The Tale of Venator

Venator turned toward them and sprinted as fast as his legs would carry him, his feet thumping in the sand, arms waving back and forth in rhythm, sweat-dewed hair pushed behind his brow by the wind. He neared their ranks, and found himself in the open, with nowhere to hide, and so he dropped to the ground, his breath coming in agonizing gasps. He waited, then, and hoped that they would not notice his mistake of coming too near, but he did not have much time to do so. The pendant burned at his collarbone, but he ignored it.

A plume of sand burst from the desert near his arm, a chorus of gun blasts roared in his direction, and he felt the air around him pinch with bullets. He stood and darted away from them, his hand automatically pulled his axe from its place at his back, and he felt an unknown force order it to swing about to block his head. A spark burst from its metal and a screech burned his ears; he had deflected one of their metal projectiles. His eyes then glanced through their ranks, and he watched one of the riflemen fall over backwards, his hand clutching his breast. Venator quickly felt a kind of ecstasy envelop him, he felt an urge stream through his veins, and so he acted upon a new thirst in his life, and altered his course, to take his body toward the throng of soldiers. He felt his heart quicken and thrum like it had never before, his pupils shrunk away to leave his green, glowering iris', his tongue lapped about his saliva-drenched mouth. The last flecks of consciousness left him, he was pure instinct now. The pendant burned.

He spent the late hours of the night throwing himself at them, his axe hacking through their limbs, its blade drenched in their entrails and their bodily fluids. Their guns bucked and screamed at him, he split them apart, their swords rose and swung at him, he shattered their metal, their shields rose to defend themselves, and he kicked them away with his foot, to leave his axe embedded in their necks, before it would be withdrawn to strike again and sever another piece of flesh from another body, from another foe. They were all his enemies. Until daytime Venator killed, and at daytime he followed the last survivor of the Barbin platoon as he fled to the top of a tall dune, the morning sun casting a corona atop its peak, and leaving the man's body nothing more than a mere silhouette. The soldier was skilled, obviously, and he held a single pistol, which he bravely discharged at Venator, who merely swung his head to the side, the bullet swishing the air about his ear. With a widened look in his eye the man turned to flee down the other end of the dune, but Venator's axe found him first, the blade hurled from a great distance, its soaked surface digging into his spine. The soldier gasped and lost all control of his body, with his nerves being cut like strands of spider silk. He tumbled down the dune until a roll catapulted him into the air and threw all of his weight upon his neck, which cracked eerily, like the neck of their leader that had been carried off the night before. At this thought Venator found himself withdrawing from his gluttonous ecstasy, and soon he was himself again.

He thought the obvious. "What have I done?"

With horror replacing the lust that had been bursting through his veins Venator lost his balance and fell backward from the top of the dune, back to the bloodied graveyard of men he had created.