The Knight Hunter

Winter

Before he became known as the knight hunter, he was known to answer only to the name of the weapon he was never without: Axe. Some lesser men joked that it must be because the man had never had an original name. Others, closer to the truth, said that the hunter wanted to remain mostly unknown. Perhaps he was protecting someone by hiding his true name? Axe did nothing to dispel rumors. Then again, he probably didn't know he was the subject of many farmer's hushed conconversations over their well earned mugs of ale in the evenings, speaking of dark things only the way a man believing himself safe indoors and next to a roaring fire tend to do. No, Axe didn't speak much in general. He had no need. He was summoned. He went. He finished the job and was paid. A simple routine.

This particular evening Axe found himself in the northern end of the kingdom in the middle of a snow blown forest miles from a barely fortified town. Axe had scoffed at the town's poor attempt at a protective wall, it was little more than sharpened sticks tied into strategic bundles to form a haphazard wall a few feet away from the outermost houses. If the creatures he had been summoned to deal with were the ones he thought they were, then this town was doing the bare minimum for their own safety. The particular spot Axe had been sent to take care of was a hunting cabin a day's hike from the town gates. Far enough for game, but close enough that if anything happened the hunters could return without much strain. But as Axe bent to examine the ground he snorted. The group he had been sent to check on hadn't returned for weeks, and the townsfolk were too frightened to look for them, and if the tracks Axe were seeing belonged to the creatures he thought they did, the townspeople were right to stay behind their hastily constructed wall.

The cabin was small and well constructed, designed to withstand the blasting winds that were not uncommon nearer the peaks. Axe glanced at the white forest around him and wondered how angry the mountain must be to have sent a wind down to coat the bark of the trees so completely. He continued his trek around the cabin, stopping to examine the deep tracks in the drifts along the walls and to sniff deeply at random intervals. His attention had been so focused on the ground that it took him a moment to look up when he rounded the face of the cabin.

Axe grunted, surprised. The face of the cabin had been gouged, for lack of a better word, with deep slashing marks with no discernible pattern. Some were fresher than others, the snow from the storm was stuck in the crevasses of most of the slashed logs. Only a few were untouched. Axe removed his hide glove and ran hand over one of the deeper marks, feeling the edges, and picking away pieces of bark from the rough cabin wall. Fur. The piece of bark Axe held in his hand had a tuft of it caught in a small crevasse. Axe removed the small piece and rolled it between his fingers thoughtfully before bringing it to his nose to sniff. It took much willpower to suppress the fit of coughs welling up from his chest and even then one deep cough escaped. Axe blinked away the involuntary tears as his body tried to dispel the memory of the smell.

The latch on the outside of the door caught Axe's attention. A rough, newer looking guard had been hammered in place over the latch, and blocks of wood had been hammered in so tightly that any movement of the latch was impossible. The latch and guard both had claw marks, but whatever had clawed it hadn't been able to dislodge the blocks holding the entire thing closed. Locked from the outside, yet something was trying to get in? Axe pressed an ear to the door, straining to hear through the crack where the door and wall met. Nothing. He raised his hand and smacked the flat of his palm against the door once, hard, ear still pressed against the crack, and waited. Axe heard what he thought sounded like shuffling followed by a muffled sob and waited patiently to see if he could hear more. Nothing.

Satisfied, Axe backed away from the door and studied the latch, then took the back side of his axe and began to pound the wooden blocks back out of the latch guard. Even with Axe's unusual strength, it took him a good five minutes to completely clear the latch guard. Whomever had placed the blocks had been thorough.