Feast of the Fallencast

Ending one

Feast of the Fallencast

The moonless night shed no light on the Dreadmire where the Fallencast lived in their holes of offal and bone. Twice already tonight the screams of the young ones filled the air; first in wails of despair then in terrified shrieks of final sorrow. The culmination of the Feast of the Ageless. A festival twice a decade that saw the end of many of the children of those that thought only to better their own race by culling the weak. Cannibalism... That was the Fallencast way of life; to eat their feeble young in a celebration of blood and body parts.

Tonight was much the same, for deep in the chiefs' cave huddled his two children. Two of the Ageless too weak to survive in the eyes of those who would dine on them this dark night... But also too cunning to end up as small chunks of meat in the mouths of those who birthed them. Deep in the cover of the night they planned to swiftly and silently flee their home for a life where they could live without fear.

Promptly they left the encampment and stumbled on tired feet over to a covered patch of forest. With fevered care they made their way to the most barren part of the swamp; past this barren stretch and they would be free. They reached a clump of weeds and grass and stopped for a minute with their hands on their gnarled knobbly knees, heaving and gasping for breath. Then, once more they ran on for they knew they could not stay there in plain sight. The Fallencast would know soon not that they had gone. Their sense of smell would carry them straight to their tiny, filthy prey. The warm swamp wind blew across their ceremoniously shaved heads sending shivers through their little bodies. Their tiny feet made shallow holes and dips in the bog; making a clear trial for their hunters to follow. Rushing, they clambered onto land, not knowing the consequences as they scrambled up a tree. Hushing themselves they stayed hidden as their family passed unknowingly by. The children could feel a light shallow breath breathing down the napes of their neck. Quietly they looked upward. Above them was a swamp dog. A wild beast that roamed the bog... The most feared beast that roamed the bog. A quiet growl issued from it's throat and all the heads of the Fallencast below turned upward in gleeful surprise. The dog gave a swipe of it's hideous paw and grazed the face of each and blood flowed freely from their open wounds and the scent beckoned the swamp dog onward, to finish the kill. The crowd cheered below with vicious snarls, roars, and grunts coming from them as they delighted in seeing their treacherous young crushed to death by the most destructive monster of the bog. The voices came to a sudden stop, the crowd holding it's breath as the dog lost its balance upon a thing branch and hung there precariously for a painfully long second until finally falling into the bog... His body to be swallowed by the roiling, steaming mass of mud, bones, blackwater, and blood.

The voices that had previously chanted a deathful cheering turned suddenly to a hushed angry growling as the chief, the runaways father, raised his hand in the charge signal. The ravenous horde of Fallencast lurched forward and scaled the tree, surrounding the children and tossing a net over them, trapping them. The children screamed and struggled to escape the prickling of claws, the biting of teeth, of inevitable capture. The first to reach them brought out a club and grinned a threatening baring of his teeth. That was the last thing they saw as it connected with a ghastly thud to their heads.

The smell of herb scented smoke drifted into the cavern. The children were again caught in the same place it started. The horrific shouts and cries of their clan echoed threateningly through the cave where they were being held when the hide curtain was suddenly lifted. The wrinkled, old, bag-of-bones tribal priestess stood in the doorway. In her crackly voice she called on her guards and they dragged the elder sibling away, kicking and screaming in protest. The younger was left to wait in eerie silence as the priestess and her guards left; so she could hear the screaming and moaning of her sibling as it was cooked over an open fire. Then the ripping and snarling of her family as her brother was ripped limb from limb.

It was over all too quickly and suddenly they were back for her. The only thing the child saw out of the cave as she peeked around the priest was the terrible grinning faces of her comrades.