The Game (A Dark Romance)

“Bryn, you need to find what is terrorizing the poor travelers,” Mayor Wishart suggested strongly.

Bryn agreed, not because he found the affair terribly interesting, but because it would get him out of the town at the very least. He had not been in a good temper before all the yelling and screaming, and the panic served as nothing more than an irritant. There had been real damage done once. There had been true terror and real horror. There had been orphans who cried all night long because of losses they could not bear. There had been wars which took good, righteous men and women. And now there was this silly, pallid panic in its place, an overreaction of bored people with nothing better to do than to flail at anything that looked remotely like danger because they had already forgotten what real danger was.

Bryn left the town calmly, glad to be free of the bustle. New Rahvin was getting busier by the day. As soon as he stepped outside the gates he felt better for it.

His journey down the mountain was an easy one. There were many spots and pieces of evidence along the way, bloody footprints and bits of clothing ripped on bushes on the way past.

The female monster, they said, lived down in Old Rahvin. He would know her because she would try to seduce him.

Old Rahvin was a dumping site for travelers who could not be bothered carrying their garbage up to New Rahvin. Quite often they’d leave scraps of food and such which would inevitably be devoured by scavengers. It was quite likely that the ‘monster’ of Old Rahvin was some form of apeling, a creature with the basic outline of humanity, but none of the intelligence.

Apelings were solitary, and most of them stayed below three feet in height. They were rare, too, having been slaughtered for various reasons over the years, the two uppermost being food and fun. Sometimes they developed long, silken hair, and in the dark, and the minds of lust starved men, they would approximate a human female. A man only tried to fuck an apeling once.

Bryn had brought a net to catch the thing in, and bait to tempt it out. He had a few other weapons and such but did not anticipate having to use them. He’d catch the apeling, release it in the forest to the south, and go back to the tavern.

Old Rahvin frightened many. It did not frighten him. He had seen a great many horrors in his life, and none of them happened in rotting old towns. If anything, he found the place depressing. It was where Hail had been taken, the last place that bright, willful thing had existed. Visiting Old Rahvin was like visiting the grave of a lost child. Being here brought him pain. Avoiding the place also brought him pain. Pain was inevitable; he may as well do some good in all of it.

He placed the bait in the middle of the village and retreated to a safe distance to wait. He’d picked the tavern’s finest and simultaneously worst dish, a fish stew made from aged fry spawn. It smelled like a thousand deaths, for that was what it was. It was a local delicacy, and no apeling would ever be able to resist it.

It should not take long for the beast to emerge. Then he would sling the net and the weighted edges would fall over the beast and it would be stuck inside, quite helpless to escape. Then he would drop a dark cloth over it, disorienting and quieting it. Then he would set the thing free.

He sat and he waited. He watched and he tried not to think, but thoughts kept coming even though he did not want them. Had the Dark consumed Hail? That was the most likely outcome. The demon was not running a rescue for humans in his realm. He was a hungry thing who fed on corrupting and then consuming his prey. And what pretty prey Hail had made for him. A perfectly innocent thing who thought she knew better than anybody in existence, flush with all the arrogance of youth and empowered with all the rights of young adulthood. He knew he could not have prevented her from leaving without becoming a tyrant. There was nothing he could have done. Nothing he could have done. There was nothing…

He saw a flash of fabric inside a door frame. Perhaps it wasn’t an apeling after all. Apelings did not wear clothes. Perhaps it was a woman. But a woman capable of doing harm to multiple men was even more rare than an apeling as far as Bryn was aware. A woman of great talent and training might best one or two men, but in the world of brutes she would eventually be overcome.