A monster emerges from the shadows. He is followed by another, and another, until the world is inhabited by new beasts of its own creation. This anthology incorporates stories from various genres and timelines, exploring what makes us who we are.
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Einar wandered the ruins where he'd discovered his family's corpses. Now he plucked twigs from his beard and inspected a horizon veiled by mist.
He stood like the great apes, chest vast and dense, arms thick as the limbs of oaks. Priests might have worshiped men with his build. Yet he cared little for recognition in this age of fear, which he suspected was too horrific to be remembered.
A gash in his knee trickled dark along his leg. Einar watched the blood journey over the ridge of his shin. He chuckled. The morning was young.
Iron shimmered across the brown grasses, and he knew he must not approach this metal. It looked ordinary enough, hard and ferric, but it would change. He did not know how or why. Though solid, it might become liquid or fumes, invading him like a poison, and then he'd be himself no more.
Ravens with human voices circled overhead and babbled, mimicking those Njal had killed.
"Odin, you lunatic!" Einar wailed at the sky. "Give us back our dead!"
Thunder boomed, and the valley quaked.
He passed the graves of his father, mother, and sister on the road to Jorvik. Their blood nourished a land thirsty for the weak.
"Njal!" Einar yelled. "Oh, Njal!"
The ravens answered him with the screams of his parents.
He jumped over clusters of iron hidden among the dirt and vines. "Njal! Fight me, bastard! Where are you?"
Gagging, he unsheathed his sword. "To hell with your wrath, Odin! Eat shit, you dog of a god!"
The curses burned in his throat and made him wheeze.
His father would've been ashamed.
Several ravens landed on a dead man, and they pecked into his ears and yanked out his brains and gulped and imitated Njal's victims: "Please, my child! Please, rescue us! Please, brother! Please!"
Einar assumed these whimpers had been his father's, mother's, and sister's.
Unless this was a nightmare.
Could he even feel pain?
An urge to experiment bubbled in his stomach.
He now dug his teeth into his own arm. A red sun glowed through the mist. The birds pled with it. He tasted iron. Not the devious kind but the stuff in his veins. Tears flowed down his cheeks. Blood dripped from his elbow.
Njal sprinted out of the murk.
"Einar!" he cried, tears rivering down his own face. "Einar, look out!"
The birds did not quit pleading.
Einar thrust out his sword to meet Njal's.
The weapons rang together like a bell tolling across the valley.
