• Night falls with feline stealth and swiftness as a pair of blazing, shifty blue eyes snaps open from within a rotting tree stump in the depths of a dense, dark forest. They are narrowed eyes, the cold, searching eyes of a wild animal. A shade leaps out of the stump, the inhuman eyes accompanying it into the cool, crisp evening. It alights on a nearby log, sniffing the sweet night air. To our surprise, it stands erect, revealing itself to be a young man, a nimble boy with the spirit of a forest creature.

    As he stands, sniffing constantly and meditating on his perch, a light, almost inaudible shuffling noise whispers out of the surrounding forest. After an odd twitch of his left eye, the boy disappears into the shadows. A flash of steel in the moonlight and a chilling squeal later, the child is back, blood from his latest kill…his breakfast, if you will…dribbling slowly from a satisfied, yet cold and fearsome grin. He wipes the blood with a rough, grimy hand before it reaches his tattered, stained black tunic, and he howls out a hauntingly beautiful tune, a song of praise to his goddess, the Moon, who has graciously sent him this meal. She sends her answer in the form of a pleasant breeze sighing through the trees, fondling his long, flowing dark blonde hair. Sitting down on a crude pad made from leaves and moss, he pulls a grimy cloth from a pocket to clean the thick, sticky blood from his deadly blade. He meticulously wipes it, crooning to it in a soft voice as though it is a kitten he is trying to comfort. Suddenly, a sound he has never heard before rings out through the night, making him cringe in fear.

    It was a sound like thunder, though much closer and colder. He gathers as much courage as he possibly can and leaps into the top of a nearby tree, deftly flipping a dagger into his mouth from its sheath for easier access. He swiftly bounds from treetop to treetop, drawing ever closer to the source of the terrible noise. As he nears a clearing, he smells a disgusting and foul sulfurous odor wafting upward into his powerful yet sensitive nostrils, causing him to nearly drop his dagger from gagging.

    “Good show, sir!” Gardin exclaims as Darlston squeezes the trigger to his new ‘Gun’, the latest weapon invention for sport hunting, and blasts the leg off of a poor rabbit in the nearby meadow. They run up to it and he gives the pitiful rodent a swift blow to the head with the butt of the device, smashing its tiny skull in.

    “Yes, it was a good shot, was it not? I shall have to have it skinned for a pillowcase, and I'm sure the taxidermist can do something about the head for a trophy. If not, throw it away, for I do not wish to see a smashed skull in my drawing room,” Darlston states first with triumph as the first to kill with this ‘Gun’, then with feigned boredom as he regains control over his emotions.

    Before Gardin can congratulate his employer again, a savage ape leaps out of the forest with a stick in its mouth, screeching more voluminously than an Irish banshee. Darlston motions for his butler to remain silent as he carefully reloads his amazing weapon to shoot this amazing creature when he notices a very odd thing: this ape is standing up straight! Moreover, he sees that it has feet that are quite fleet; and he feels a twinge of fear and wrongness in his gut. The sooner he can kill this…this thing, the better.

    He looks up when he has finally finished loading his firearm, and drops it on his foot, his rich, blustery red face turning an ashy pallid shade, and he is rendered utterly speechless. Gardin is about to ask his flabbergasted employer what he saw when he looks up and loses his ability to speak as well as he notices the apparition that Darlston saw.

    But this is no apparition; it is our ‘friend’, the wild boy who lives by no rules but his own and those of the forest.

    The boy finally reaches a good distance from which he can see the source of his fear. It appears that the noise was made from some strange long instrument. He stands up straighter from his running position, firmly grasping his knife in his left hand, and cautiously walks toward the two ugly, musty old men he sees in the clearing. They appear to be cringing in fear at the sight of him. He does not understand their fear, but supposes it is a good thing since they have caused him such trouble this night. He slowly approaches them and, upon reaching their position in the clearing, flings his knife point down into the ground and extends his right hand, a gesture he hopes is friendly and inviting. He realizes that neither the fat old man with the ‘Thunder Stick’ nor the frail, skinny man who obviously takes orders from the aforementioned one takes his hand, so he attempts to talk to them. He starts with a strange, guttural language, the language of the forest, and the men tentatively step backwards as one, eying his sheath and the dagger on the ground. The ‘Lean Servant’ says something to the ‘Fat Master’ in a language that the boy believes to be a derivation of French, a language he knew in a life all but forgotten, so he greets them in the language, although he is a bit rusty with it. The men appear even more perplexed, and the Lean Servant asks a question in broken French (having not learned much of the language), which shall be translated for our purposes to “What are you, monkey-childe?”

    “First, tell me what that thunder stick is and what it is for. Then, I will give you a better description of myself,” the boy demands, his own speech getting better with every word.

    Gardin tells his very puzzled master what the boy said, and the man then grows much friendlier, and more relieved, and shakes the boy's hand vigorously. And to imagine he had just had serious thoughts of either killing the boy or running away as fast as possible! Darlston, who knows no French, tells Gardin to inform the young man that it fires pieces of metal to kill with for hunting. Gardin complies with his request and is met with a wary, yet understanding look, and translates a message from the boy.

    “Your killing stick is fascinating, but how is it good for hunting? Hunting is about honour, receiving the animal's body from Liushath, the moon goddess, rather than slaying them only for the sport or the fun, is it not? So then why do you kill the first thing you see with a horridly powerful, distant weapon? Did you thank Liushath and sing to her, or simply applaud yourself for your murderousness? Amachna elingh wilthnish, phanlo ippish lanufa Liushath!” he had said, singing the last sentence with all the beauty, mysteriousness, and fearsomeness of a lone, pining wolf howling in the moon's soft glow.

    The men ask what the statement means, and he replies simply that he was asking the moon what he should do if they had killed for pleasure alone. He then tells them that he must leave, for the night is passing and he has business to take care of, as he is the guardian of this forest, his home since he was dumped there as a child with only two weapons for survival. He looks at his knife and his daydreaming gaze slowly shifts to the hilt of his sword, and he picks the knife up before slowly slinking off into the night.

    The men watch in amazement, admiring this poor forest orphan's valor and respect for nature as he sneaks off into the forest, a jaguar in a human's skin. Suddenly, the wind picks up and the boy whips around, knife in hand and pulling his sword out of its sheath, a venomous leer like that of a cobra emanating from his once blue eyes, now a glowing shade of red. With both weapons drawn, he roars with a lion's menacing voice, his long, blonde hair flowing in the strong, cold night wind, and charges the men, screaming "Mashallah, enh fallan phelet ti enhm palana!" a war cry meaning "Heathens, you shall die for your dishonorable deed!"

    He swings his cold sword, still dark and slimy with the blood of his small meal, deftly snapping it at the men's hands to sever them. As they stand, gaping and dumbfounded, he whips his dagger around with his left hand at their faces, slicing their eyeballs out of their sockets as neatly as one would prune hedges. As the two ignorant hunters stagger and slump to the ground, screaming in pain and fear, thick blood forms rivulets like so many tearstains from hysterical crying, black and shining in the dim moonlight. The sylvan dæmon child's eyes light up, catlike, grinning red eyes that are the very quintessence of evil. A lupine croon echoes through the boy's cursed, hellish forest, making the pitiful men cringe all the more in fear. The devil boy titters with laughter; it is more than enough to grip the men's already slowing hearts with icy, deathlike claws. As the child swaggers slowly towards them with his sword and dagger drawn, a strong breeze throws his hair backwards and his face lights up, a morose, deadly grimace transforming into a demonic sneer.

    Two young men walk towards a peaceful looking, out of the way forest, perfect for a rest stop on their trek on this cool, clear night. As they start into the slightly overgrown pathway leading to the heart of the forest, one of the young men feels that something is wrong. He shivers as he thinks he hears a whispering of the wind through the trees that sounds more like wispy, stifled sobs. He alerts his companion, who assures him that he is simply delirious from lack of sleep. They press onward, and the first of these two men that we have had the pleasure of meeting looks up at the stars for his favorite constellations. Seripen the Cockatrice, Questine the Unicorn, even the almost never seen Lestrin the Manticore, he knows them all by heart. As he looks up, he stops short, his eyes wide as dinner plates. He can feel the world revolving under him, a sensation making him wish he could vomit and lie down on the soft forest floor, but he is petrified with fear. His friend notices that he has stopped, and looks upward for what he saw. When he sees the apparition, he suddenly realizes that his vision is dimming. The last thing these boys ever see is the sight of two men in their forties, tied up to a tree and dying slowly, with no eyes, bloody tears, and human bite marks covering their limbs, gagged with their own entrails. The last thing they hear is a guttural cry and a scrape of steel against bone before they feel hot objects fall into their arms and slump to the dirt.