Billy Goat Tales (And Other Such Fancies)

[Venessian]

Lorehorn Monastery jutted out from one of the highest slopes of the Comb Mountains. Constructed of the native stone, from a distance, it appeared to be nothing more than another jag in the uneven crags of the modest mountain range. A hewn path weaved its way up the steep incline to the heavy oaken doors set into the face of the library. There were no signs, no tell-tale markings to indicate the structure's designation, but any who had ever been to the place knew it to be a home of knowledge and learning. Secrecy had been the catalyst for a decline in population of the great library in recent decades, as few knew of the haven's location. Fewer still were introduced to the humble trappings of the monastery's interior. Every now and again, the monks and librarians ventured into nearby towns below and took particularly bright orphans under their wings, returning with the new blood and high hopes of producing a fresh generation of lore keepers, but the talent pool grew shallower every passing season.

The exterior could not have been less awe inspiring, save in size alone. It had no domed chapel or stained glass windows, only dark, keyhole-shaped observation slits scarcely big enough to aim a crossbow through. The monks of Lorehorn were a peaceful, knowledge-loving people, and had constructed the secret place with a single, clandestine purpose. To hide away that which they coveted.

Virgin powder coated the stone around the building on the crisp spring morning, and a trail of footprints followed the rocky path up the mountainside to the great doors. A ranger or wild-man skilled in tracking would have taken many a moment to ponder the tracks that a small group of unlikely travelers left in their wake. There were three sets in all, and the first seemed simple enough. Narrow-toed boot prints were spaced close together, as if the owner took baby-steps along the trail. They zigzagged from side to side, and every now and again, a large melted circle could be found in the snow, formed by a hefty rump. Beside the circles were hand prints, with fat fingers as big as sausages, and meaty palms wide as a child's face. The fat hands had been used to raise the obviously plump form to a standing position again and again.

The second set of prints was slightly more enigmatic. Rectangles a full foot long and almost as wide, stamped an even pace through the snow. There was no tread to the rectangles which were perfect manufactured polygons, and the source would have been difficult to guess by any hunter. Long, squared slashes in the snow showed the granite beneath and it was only around those skid marks that any clue to the being's nature could be found. Like the pudgy fingered sets, more hand prints could be spotted with a mass even larger than the last, but it was the fingers that differed, little more than thin lines joined by knobby joints. Alien.

Skeletal...

The third set of prints was the most distinguished; large, distinctly goat or horse-like stamps in the icing of diamond dust. Unlike its companions, there was no sliding and skidding, falling or fumbling. Surefooted and even-paced, the hoof marks climbed higher and higher up the winding, man made trail. No beast of burden could have navigated the, at times, sheer road. The third stranger was decidedly bi-pedal and obviously accustomed to such terrain.

The trio of tracks arrived at the entrance of Lorehorn with the rectangular-footed visitor moving to an adjacent outcropping of stone, large enough to conceal a man from sentries in the windows high above. The snow around the threshold had been cleared away by a mighty swing of the ten-foot tall slabs of wood, and a new clue tattled on the intentions of the strangers. Red plasma sprawled out in a pool from the cracks under the doors, now frozen like an ominous welcome mat. It seemed fitting, as the doors were a thick, oaken bulwark, so large as to forbid entrance to any, save those who were invited in...

[Venessian]

The intent of the strangers became clearer with a close survey of the monastery's first floor. A grand scale refectory took a prominent place in the heart of the great library. Columns ran parallel to a lengthy dining table, the bottom end of which began just a few paces from the front doors. Several chairs had been carelessly cast aside denoting signs of a struggle, and half eaten meals were long cold in evenly spaced clay bowls, each accompanied by a single, hand-carved wooden spoon. Looking on from a slightly elevated granite dais at the head of the table, was a rough, undecorated stone chair - not a throne like that of nobility, but a modest position of power for a kindly elder or spiritual leader. A yellow straw cushion was to be the only creature comfort of the otherwise uncomfortable looking piece of furniture. The foremost edge of the seat, all sharp, right-angled stone, sported bright crimson splotches and sparse amounts of drying grey-matter, but no source lay at its foot.

The rows of columns, each pillar with a diameter similar in size to an ancient fir's, were all that separated the main refectory from the east and west halls beyond them. Towering bookcases loomed like predators around each hall's perimeter, and both sides had only a single, symmetrically placed chamber against the far middle walls, with a single door to each. The rest of the space was dedicated to tables piled high with scrolls, books, magnifying lenses, and other scholarly odds and ends, much of which had recently been knocked to the floor in chaotic fashion.

Only the crackling of a dying fire lent sound to the room. More ember than flame, thick logs hissed and popped, expending the last of their fuel to cast a ghostly light south across the western wing from a huge, nondescript fireplace. The dim lighting danced across the flagstone floor to the doorway of that side's respective lone chamber. Almost too dark to be spotted in the gloom, a long streak of wetness ran from the northern part of the central refectory and into the foreboding room. Door slightly ajar, a single, bright red object seemed to be reaching out of the blackness. One solitary hint about the fate of the monks and librarians of Lorehorn:

A bloody, human hand, fingers stiff and claw-like in the throes of rigor mortis.

From the macabre door frame stretched the path of sticky-wet blood, to a sweeping spiral staircase in the center of the first floor's northern wall. Wide enough for two men two walk abreast, the staircase climbed almost fifteen feet up to the second floor of the monastery. So caked in blood were the stone stairs that more than one unfortunate victim must have lent their vital fluids to the carnage.


------------------

Truly, the late occupants of the once great storehouse of lore did not have a keen eye for decorating. The barren, grey stone on top of stone with all its plain wooden doors could claim little more than the odd, empty brass candle sconce. The second floor opened to a long, wide hallway dotted with doors every ten feet or so, and it was in that passage where many smears of life-substance merged into one scarlet stream. One by one, bleeding men had been dragged into the hall and roughly hauled to the lower level. A noble onlooker's heart would have sunk to know that beyond each ingression, lay sleeping quarters belonging to one of two-score of the most non-violent souls in all the realm. Eerily silent without the steady snicker of the fireplace below, nothing stirred on that nightmarish layer of the doomed library.

A sudden right turn near the end of the main corridor led down a narrower hallway, ending in a less extraordinary staircase. Windowless, there was no hope-granting light in the new passage, but as one drew closer and closer to the first step of the entrance to the third floor of the monastery, audible sounds could once again be sensed. The sounds were high-pitched and prepubescent - energetic and oft frightened, crying out after the slowly repeating sharp thwack of wood on wood.

Somewhere, past the darkness of that cramped hall, up the flight of stairs to the third floor of Lorehorn, were surviving children.

[Venessian]

The keyhole windows built into the thick, fortified walls of the monastery allowed for a small beam of light to enter through them, casting a focused ray onto the stone floors. The effect was minimal, however, and the whole of the great library relied on an extensive network of torches, candles, and lanterns to illuminate it. It was resting hours for the monks of Lorehorn when the strangers arrived in the dead of night, claiming to seek asylum, and few of the lamps had been lit.

The top of the stairs to the third floor was as similarly dark as the rest of the previous two floors, but further down yet another long, wide hallway, white light crept out from under the crack of a door opposite the staircase. The radiating glow parted like a stream passing two large rocks, as it rushed around the large feet of a silent jailor. In the illumination, two misshapen human feet of disproportionate size could be seen, albeit faintly. Too large for conventional shoes, a poor man had once found a creative solution for the unclad soles. Brown butcher's twine circled the mammoth appendages like makeshift sandal straps, attaching a pair of weathered, leather book coverings to the jailor's feet. Its ankles were the purple colour of violent bruising, and very, very dirty. Its calves were thick and muscular like that of an athlete. Hardy muscles coursed upwards to the knees, which were caked in dried blood. That was where the human resemblance ended.

Just above the knee, the skin peeled downwards and made the entire lower half of the limb seem like an obscene mockery of a riding boot. The thighbone was entirely bereft of flesh, as was everything above it. Little bits of hardened sinew clung to the hips and spine, but the torso was equally barren of meat. Long, almost simian arms hung low like a caveman's, displaying wrists of yellowed bone, and the creature's slumped posture lent credence to the caveman theory. The beast was a skeleton. Simplistic in design and function, it had obviously been chosen for its intimidating size – almost too big to be human. Its mouth had only half of its teeth in attendance, and its hollow, empty eye sockets sported tiny pinpoints of icy blue, necromantic light that could be viewed even in the darkness. The skeleton stood in place, eerily still, waiting for further orders from its master, or for one of the captives in the room past the foul monster's mass to make a daring escape.

If they knew what waited for them in the dark, escape would be the furthest thing from their minds.

Beyond the door which had no lock to speak of, warmth and light finally took hold in the now haunted place, but it was neither comforting nor reassuring. Five children huddled together in the fiction hall of the great library, eyes turned towards their cruel overseer, waiting for him to crack his yew switch on a nearby table again, causing them to flinch and bringing a smile to his sadistic face.

An obese human leered at his charges. He had not spoken a word since he had herded the young scribes into the fiction hall an hour prior, his length of yew speaking for him. It promised a swift lashing for any of the youngsters who fell out of line, and so far, they had been compliant.

The man himself was imposing, standing closer to six feet than to five with an impressive girth. He was a slovenly man, with a stained, red wool turtleneck that barely covered his bulging gut and had ripped at the cuffs when he passed his hammy forearms through the sleeves. Course black hair covered his belly and arms. Indeed, the only bit of him that was not covered in the greasy black hair was the crown of his head which was bald as a plucked chicken. His ruddy cheeks boasted a forest of black growth, and his beard contained traces of past meals. At first glance he seemed as simple as he was homely, but it was his eyes that betrayed a sinister intellect. His bright green orbs studied each of the young boys and girls with horrific glee. The young wards cowered before him, imagining the horrifying fate that awaited them.

[Venessian]

Overcrowded bookshelves were a theme of the great library. The hall of fiction was no exception, although the books that lined the walls were of inferior quality, with soft, course fiber paper covers instead of the dyed leathers and painted wood of the great tomes of lore in the other wings of the monastery. The smell was the same though - the musty aroma of damp paper that had begun to mold. The room itself was rounded at the forefront where the single window looked out over the Comb Mountains. The rest of the room was large and rectangular, with the only door going in or out to the hall's far south. Every inch of the walls were covered by bookshelf after bookshelf, stretching high to the buttressed ceiling.

The fireplace and primary lightsource for the hall was an extension of the one found on the first floor, sharing the same flue. It bathed the room in orange light, and made reading possible for those who were near it.

The pudgy guard shifted his switching hand and picked at a stubborn itch on the seat of his pants. He stopped for a moment to ponder the other guard standing watch on the other side of the door, musing to himself enviously about the undead's inability to feel boredom.

“How long is he going to make me wait with these miserable rodents?” the gross man griped to himself. The children's reactions to his switch were starting to lose their appeal and he really just wanted to move things along, but without his master's instructions, he dared not stray from his post.

The room was quiet for a good long while, until the silence was broken by a rhythmic sound in the distance. Growing gradually louder, the sound was like the tick-tock of an oversized clock. Slow and steady, the sound grew louder until it seemed to boom in comparison to silence of the hall of fiction. Then, the children simultaneously held their breath.

The noise had stopped at the entrance to the room.

The heavy door creaked open slowly exposing the tangible darkness beyond. The scribes watched on with breath still held, afraid to move. A single, white-furred finger wrapped around the stone door frame, then a second, and a third and fourth followed. As if it were pulling itself into the room, the fingertips tightened their grasp, and an inhuman, elongated face slowly slid into the light. A pair of huge black eyes gazed about the room, slowly... and soullessly. Another mighty paw grasped the door itself, parting it to the side as the vile beast made its way into the room at a painfully slow pace.

Clip. Clop.

Hoof falls echoed slowly and one of the children screamed, burying her eyes in the tunic of a boy beside her, beginning to cry. The monster had prodigious horns which dipped low in a graceful arc, the colour of obsidian. The door creaked open wider. It had a humanoid torso, but the legs of a powerful mountain ram, all of which was covered in a pelt of long, shaggy white fur, matted in spots with drying gore. Strips of faded yellow cloth hung from the fiend around its joints and waist, giving the illusion of civilized modesty, and a sizable length of iron chain wrapped around his emaciatedly thin midsection like a belt. On the end of the chain hung a book, bound in pink skin and a pair of scarlet horns etched into its surface.

Diabolic in appearance, it moved fully into view making cacophonous noises on the hard stone with its hooves as it leisurely cleared the distance to the children, now ripe with terror. The oldest of them had seen the black tomes whose pages were laden with depictions of monsters and witches, spells and black magic. To them, this creature could only be one thing.

The devil.

[Venessian]

The air was colder in proximity to the vile beastman. Breath came laboured as if there were a little less oxygen in the air when he was near. He did not make any outwardly hostile actions towards the youths. He merely circled them, like a carrion bird, taking in their faces, their mannerisms, and most of all, revelling in the quiet, ambient fear that they gave off like the unpleasant smell of a country farmer after a long days work in the heat of summer.

He was a bully – an arcane tough – who preyed on the weak when there was no stronger more combat savvy goodly folk to protect them. Venessian relished the feeling of hopelessness. The initiates of Lorehorn knew their time was coming.

Venessian studied their appearances one by one. The first was a child of ten. His face was more than just baby-fat, rather, his chubby, freckled cheeks belied one too many midnight trips to the pantry under the cover of darkness. His bleach-blonde hair was just a little too pale against his sun-deprived cheeks, and two tendrils of sandy, white locks were plastered to his podgy cheeks where they met a twin stream of child's tears. The boy whimpered weakly as the goat's stare locked on him, his yellow vestments trembled with imagined knowledge of what was to come next.

But the end did not come, as the wicked necromancer moved on to the next child to the fat boy's left. A head of short, curly brown hair and deep brown eyes suggested that when that young man of twelve was fully matured, he would be handsome and charismatic. He did not quiver the way his chunky companion did. As Venessian studied him, he was busy doing the same. He identified the goat-man's horns as natural weapons, recalling tales of sherpas falling to their deaths from mountain peaks after suffering a rather dreadful headbutt from a disgruntled mountain ibix. The young man did, however, gasp, as the powerful demi-human lashed out with an oversized, white-furred hand which completely enveloped the brown-eyed lad's neck and jaw. The other children wheeled back on their hands and knees, abandoning their long-time friend as they suspected his time was upon him. White fingers probed the soft spots on the boys face, stretching skin and scrunching up facial features. The brave boy felt the tip of one of the Ibixian's great horns brush against his flesh as Ven dipped in low to meet his quarry eye to eye, and the boy finally shuddered.

“This pink little manling's face is familiar,” Venessian spoke in an inhumanly low voice. “Could it be...”

His words trailed off, mumbling to himself in tones so deep that human faculties had trouble making out the details of what he was saying. He arrived at some inaudible conclusion and released the now terrified boy's face with a sudden jerk that drew more gasps from the initiates around them. The youth recoiled from the sickly sweet scent of the goat-man's breath, gagging.

Some dark revelation took Venessian's attention away from the rest of the scribes, all clad in yellow initiates robes. He did make a brief mental note of the remaining three. A pair of adolescent twins, boy and girl, with long blonde hair on each, and athletic builds that were contradictory to their scholarly lifestyles. They hissed at each other angrily, fighting amongst themselves even in the face of true evil. Their squabbling was abrasive to the villain's ears, and a sharp CRACK of the fat man's switch put a quick end to it.

The final child was also the youngest. She could have been no more than eight years of age and was frozen with fear against a bookcase where she had fled to when the goat-man assaulted her secret crush. Her eyes were fixed to the floor and she mouthed the words of a prayer, not for her own safety, but in hopes that her peers did not notice the acrid smell in the air, or the dark patch in the fabric of her robes.

“EISERT!” Venessian spoke loudly, catching the children off guard. It was not any one of them that he summoned, however, as the large man with the switch stepped forward, casting a menacing glance to the children as he did. “This-One goes," the necromancer continued, using the third-person moniker of which he was accustomed. "Tend to our... young friends. Make sure they are primed for the ritual.”

[Venessian]

“PLEASE! No more!”

“I can't take it! I want to die!”

Such words would have normally been music to Eisert Buckley's ears, but all he found in them that afternoon, was annoyance. As soon as the peculiarly intelligent children got a sense that there was a larger purpose to their captivity, and death was not an immediate option, they had become unruly.

“Pay attention you little bastards!” Eisert, the fat jailor, roared. He rose immediately from his undersized chair which his ample cheeks had almost assimilated, crossing the five-foot distance to the semi-circle of initiates. He drew back his flabby arm, raising his beat-stick high and bringing it down with a SWOOSH through the air. He stopped just shy of the curly, brown-haired boy's brow, under strict orders to terrify, but not harm.

The clever youth had grown accustomed the song and dance, but he did flinch a little, wondering if perhaps he was starting to push the irate man past the point of obeying orders.

“What's your name, funny-boy?” Eisert demanded. It was the first time he actually bothered to learn any of their names. As far as he was concerned, they'd all be dead before the next sun-rise anyways. As a side thought, he rather hoped that Venessian would choose to animate them as undead horrors when it was all over, so he could abuse them at his leisure later on.

“Calvin,” the boy replied, doing his best to sound fearless for the benefit of his peers, but fell short as his voice wavered and cracked. He had adamantly decided from the start that he would be as uncooperative as possible, but was beginning to reconsider. The younger scholars seemed to be taking cues from him, and the last thing he wanted was for one of the younger boys or girls to receive a lashing for mimicking their leader's hubris. Eisert was quick to confirm his fear.

“Well, Calvin,” Eisert started evenly. “You seem pretty brave for a doomed little rat. But what about your brothers and sisters here? One more outburst like that, and little Goldie-Locks in the corner there will do a little jig for me on the fireplace coals. She'll still be useful with burnt feet. What do you think of that?” Eisert turned his gaze to the youngest scholar who had stripped down to her bed clothes after soiling herself.

Out of all the children present, she was obviously the most terrified as her doe-eyed expression suggested. The young girl (Amelia by name) had perhaps the most active imagination of all, which made the threats of violence seem all the more vivid. One of the blonde twins leaned in and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. The girl immediately buried her face into the offered armpit and wept for the twentieth time since the invaders had arrived.

“I think we've come to an understanding. Shall we continue then?” Eisert asked, knowing full well he would have no further issues. “Now, where was I?” The hefty tormentor returned to his metal seat and wiggled, shifting his weight on the chair which seemed intent on crawling up his bum. It was, after all, intended for children. He set his switch down on the table beside him and picked up a yellow jacketed book which showed greenish-blue splotches of water damage in the corners. The book stank of mold, but Eisert had come to like the smell after years of serving dirty drinks and food as the proprietor of a run-down pub. He skimmed through the pages, unconsciously running his fat fingers over the embossed golden letters that comprised the title of the book.

“Ah, here we are. AHEM. This one's too hot, the young girl said, burning her tongue on the steaming porridge. This one's toooo cold...”

The children groaned in unison. Calvin, who had once committed the Almanacs of Salvar AND Corone to memory, began to actually wish he was dead.