[center][h2]The Hunting of the Blood-Beast[/h2][/center] It had come in the night. Ostap awoke to the sound of struggle to his right side. Despite the immediate pangs of alarm, it took some moments for his drowsy mind to fully shake off the dust of sleep and find its bearings. The night was warm and clear, the moon’s web in full view. Earlier in the evening, he had decided to lie down to sleep outside, with the smell of fresh grass, while his father had grumbled about the fancies of his moon-struck head. His father! The grunts and groaning of torn xo-skin were coming from their tent! With a shout, Ostap threw off the hide he had covered himself with and grabbed his knife of chipped stone. There were murmurs and calls around him as the rest of the band began to stir, but he paid them no attention as he rushed to the heaving bundle that had been his family’s tent. He heard Taras try to yell in a choking gurgle, saw his fists rise and fall wildly - and there, on top of him, a huge black shape beating him down with its repulsive naked wings. Ostap shouted again as he fell upon the beast with his knife, whether to drown out his fear or give voice to his rage, he could not say himself. He blindly slashed at a hairy flank, and something shrieked in a way that made his agitated blood run cold. A face rose from the collapsed tent, no, a snout, flat and toothy like a skull crushed by a horse’s kick, and snarled at him. He lunged a second time, but something sharp raked him across the chest with such force that he fell onto his back. The wind knocked out of him, he could only dully stare upwards as a monstrous shadow crossed the sky before his eyes and winged away into the darkness. Someone helped him to his feet, and he staggered up among figures that he struggled to recognize. He made to stumble towards the ruined tent, but a wrinkly hand held him back, pulling up the hem of his tunic almost to his neck. Ears still ringing with the excitement of fright, he looked down into Yevka the salter’s frowning face. Her mouth moved, but still he could only barely make out a distant mumbling, and he almost did not feel the sting when she rubbed a handful of her tiny white stones over his chest. It was only then he realized that the monster had wounded him. He ran his fingers over his ribcage, and in the moment before Yevka knocked them away with a matronly slap he felt the gouges. They were long, but shallow, luckily. He had gotten off much lighter than- Taras! Now firm on his feet, he rushed past his gathered bandmates. They parted before him, but if they said anything, he did not hear them. His eyes, his ears, all his senses were painfully fixed on the chaos of wood and xo-skin ahead. His father’s body had already been dragged out from the mess. The hearty old man had fought to the last; his clenched fists were clinging with deathly force to tufts of soft grey fur torn from the beast’s hide. But it had taken much more than it had lost: Taras’ throat was almost gone, torn to a ragged hole by vicious fangs. Behind Ostap, someone retched at the sight. It was a fleeting echo to him, and the next moment he had forgotten it. A dull pain in his hand finally tore his eyes from the scene. He looked down, and saw that he had still not let go of his knife, now stained with foul dark blood. His fingers had slipped over the sharpened side, and the stone bit deeply into his skin. [hr] They gave Taras the death-rites the next morning. He was laid out on the ground some distance away from the camp, among the white dry-stalk flowers, and Ostap draped three fine hides over him. Old Tovkač circled around the body, muttering the farewell tales that would soften the grief of the dead - and of those they left behind. "...so Avros passed into the land of the shroud, for as the father of all peoples, he knew he had to lead the way for all his sons. He would be there to meet them when they no longer walked the earth, to show them that there's joy beyond that threshold as well as before." The old wiseman bent down under a coughing fit, a sign that he himself was not long from meeting the forefathers, and righted himself with his walking-staff. "For there they would be with them who they'd long thought lost. Brave Taras sits now with Adan his father, and Donera his father's mother, and everyone strong and wise that came between him and Avros. Don't weep for him! We'll see him again one day, and he'll greet us when we come into the land of the shroud." "Yes, he'll greet us," Ostap answered absently, as he looked at the mounds beneath the hairy xo-hides. Far from their intent, the storyteller's words had dragged the stark, ugly truth of his situation before his eyes. His mother, Kasja, had been the first to go. It had happened soon after the birth of his brother Anton. Though the boy had been strong and healthy, Kasja had been struck by a wasting illness some days after delivering him, and little by little it had eaten at her from within until her sun-marks had at last gone out. No one had blamed Anton for this, but Ostap knew that his brother had quietly shouldered that guilt regardless, and it was that weight that had pushed him, as if in expiation, to always be the best. The most cheerful, always with a joke and a smile ready; the fastest hunter; the sharpest forager; the most thorough skinner. He had even become a friend to their usually surly and taciturn marshal, who had given him one of his horses to ride. And it was that gift that had been his end, when he fell from its back in hot pursuit of a spiral-horn herd and broke his neck. Only he and Taras had been left. Each of them missed someone that had been his equal, and in that shared loss they had become as much friends and comrades as they were father and son. They had drunk field-brew together, traded jests and playful blows, cursed and laughed as they pulled out the guts from a butchered xo. Now Taras was a cold log of wood under a shroud. Now, Ostap was the last. He would have his own children, in time - [i]in time[/i], yes, he thought bitterly as he trudged back to the camp in silence. Who knew when that would be, now that all he had to his name was a broken tent. Seča would not mind, he suspected, but what kind of man would he be to drag her into a life of picking bones? The herd was the marshal's, and he did not trust him anywhere as much as he had Anton. Ostap's line had always been hunters. With two pairs of hands, they could have built up something, but on his own it would be years before he could think of feeding more mouths than his own. The monster had taken it all away together with his father. Something in the tall grass caught his eye. The sun had dried out the earth out in the plains, and its murky brown graininess had turned to a pale, greyish crust. Everywhere but in one spot among bent yellow stalks, where the soil was instead a dark, dirty red. No, not the soil. Something that had fallen on it and lost its liveliness under the day's warmth. Blood. The blood of a beast. Ostap hunched down and parted the grass around the desiccated blotch. Sure enough, there was another close by, and another still. A line. A trail that led to the east. [hr] “So you’re set on this, eh? No way you’ll clear your head and put that spear down?” “You know him, Kuben. A moon-struck head never clears on its own.” Kuben laughed at the joke, but it was a mirthless, forced thing. Ostap was a good friend and a hard worker, and so, when he announced his mad idea, full eight people had come to try and set his thoughts straight. Kuben, Balban and Mezhig the hunters were there, and so was Bovdug, and Dubenia, who had been Anton’s lover, and Glodukha, Demid and Seča. But there might as well have been eighty of them, and still they would have been ramming their heads against a tree for all the good their words did. Ostap had the same hard skull as his old man, and besides he was moon-struck; what could one do when his moods came over him? “That’s right,” he was wearing his travelling-cloak, and he leaned on the haft of his spear like old Tovkač on his staff. “For everything you take, you give back its worth, that’s the way of the just. That beast’s taken the dearest thing there is, a good life. It’s only right it gives back in kind, even if it’s only got a rotten one itself.” Balban shook his head. “How do you know you can even kill it with that spear?” “It’s bled before,” Ostap’s face was carved in stone. “If it bleeds, I can do it.” There was a moment of silence, then Seča stepped forward, gloomy like the evening with her prematurely dark eyes. “We’ll go with you, if you want.” She was a woman of few words, but they were weighty. No one dared argue with her now. “No,” answered Ostap, looking down to the earth, “If I go and don’t come back, I won’t pull you under the shroud with me. There’s no right in that.” “If we go together, you’ll be more likely to come back, and we too,” Bovdug pointed out. “The beast looks down from the sky, it’ll spot us easily if there’s many of us.” Again, no one found any words, until at last Balban spoke up. “Well, it’s goodbye, then,” he smiled, this time genuinely, “Good hunting.” “Goodbye.” Their eyes followed him as he walked out into the grass and crested the nearest hill, becoming a blurred outline in the sun’s glare; then he went down on the other side, and they could see him no more. [hr] The blood trail only lasted Ostap until around noon. The monster must have licked its wound on its way, for after the five hills there were no more dried clots to be found among the grass. He did not let this deter him, and since he knew no better, he went straight ahead. Even if the beast was not there, there must have been someone around the steppe that had seen in, large as it was. In this, too, he was however disappointed until twilight set in. Only then, weary and dragging his feet in the descending darkness, he saw something on the plain ahead. It was too big to be a spiral-horn, too tall to be a wild xo. Fear shot up as his thoughts ran to the beast, but settled down again when he noticed the shape had not moved. Squinting, he could make out the tip of a pole sticking up from rigid conical flanks. A tent! There was someone out here after all. As he came closer, he spotted the tent’s owner seated on the ground before the threshold, swaddled in an old, bug-eaten hide cloak. He almost stumbled when he saw her face; she was without a doubt the oldest Eiodolon he had ever seen. Her hoary skin, drooping in wrinkles around her long crooked nose, made old Tovkač look hale and youthful in comparison. It might have just been the evening shade, but her eyes were perfectly grey, as dusty and ashen as her weathered horns and thin hair. He could only imagine what her sun-marks must have been like, if she still had any at all. “Hum, hum,” the woman croaked when Ostap drew near, the wide conches of her nostrils twitching and widening under her bony beak, “I smell a steppe-man. What are you doing out here with the sun almost gone? Don’t you know that the blood-beasts have been stalking the sky?” “I’m not afraid of them,” Ostap steadied himself with his spear, swaying on his sore legs, “But you’re out in the steppe all on your own, and the blood-beasts took my father though he wasn’t older than you. Let me be your guest, we’ll be safer the two of us together.” “Eh! Fine words,” chuckled the crone, “Come in, then, there’s room for us both. I’ve lived here many years, since my band went north,” she kept speaking as she ushered Ostap into the tent, which was wide but almost bare save for a few bundled hides and a weakly smoldering fire-circle in the middle, “But I’ve never seen a blood-beast around before that big one flew by yesterday. That’s the one that came to your band, isn’t it?” Ostap nodded. “Did you see which way it went?” “Straight to the sunrise,” the old woman answered as she sat cross-legged on a crumpled spiral-horn hide speckled with ash, “Why, are you hunting it?” He nodded again, hand on his spear. “Brave man! I’ve never seen anyone try that and make it, but there’s always a first time. What’s your name, so I will know whose story to tell to the next one who comes here?” “I’m Ostap, son of Taras. And who are you, so I’ll know who to thank?” “I’m Yeghna. You wouldn’t know my father or my mother, they died long ago. But let’s leave them to rest! You must be hungry after coming all the way here, and I’m your host.” She went to fish for something under a disorderly heap of furs, but Ostap held up a hand to stop her. “Don’t worry, I’ve got my own,” he drew out a strip of salted meat from his belt-bag, “It’s already enough I’m taking your tent, I haven’t got anything to give for your food.” “I said I’m the host, why should you give me anything? It’s up to me to make sure you’re covered and fed,” Yeghna grinned, crooked and toothless, “Are you sure all that salt won’t make you thirsty?” Ostap opened his mouth to reply, but then he felt his parched mouth with his tongue, and thought to how every drop in his waterskin was precious out on this journey. “You’re right, a swig wouldn’t hurt,” he assented at last. “Say no more - you’re my guest!” Yeghna pulled a wooden bowl out of a corner. It was halfway full of some thin, murky liquid that smelled of sour berries and wood-root. “Thank you.” As she handed it over, Ostap’s hand gave a twitch that could have seemed involuntary, bringing it to brush against the old woman’s wrist. It was an undue precaution, perhaps. What could she have stood to gain if that brew had been poison, if it made him die here, in this lonely tent? Even if, spurred by some madness that had come into her from living alone for so long, she had wanted to kill him and eat him like an animal, he was quite sure that she did not have enough teeth for that. And still, this tent standing alone in the steppe, that strange-smelling bowl instead of a waterskin, there was something in all of this that put him on edge. Even just a touch to sense the shades of her intentions would have been reassuring. Instead, he felt nothing, though his fingers touched ruvid skin. Instead of Yeghna’s wrist, he had swept them over the hem of her cloak. She did not seem to have noticed, and so, not to appear ungrateful, he took the bowl and drank the sour, but not unpleasant berry-water. It did not give him any pangs in his belly, and he dismissed his caution. The danger was not this frail ancient, but the thing that flapped and skulked out there. “It’s good for your dreams, chases away the dark ones,” the crone smiled as she took back the bowl and tossed it away to clatter in some unlit corner, “You should lie down now if you want it to be strong. My old head sleeps lightly, I’ll wake you if anything comes.” She picked up a fistful of loose dry soil and tossed it over the embers, plunging the tent into darkness. Ostap laid down his spear by his side and stretched himself out on the ground, covering himself with his cloak. It was hard, but not unpleasant, and so much had happened on that day that he felt his head grow heavy as soon as it touched the soil. Halfway through an unfinished yawn, he was falling into a deep black well, and heard nothing more. [hr] He awoke to a sharp pain in his chest. Not just anywhere, he realized, still with a foot in the hazy leaps of thought that happened in dreams. Right where the monster had scratched him the night before. He tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids were heavy like fallen trees, and would not budge. Panic seized him underneath the lancing agony. His hands, his feet, his head would not move. A cold woodenness had seized his limbs, and they did not feel as if they were his - no, he did not feel them at all, but some rotting logs that had been tied to the stumps of his legs and shoulders. He felt cold, then hot, then sick, and wondered if this was what death was like. Tovkač, you lied, you old bastard, there is no happiness in death, only numbness and pain, pain, pain. With a tremendous effort, Ostap forced his eyes open. He had rolled over on his back in his sleep. Straight ahead, he saw the darkness of the tent’s sloping wall, swelling and wavering in the night breeze. Then he looked down- There was something on his chest, something huge, grey and horrible. A great bloated, wobbling body, like a sack stuffed full of rotting entrails, pulled up by eight spindly, pointy legs that gouged into his sides with their hooked tips, and on his chest, biting into his wounds with what could only be its jaws, a head out of the worst moon-addled nightmares. He had thought that the blood-beast’s snout was ugly, but now he would rather have seen it a thousand times than facing the thing that gnawed on his ribs. Smooth, eyeless, with sparse bristles like a bald hog, it was little more than a nameless oblong shape ending in two recurve prongs. The head of a spider, or a beetle, or a tick, but stretched out to an impossible size. He had to be dreaming. This thing could not be real. It [i]should[/i] not be real! “Shh-hum, shh-hum,” the creature hissed, and somewhere in the damp, whispering screech that was its voice, Ostap heard echoes of his host, “Lie still now, steppe-man. I’ll be done soon, and you won’t feel pain ever again, shh-hum, shh-hum!” Suddenly, the whole tent quaked. Something outside whistled, cutting through the air, and a huge dark bulk forced its way in through the all too narrow entrance, tearing the hides with its clawed wings. “Well, well,” the blood-beast snarled, its monstrous nostrils twitching, its jagged teeth bared and dripping, “What do you think you’re doing drinking him dry by yourself, old hag? We had a deal, you get half and I get half!” “Shh-hum, shh-hum,” cackled Yeghna, “There was a deal, and it flew away! He was here for a long time, and my old throat was parched. You can fly far! Go find yourself another.” “What?!” growled the beast, “I’d rather gnaw you open here and now!” And it spread out its wings, splaying its claws, and pounced; but the tent was too small for its huge body to lash and lunge so, and it collapsed with a mournful thud, burying the horrors and their victim under foul-smelling xo hides. The blood-beast thrashed and tore loudest of all, until it had scattered the ruins and stood panting and gnashing in a circle of rags. It peered around with its dull beady eyes, its huge ears twitching as they strained to catch the faintest sound. Yeghna was nowhere to be seen. Not even a rustle of grass gave the vermin-hag away as she crawled off, fat with the fool steppe-man’s vitality, to skulk and spin her tales and find more sots to prey on. Gritting its fangs in annoyance, the beast shuffled over to the prone Eidolon. He lay still where Yeghna had left him, eyes wide, arms stiff at his sides. Maybe there still was something in him, and the tick’s venom just so nicely held him prisoner in his own body. The blood-beast hunched over him, fanged maw open wide- And it screeched as Ostap plunged his knife into its exposed throat. It snapped at him, but with the agility of a hunter he drew his hand back and angled it higher. His arm was still numb, but his fingers answered him once more, and he stabbed at the monster’s soulless eye, and pushed deeper, deeper, the warmth of blood flowing over his hand, until the great winged body at last stopped flailing and dropped in a twitching heap. Then Ostap let his hand drop, and, looking up at the starry sky and the gently glowing moon, he smiled. [hider=Summary] Somewhere in the Plains, an Eidolon named Ostap wakes up in the middle of the night to find that his band’s encampment is being raided by a bat-vertan, who kills his father Taras. This leaves Ostap the only surviving member of his family. Stricken with grief and knowing that he’s going to face some hard times, he decides to follow the monster’s trail and take vengeance, and sets off despite his friends’ attempts to dissuade him. After a day of travelling, Ostap meets an old woman named Yeghna, who lives in a lone tent and agrees to let him in for the night. It turns out to have been a mistake, as he rudely awakes to discover that his host is a tick-vertan and is drinking him dry after paralyzing him. However, the bat suddenly appears; it turns out that it and Yeghna knew Ostap was coming and agreed to share the bounty, but the tick is feeling extra parched and breaks off the deal. A fight ensues, and Yeghna slips away into the night. The bat goes to finish Ostap, but he has recovered enough to take it by surprise, killing it and completing his revenge. [/hider]