City of Sinister Angles

The Black-Clad Man From Thule

The black-clad man from Thule came to the Locust Tribe from the other world across the ocean. The Locusts were superstitious and unlearned, as best as they understood Viktor Baal had come from the spirit world. He had come, he told them, to exchange wisdom with the tribe's cabal of shaman. He was ugly and foreign but he had potent medicine, which he called thaumaturgy, and so the shaman agreed that they would kill him after he had ridden with them for a while and they had learned what they could from him.

The right to ride with the Locust Tribe was a great honor, the shaman had explained, for they were the herald of the apocalypse who would despoil the land before them and bring terror to all the great kingdoms before chaos swallowed the universe.

This was not, in Viktor's estimation, a particularly likely boast. The locust tribe numbered a little over one hundred, including children. They were a sickly lot and many had wounds so deep Viktor was amazed that they were still alive, let alone able to ride their knobby, starved horses. They all had festering sores writhing with fly maggots, and the flies themselves buzzed around their temporary camps constantly like they were great dead beasts.

The particular land the locusts had decided to despoil before them at the moment was a heavily wooded area that they had to dismount to make their way through. Viktor had warned them against entering the forest, but the locust tribe went where they pleased. They diverted from their usual route to prove this to the barbarian wizard.

They had been making slow going for a few hours when the magnitude of their error was made manifest.

A sanity-gnawing amorphous form, beyond human ken to fully describe, spun itself from the shadows and shot at the locusts. It cut a bloody swathe through the line of men and women until it crashed into the wards protecting Viktor, which surrounded him like an invisible bubble. The paper charms Viktor was wearing sizzled slightly at the impact.

The demon slid around Viktor, ignoring him for the moment, and made sport of hunting every man, woman and child of the Locust Tribe and butchering them. Only then did it return to Viktor.

"You were foolish to come here, wizard," said the demon "I am going to tear the spirit from your flesh piece by piece and make you watch me eat it. Do you think your mortal magic can stop me forever?"

"Of course not," said Viktor "I don't need it to. It only needs to hold out long enough for us to talk."

"I'm going to tear your wards to shreds and make such a mess of your still-living body that it will make what I did to your friends seem like a mercy," replied the demon.

"They weren't my friends," said Viktor "I didn't want to be insulting by coming without an offering. 100 souls seemed like a fair price for a chat."

The demon made a horrible unsettling noise almost like laughter, but without warmth or mirth.

"I like your style, wizard. It may amuse me to permit you to live a while longer so we may 'chat'."

"If I hadn't lured the fools I fed to you here you would have starved to death trapped in the woods. People avoid this forest out of taboo, not fear. Your legend is a pitiful dying fairy tale. There is nothing left to sustain you."