The Tale of Venator

When the earth was ready for the coming animals, the titans rested from their work and pulled blankets of land over their bodies to warm them on their journeys into permanent rest. Their eyes closed and as the sun and moon took turns racing across the sky their skin gradually solidified. Sometimes the hills that they slept under would break apart from flood or downpour, and their faces would peek out into their creation once again, their heavy stone eyelids would open and their pupils would flick back and forth with wonder until the land closed up once again.

The land the titans forged had been reduced to ash by a horde of demons that came from a volcano, according to his father at least, and for a time the world was an unnatural furnace, where venomous miasmas wafted about in the air like clouds, and the ground was stale with charred rock. Humanity had nearly perished, but a hero from the ash emerged, and somehow, through means indeterminable, brought back the world into the green glory it had once been, brought back life and happiness. He had perished, some said, only several decades ago. But no one knew for sure.

In his dreams Venator would see the great pair of flapping, gothic wings, and would hear the call of whatever rode upon them. He would see them just above a sun-scarred horizon, and feel the earth shake with the screech of the rider's horn. In his dream Venator looked down to his neck, to the pendant, and lifted it to his eyes. The metal would glow with an eerie blue, and the scream would grow painfully louder. Venator would awake in a cold sweat, his fingers rubbing the metal of the pendant at his neck, sometimes touching the upside-down cross-shaped tan on his neck that had formed over the years.

Venator once stood upon the wintry streets of Mourglis, a grand city, and whirled about in astonishment as a mechanical coach rolled past, its wealthy occupants waving to him as the machine's wake of wind bit at his exposed cheeks. More people than he had ever seen in his life bobbed about the city streets, their visible breath mixing with the steam that fissured out from the sewers. He could stand still and crane his neck back as far as it would go and still not see the top of the towering citadels of stone they called skyscrapers, he would bend backwards and slip upon the snow and ice in front of the thousands of people around him that lived with these wonders daily. To Venator, this brief period was the most interesting in his life.

But the bane of humanity, nor his want to end its miserable life, did not go away.

He heard rumors about the caravan of a monstrous creature terrorizing the armies of Trachos on their way to the various forts and cities that peppered the nurturing liquids of the Silvestris River (the only source of water in the Baradan Desert), that even the columns of armored pike men and musketeers could not keep it from stealing away a random guard or a sentry every other night, always after the moon set. As time inexorably progressed Venator found himself closer and closer to Barada, the air became stale and dry, the sweltering sun filled the sky and all traces of greenery disappeared. They reached the delta of the Silvestris River and stopped in the small village of Decarideres, a quaint place surrounded by an aging wall and consisting of little more than mudbrick homesteads. A neglected field of blackened, dried vegetables had greeted them just before they passed through the gate to the town within.