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talesfromsigil · 1 year ago

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As the flames flickered behind me, I held the bundle of white fluff tight to my chest, panting hard as I laid back against the first large tree I'd been able to throw myself behind. What had just happened? I saw their torches fly into the roofs of our barn and our house, but these was no monster attack or raid. I'd seen horses in boarding at the entrance to the ranch. These were royals. The very people we worked for were torching our home and slaughtering our breeding stock from the fields.

My parents had been nothing but kind and loyal to the crown, so why were we being assaulted? Mom and dad… my sister… we had been in the house when the fire started, and so would I if I had not been slacking on my chores that day. I hoped that my family had managed to escape as well, but I had to focus on fleeing.

Feeling the hatchling squirm in my arms, I looked down and repositioned it to try to comfort it. It was a runt. I'd been handling it when the attack began, since it's mother had abandoned it in favor of the rest of its brood. For the last several days, it had become my responsibility to keep the waif fed and entertained so that it might grow enough to be sold off.

It was a Ripchaser. A species of large carnivorous beast that we'd raised for generations. They were known for their versatility, offering warm fur, strong hides, hearty milk, and could even be beasts of burden. But they were also often bought by ambitious nobles who wished to hunt them at their fiercest, which had always been a boon to our ranch when creatures grew up too ill-tempered for domestication.

But that hardly mattered right now. Just behind me, all of our beasts were being put to the sword or burned to death. The scent of blood and flesh hung heavy in the air.

I heard the shout of one of the armored men yelling to search the surroundings. The ripchaser baby in my arms was beginning to make agitated squeaks of displeasure. I hadn't given it its food yet, and unaware of the grave danger we were both in, it was begging for something to drink.

Ripchasers are obligate carnivores from birth, and I hadn't had the chance to grab the cannister of stored animal blood that we fed infant beasts when I fled. But I had to give it something quickly before it's grumbling turned to wails and gave away our position.

I considered just letting it go, but it had already bonded to me and I knew from experience that it would come crawling after me, crying, if I'd done so. There was really only one solution as I heard the soldier coming closer.

I pulled my pocket knife from my overalls and biting into my own shirt to prevent myself from crying out, I sliced across one of my own fingertips. Blood dripped out and I pushed it into the creature's mouth. I shivered as it began to greedily suckle at my hand.

This was a cardinal sin of raising ripchasers. When the creatures tasted human blood from an early age, they learned to mark humans as prey. We would ordinarily have to kill off any that got an accidental taste for people, for the safety of everyone. But I was desperate and didn't have a choice in the matter.

Biting hard into the cloth of my shirt while the creature quietly drained the dark red fluid from my hand, I held my breath and listened closely for the footsteps of the passing soldiers. I almost breathed a sigh of relief when they continued right on walking. After a moment of waiting to be sure no one else would be there to spot me, I began to run deep into the forest, my bloodthirsty charge still drinking greedily from my open wound.

–

The first year had been the hardest. I was barely on the cusp of adulthood at the start, and here I was scattered to the wilds. I never did find my family. I know realistically that they perished in that raid, but I'd kept hoping that my parents, or at least my sibling, had managed to flee as I did.

I was handy enough to build my own tools. Spears and bows that I could use to hunt. I needed the meat. I couldn't bring myself to put down Runt. He felt like the closest thing I had to kin. An orphaned creature who'd lost everything. And I knew all too well how useful a tipchaser could be if I could keep it's nature in check.

As I learned to hunt, I spent many of those first unsuccessful weeks feeding him my own blood. He was small, I thought that I could afford it, and I needed to keep him satiated now, even if I was starting myself.

That first year, I lost two of my digits to infection. A third, Runt had mangled by himself when I failed to acknowledge that he'd been growing too large to continue this strategy. I wondered if he would soon outgrow me and see me for what I'd trained him to see humans as: food.

Mercifully, I got better at hunting. I was able to regularly bring in enough to keep me and the pup satiated, especially once Runt had become competent enough to join me. Despite keeping him alive on a diet of me for almost his entire early life, it seemed that he still viewed me more as a father than a meal.

Life was hard. But I was alive, and so was my last charge. As survival became routine, however, my thoughts began to simmer on the matter of the cause of my exile. That fateful day that left Runt and I alone in nature. And I found myself barely able to stem the tide of my rage.

I could have just let it go. I could have lived the rest of my life out as a hermit quietly surviving in the outskirts with my unusual companion. But I needed more than that. Like Runt, I needed blood.

–

The next several years of my life, I'd begun to spend more time hunting royalty than I'd spend chasing animals. The first happened by chance. A traveling count had happened upon my encampment. Thinking me any other commoner, he and his small retinue came to harass me. He declared that I was trespassing on the Queen's forest and I would have to pay a fine.

The very idea that I would pay tithe to the people who had torn me from my peaceful childhood made me furious. Before I knew it, I had gutted the man, and Runt had pounced and wrestled the poorly armored guard to the ground. It felt good. My partner and I worked together in a fight against people just as we had when we encountered desperate predators that tried to take us on. Their third fled before I could chase him, and so began my legend. I took their weapons and packed up camp to move on, glad to have steel at my disposal rather than wood.

–

Curiously, I began to find company. At first, it was slow. Runt often chased away what I'd considered to be threats, but now and then a few brave souls weren't deterred by the beast that grew fiercer by the day. Desperate souls. Outcasts like me. In those cases, I began signaling to Runt to back down. I would at least hear them out. I had attracted bandits, thieves, all manner of ne'er-do-wells. I couldn't deny that we had things in common. I was a murderer now, after all. They respected power, and there was little more powerful than what was now a rare, viscous beast bonded soul to soul with a hardened man.

I took them in, cautiously at first, but I soon found them reliable and loyal. They too had been forced to the fringe by status or circumstance, and a common enemy in the local nobility made us brothers.

Every now and then, a too-brave fool tried their hand at pursuing the growing bounty on my head. They fell to Runt's jaws easily. As our opponents grew mightier, however, I found myself fortunate enough to have garnered the attention of a doctor, scorned by society for failing to save a doomed princeling babe. Wounds were bound to happen as our opponents grew more competent, and now that we had someone to tend them, we could afford our injuries better.

Runt's bloodlust only grew. He subsisted almost entirely on human meat. I wondered if I could continue to keep him under control at this pace, but I trusted him. We were brothers.

–

I knew that our day was fast approaching. My men and my beast were disciplined under my command, and we'd become competent fighters. The Queen's knights feared us. They sent assassins to try to take my head in the night rather than face me in battle, but when you sleep alongside a Ripchaser, it is difficult to sneak up on someone.

The day that one managed to slay one of my trusted lieutenants was the day I declared to my camp that enough was enough. This loss did not discourage us. He became a martyr that bolstered us, and the end of the royal bastards that had lorded their power over us for so long was declared.

We bolstered our forces, gathered our supplies, and set siege to the Queen's castle.

–

I stood for the first time in my life on the ornate marble floor of the Queen's Court. It had been a long hard road to get here, and here I was, my own blood dripping heavily onto that shining floor, staining it red.

I listened to the carnage happening outside, my men fighting tooth and nail as I fell to my knees in the enormous chamber, clutching my mangled left arm.

I had miscalculated. I lay, panting on the floor before the throne, her majesty sitting at the throne before me. It made me sick that I'd gotten so close. That this was where it would end, fruitlessly.

There were too many of her royal guard. They were too well outfitted and too well trained. Formidable as I'd become as a master of the forest, they were simply more.

I glanced, heartbroken, at my companion, tossed to the side of the room with a gaping slash wound in his side. The sword still struck through him. He was surrounded by the bodies of the fallen, but there were simply too many.

I watched the Queen rise from her throne. Of course, she wanted the glory of the kill. The man that had plagued her for so long had to fall at her hand, a symbol of her right to rule. Her sycophants were happy to allow her to draw her all too beautiful sword that had never seen a drop of blood and approach me slowly. She was gloating. The arrogance of nobility knew no limits.

As she stood over me, I sneered at the thought that I knelt in front of the very cause of all of my strife, my body too tired and beaten to rise back up and find my discarded blade. I wondered if I could swing one last time without my sword arm. I'd at least die in defiance. But I couldn't find the energy. I'd lost the spirit.

As she raised her blade, however, I heard a snarl, and a blur of white and red flew across my vision. Runt had been biding his strength. And the moment he saw me in mortal danger, he used the last of his strength and slammed into the queen, biting impotently into the Queen's armor.

She swore loudly and dropped her weapon as she was thrown from her feet. Immediately, I saw the royal guard begin to hack away at my brother's hide, and it awoke my last vestige of strength. If Runt had the energy to finish the job, then I had to pull it from somewhere too. My off-hand shaking as it grasped the Queen's fallen sword, I forced myself shakily to my feet and let out a primal scream as I lunged into the crowd and plunged th blade deep into her neck.

I watched her expression of astonishment and disbelief with pleasure, a twitching smile on my face even as I felt myself run through by the numerous blades of the guard. It was done.

I coughed up blood and in my blurred vision, watched as my companion heaved one last breath, as if he knew that we'd accomplished what we set out to do as well. This land was free of a tyrant.

I felt my hand lose grip of the blade's hilt, and for the first time in an age, I felt myself relax. I used the little strength I had left to fall into my brother and close my eyes with a satisfied smile. We'd done what had to be done. And now the world had no need for beasts like us any longer.

Text: My family breeds monsters to sell to the Hunt. When a prophet says the Queen will die in one’s jaws, they come to slaughter them all, and us for good measure. I escape, with one newborn.

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