The Tale of Venator

Its roars climbed high into the sky like the soldiers that he hurled, and the blood of its victims began to fling about the terrified soldiers, the ones lacking guns backing away from a small, inner arena and the ones with guns too terrified to fire them. What appeared to be one of the living leaders gathered his riflemen and had them discharge their weapons at the creature with a downward swing of his sword, but it ducked to the sand in an imperceptible blur and the speeding pellets struck the soldiers behind it. When the thing rose, its eyes peered right through the eyes of the soldier that had made that order, and with one final scream it scuttled forth and picked the man up in its mouth, its teeth closing over his writhing neck and quickly ceasing its movement with a painfully audible crack. It hurled itself into the sky once more and disappeared among the roars and gas clouds of rifles, the soldiers not bothering to go off after their leader. After this attack the survivors slept with ease, for they knew he would not come back for yet another sublunary light.

III

Within a blanket of orange the sun peeked above the horizon and the stars were smothered. Venator found his eyes weary, for they had been following the easily traceable footprints of the creature since it had scrambled away from the encampment of soldiers; he had been doing so for the whole of the night. It had been easy for him to slip away in the confusion, under the fog of their roaring and flashing gunpowder. Its feet seemed eerily human, he could hardly tell the difference between the thing's tracks and his own, when compared. The sun climbed the lens of the sky and Venator's shadow became nonexistent, the weight of the heat was beginning to become unbearable for the young man. As he began to comprehend resting his eyes spotted a blip of dark light on the horizon, and with a last bit of strength he jogged toward it.

His eyelids expanded, his eyebrows sprung upward, and he retched violently, for, in front of him a red skeleton had been nearly picked clean, its shards of clothing and bits of meat scattered about a bloody crater encircling its desperation. Venator recovered and sipped a bit of his scalding water before draping a shirt over his face and drifting into sleep, his last thought questioning his decision to come to Barada, to exact vengeance upon the terrible beast that had slain his father. The sun fell, the sky darkened and the moon drifted silently from the horizon. Venator awoke, rested, and found his water to be cool with the absence of the extreme desert heat. He took off in a run, his shoes removed, muscles straining but not painfully. The tracks never changed their course, from a straight line: they remained steady and perpetual, and in the faint gloom Venator could see that they stretched far into the stolid horizon. His endurance never left him, as if the hand of a spirit was continuously urging him on, and Venator soon heard the warsongs of the same platoon he had encountered the night before wafting about with the midnight breeze.

He could see their ranks, faintly, there and as he watched and continued to jog he saw a series of flashes, and then seconds later heard colossal booms in sync with each other; a cloud of fog began to obscure the flickering stars just above them. The creature was attacking.