Horror and more

The start

The decaying air and stifling atmosphere provided the perfect abode for those who worshipped the darkness rather than the light. In the dense shadows, spiders clutched their snare-strings. Their webs shimmered like meshed steel dipped in silver. Eyes a-flame with hunger, they were hoping to dine on bloated bodies and slurp on hot blood.

The forest was primordial. Centuries-old trees with sprawling limbs guarded the darkness, blotting out any sunlight. Their bark was mottled and splotched, as if bubbled soup had been frozen in time on its surface. Clumpy combs of wet moss dangled from their rotten boughs. Underneath the moss, lethal larkspur peppered the mulchy floor. A pungent tang oozed from every sentient being in the forest. Bewailing sounds ghosted through the trees. Whether it was from victim or victor, only the forest could tell. It was truly a place to make your veins freeze over. Everything considered edible in another forest was nauseating here. It left you with the same, sickening taste of your own blood. It was a forest to be avoided.

Never had he encountered these emotions on his many hunts. He had quarried after dread vampyres in the fathomless bowels and dripping basins of the deepest caves. He had ascended sky-kissing mountains to seek out blood-besmeared trolls. He had even, as a favour to a foreign king, crossed a tyranny of distance to bring to bay the Black Golwroth of Karaganda in his lair. But this dark forest was different to anywhere he had been before. Hunting after base beasts into dens and burrows, down begrimed pits and through gloomy hollows, could not begin to compare to this gullet of madness. Just being here felt like partaking in an unholy parody of life. He tried to think of a word for the renders of human flesh he was gazing upon, but it eluded him. They had maggoted their way to this glade, burrowing like wood-weevils into the corrupted heart of the forest. He noted with contempt their filed-down fangs and brutish weapons; clunky clubs, brutal bull-axes and wicked sickles. It seemed fitting to him that they would inhabit this sacrilegious wood.