-fowl and the sinister rustle of hidden beasts. In the deep gloom, a thousand fireflies swarmed among the briars, their cold, green sparks blinking like the eyes of phantoms.
The wind lashed at the cart, causing the horn-lantern that hung from the wooden frame to swing in wild, violent circles. Inside the cracked glass, the tallow candle flickered, its small flame drowning in the draft. Then, with a sharp, brittle snap, the glass shattered against the iron-work, and the light died.
The old man cursed softly, bringing the cart to a sudden halt.
But ere he could step down, his eyes caught a strange glow through the thickets. It was not the cold fire of insects, but the hot, orange light of multiple torches. They emerged from the brush like a ring of burning stars, and in the space of a single breath, the bullock cart was hemmed in from every quarter.
The old man's blood turned to ice. They were horsemen, mounted upon iron-gray steeds, their faces obscured by grime and blood-stained leathers. In their hands, they bore broad-bladed swords that gleamed with a wicked, metallic malice.
The old man's wife let out a strangled cry, catching her son up into her arms and pressing his face against her breast.
From the circle of riders, a towering rogue spurred his horse forward. With a single, brutal downward stroke of his cutlass, he severed the hempen traces that bound the oxen to the frame. The beasts, mad with the scent of iron, broke loose with a wild bellow and scattered into the undergrowth. Deprived of its support, the heavy yoke slammed into the dirt, and the front of the cart collapsed with a sickening crunch. The thieves gave chase, driving the oxen far into the dark until their lowing died away.
The old man had no steel, no shield, nor any weapon save the strength of his bare hands. Yet, seeing his flesh and blood in peril, he gathered the last remnants of his courage, rose to his full height upon the tilted flatbed, and cried out.
"Who are ya to block our way?" the old man barked, his voice shaking. "What do ya want on this dirt track?"
The riders parted, and their captain rode into the torchlight. It was the woman from the tavern, her stiff leather jerkin stained with old slaughter. She looked down at him with a cold, mocking sneer.
"Ya asked two questions, old fool," she cackled, her voice like gravel shifting in a tomb. "So listen to the answers. We are the kings of these woods—thieves and blades—and I'm their captain. And for ya second question: we want meat for our bellies and silver for our pockets."
The old man held out his hands, his voice trembling but clear. "I ain't got no meat for ya! But if ya let my family go without harm, I got silver. Take it all, every single coin, just don't lay a hand on my wife and lad."
The captain tilted her head, her eyes glinting. "Bring it out then."
The old man reached into his kurta, drawing forth the heavy purse of his day's labor, and cast it into her lap. "There! It's every coin I got. Now let us go into the dark."
The lad shrunk behind his father's frame, his small body shaking with an ague of terror. The dacoits looked upon his smallness, and a low, terrible laughter rose from their throats—a sound devoid of mercy, their eyes burning with a raw, predatory brutality.
The old man took his wife by the fingers and reached back to grasp his son, intending to walk through the circle of horses. But as they stepped into the mire, the woman-captain reached down from her saddle and wrapped her iron fingers about the boy's wrist.
The lad shrieked. The old man's heart stopped, and the captain leaned low over her pommel, her breath hot and sour against his cheek.
"Listen to me, graybeard," she purred, her eyes widening with sadistic glee. "Ya gave me ya silver, but ya forgot to ask what kind of meat we're hungry for. Don't ya wanna know what fills my men's bellies?"
The old man's eyes grew wild. "Whatever ya eat, it don't matter to me! I paid ya price! Let us go!"
The woman's smile stretched wide, revealing yellow, rotten teeth. "We eat kids, ya miserable farmer!"
With a violent jerk, she hoisted the screaming boy toward her saddle.
PART V: THE NAKED DANCE OF DEATH
An ancient, primal fury exploded within the old man's breast. He forgot his age; he forgot his weakness. With a roar like a baited bull, he lunged forward and slammed his shoulder into the chest of the captain's stallion with such terrible force that the great beast lost its footing. The horse went down into the dirt with a heavy thud, throwing its rider into the briars.
"Kill the dog!" a rogue screamed from the dark. "Cut 'em down!"
Before the old man could recover, a rogue spurred his mount forward, his broadsword whistling through the night. The iron plunged deep into the old man's wife's belly, the steel grating against her spine. Ere she could scream, a second rider crossed her path; his blade flashed in a wide, silver arc, and her head was lopped from her shoulders. The severed crown rolled into the ditch, her white hair instantly fouled with mud, while her trunk collapsed upon the cart, a fountain of crimson gore spraying the wood.
The sight broke the last sanctuary of the old man's mind. He went mad.
Stooping into the mire, his fingers closed over a great, jagged stone. He sprang upon the rider who had slain his wife, dragging the man from his stirrups by the throat. They fell together into the dirt, but the old man was possessed by a demon's strength. Straddling the rogue's chest, he raised the heavy stone with both hands and brought it down upon the thief's face.
CRUNCH.
He struck again and again, his arms moving like the pistons of a forge. CRUNCH. CRUNCH. He did not stop until the man's head was reduced to a shapeless pulp of bone and brain-matter. The thief's eyes were gouged from their sockets, bursting under the weight; his teeth were shattered and scattered across the stones like broken dice, and his brains oozed into the gravel like gray porridge.
Subsequent to the roar of his own blood, a low, bubbling groan reached his ears.
The old man's soul withered within him. He turned his head. His boy lay upon the grass, held down by two laughing reivers. A third rogue stood over him, a small, curved dagger in his hand, slowly, deliberately sawing through the lad's tender throat.
The old man scrambled to his feet, howling like a wolf that had lost its cub, and ran toward the boy. But three horsemen lunged from the dark, their powerful gauntlets and iron grips seizing his arms and pinning him back to the earth.
As he struggled, a thief stepped behind him and drove a short-sword through the tendons behind his knees. SLASH. The hamstrings snapped with a sound like taut ropes parting, and the old man collapsed into his own blood, his legs useless beneath him.
He could only watch. He was forced to look upon the butcher's work with wide, unblinking eyes. The dacoits hacked his only son into pieces before him, their blades wet with the child's small life. When the butchery was done, the woman-captain tore the wet, beating heart from the boy's ribs and, with a low hiss of pleasure, raised it to her mouth—eating the raw flesh while the blood ran down her throat, her eyes fixed upon the father in absolute triumph.
The old man's mind shattered into a thousand nameless shards. He could no longer weep; he could only make a dry, rattling sound in his throat.
Then began the naked dance of death.
The reivers surrounded his broken frame, shouting their lawless war-cries as their swords began to play upon his flesh. They did not strike to kill, but to torment. SLASH. STAB. Fountains of hot, bright crimson burst from his shoulders, his flanks, his breast. When his skin was nothing but a lattice of red gashes and his breath was nearly spent, two large rogues seized him by the wrists and two by the ankles. They hoisted his half-dead carcass into the air, swinging him high, intending to dash his brains out upon a nearby boulder.
"Hold!" the captain shouted, wiping the boy's blood from her lips. "Don't waste his life on a common stone. I got a better death for this farmer."
A terrible malice shone in her eyes. She marched to the collapsed cart and dragged forth the heavy wooden yoke—the thick, notched beam of ash-wood that had rested upon the necks of his oxen. She stood the heavy timber upright in the mud, its iron-capped pins pointing toward the sky like a stout spear.
She turned to her men, her voice full of dark mirth. "Lift 'em high, boys. Get 'em above the wood, and when I say so, drop 'em on this beam with all the weight of his sins!"
The four men roared with laughter. They swung the old man's bleeding frame three times into the air, and then, with a mighty heave, they hurled him downward.
THUD-CRACK.
The blunt, thick ash-wood of the yoke tore through the center of his chest, fracturing his ribs and bursting through his heart. The beam stood impaled through his torso, holding his bloody frame aloft like a grotesque scarecrow. His eyes rolled back into his head, and his jaw fell slack.
Believing the work finished, the dacoits pulled his body from the timber, hauled him to the lip of an old, abandoned well nearby, and cast him into the black depths. With a dull splash of mud and water, the old man hit the bottom. The thieves clambered back into their stirrups, their laughter echoing through the canopy as they rode away into the night, carrying the remaining remnants of the boy's flesh to dress over their fires.
PART VI: THE SEED OF THE PIT
The forest returned to its macabre silence.
In the clearing, the moon looked down upon a theater of unmitigated horror. A woman lay dead, her belly pierced by iron, her head gone. A rogue lay in the grass, his skull a red puddle of teeth and brain. Near the cart, the remaining fragments of a child's body lay cold, half-gnawed by human teeth.
And within the black belly of the well, the old man lay in the mire. The water about him was thick with his own blood, his chest a hollow ruin where the splintered ash-wood of the bullock yoke had done its butcher's work. Yet, by some cruel dispensation of the gods, his last breath refused to leave him. His heart gave a slow, agonizing throb every few heartbeats. He lived still, trapped in a tomb of his own agony, his mind weeping for his butchered family.
Then, the shadows at the top of the well shifted.
A presence descended through the trees—a creature of the deep waste, an Eldritch Demon of the ancient world. It stepped into the clearing, its nostrils twitching as it caught the potent scent of fresh slaughter. It looked upon the headless woman, the crushed thief, and the small bones of the lad. It turned to leave, indifferent to the transient tragedies of mortals.
But as its cloven hoof reached the edge of the well, a different scent rose from the black water below—a smell of dying wrath so thick, so sour, that the fiend paused in its tracks.
With a silent leap, the Demon dropped into the deep well, its great yellow eyes illuminating the absolute dark. It looked down upon the old man's mangled corpse. The beast was moved to wonder; it had never seen a mortal frame hold onto its breath after such a cataclysmic butchery. There was a grand, terrible dark spirit within this dying peasant, a hatred so pure it could outlive the breaking of the flesh.
The Demon raised its hand. With a single, sharp black talon, it drew a deep gash across its own palm. A stream of thick, black, steaming blood—visceral and foul with the primordial magic of the pit—began to flow from the wound.
Leaning low over the dying man, the Demon pressed its bleeding palm against the old man's slack lips, pouring the dark essence into his throat.
For a brief, agonizing heartbeat, the well went silent. Then, the old man's eyes flew open—no longer brown and mortal, but turning into a pair of terrifying, empty, milk-white eyes that stared blindly into the dark.
The dark magic of the abyssal blood coursed through his veins like liquid fire. Under the shadow of the curse, his broken bones reshaped themselves, and his limbs began to expand, thickening into massive, bowed thighs—heavy with muscle like the limbs of a great marsh-frog. His weathered skin began to stretch and change, burning away until it took the color of a dying campfire—the deep, angry red of glowing coal. His gray beard vanished, replaced by a sudden, wild eruption of snow-white hair that grew from his scalp, falling in a long, tangled mane past his shoulders.
The hundred unhealed gashes left by the dacoits' swords remained upon his hardening flesh, sealing into permanent, weeping scars. And at the center of his swelling, massive chest, the purple meat and grey skin of his torso grew tight and violently fused around the splintered timber of the bullock yoke, sealing it forever into his chest as a monument of his penance and pain.
The peasant was dead. The father was gone. He had risen three heads taller than any man, a monument of ancient malice. And from the mud of the well, a new, vengeful Demon arose to claim the world.
VOLUME ONE: CHAPTER 5 END