The Tale of Venator

Its body disappeared from view, over the edge of the dune. Venator's eyes glared at his axe, he stretched out his hand, and his weapon flew through the air to return to his fingers, which tightened at the new arrival. He felt the pendant at his neck sting, but ignored it. Venator pumped his legs to the edge of the dune and then reduced his speed to a walk, where, moments later he met up with the huddled body of the animal, motionless on the arid desert carpet only several feet in front of him. Wasting no time, he threw forward the axe with his hand still clenching it. Its metal tasted only sand.

In an instant the thing rolled away, sprang into the air and smashed its fist against Venator's stomach. The boy screamed and tightened his eyelids. He fell to his knees and the creature grinned with its victory.

It slowly brought its widened mouth to Venator's neck, its triangular teeth ready to pierce flesh, ready to draw blood. Its eyes closed with an ecstasy enveloping its body, it readied itself for the kill, its fists balled.

In an instant, then, Venator's hand found his axe. In an instant, the creature's head lay in the sand at Venator's side, its body rolling down the dune, muscles quivering. Venator's fingers picked the head up from the sand, and he approached the body, where it had stopped, and he examined it. The skin was tanned, but quickly paling, and other than the scratches and kobold marks Venator found a single white indentation just below its neck. Its upside-down cross shape was identical to Venator's pendant. Identical.

The thing could only be his father.

He dropped the axe. He dropped the head. His body dropped to the sand.

Like his father, what had been Venator's soul was swallowed by the pendant, nothing further of Venator's heroism remained beneath his muscles, even though they still lived and thrummed with the pumping of his heart. A great shriek sounded from a horn, one that vibrated the sand and shook it from its foundations. Just over the white horizon a pair of great, wide wings flapped, and from atop the rider who stole souls through the pendant sat, a grin on his horrible face. After so much waiting, after the new world's creation many thousands of years ago the demons could arise again, and through the boy's body the fires of Chthon would rise as they had in antediluvian seasons now passed.

It was over a year later that Venator's body returned to Ivlüvcatan. It walked without thought behind it, its clothes tattered, hair disheveled, body tight with starvation. The stirring grass paused to watch him approach. Storm clouds fled from the sky, but could not run fast enough on the wind. Ivlüv was dark even in midafternoon, the verdant trees and verdant fields had grown darker with the black undersides of the clouds. War had wreaked havoc across the lands that bordered this place, but like always before, the soldiers and the conquerors never found their way here, by some magic or by some luck or a combination of the two. The town remained untouched, remained, as it had been when Venator had departed from it two years earlier. The wind billowed.

Venator walked through the dirt streets, his feet without shoes. His despondent mother saw him walking there, her heart leaped, her insides roiled, and she ran toward him, her dress trailing behind her and fluttering in the wind. She clutched him, shouted at his bare, soulless face, but garnered no response. A crowd had soon gathered to watch.