The Vile&Violent (Solo)

[Slayer]

Dan Lagh'ratham had always had a difficult time being concerned about his own mortality. Name the punishment and the injury, and he'd taken it. He remembered a time where he'd had to cram his intestines back into a belly wound. Hundreds and hundreds of times he'd felt the icy waters of the Antifirmanent lapping at his toes, but never once had he paid it any mind.

Not until he was stumbling through a silent winter forest, his skin turning a slight shade of blue, leaving a trail of blood drips and spatters of pus, that was. All his teeth were loose in his mouth, and as he struggled to keep going forward, to keep his momentum, he poked at them, from their sharp tips to the seeping gums. Every few dozen steps, he would spit out a mouthful of pink and brown slime, complete with a single tooth, like some twisted child's prize in a baker's novelty treat. His arm refused to heal, slowly crumbling away into black bits of rotted skin and meat.

The tiniest crunch came to his ears. A foot step, breaking through the rime skin of the snow. He stopped, knees wobbling slightly, and fell back into the tree he was just about to pass, and clutched his disgusting stump against his chest with one arm, peering around the gray trunk. Despite the ice creeping into his veins, sweat beaded on his forehead. Everyone knew his face. Everyone knew what he'd done, what side he'd picked, and even though he'd changed his looks and took the name Kross, he'd been discovered when the clock was ticking two minutes to midnight. Xem'zund wanted his life. The elves wanted his head. The dead wanted his skin. There was nowhere to go, no corner to back up into. He was already in the corner, a Red Beast hunted and helpless. With his strength fading fast, and the necromancer's touch pulling his teeth, there was nowhere he could go, no one he could trust.

Even some innocent out on a hunt in the woods, that never meant any harm to him.

'I'll make it fast,' he thought, reaching to a low hanging branch. It pulled away from the trunk soundlessly, like plucking a flower out of the ground, and he shaped it into a short spear with a wicked point. He ran his fingertips over it, feeling the wood grain, picturing in his head the spin to take him into the opening, and then the abrupt thrust - to heart or throat, it didn't matter. The crunching was growing closer, and he held his breath now, fearing the woodland stranger would see it puffing in thin clouds from behind his cover. His eyes narrowed as his muscles coiled, preparing, drawing some of the last of his energy.

A crunch came right from behind the tree.

Spinning on the ball of his right foot, he came around the trunk like a zephyr, splashing snow up in a great arc around him, and he thrust violently forward - and snapped off a tree branch with a loud crack that fractured his makeshift spear. The axe handle that was aimed for him did not miss though and caught him between the eyes with its own particular wet crunch, blood streaming from his swollen nose. Dan's vision vanished in a brutal starburst of white that rapidly faded to muted blues and pinks, and he barely felt the fall that knocked two more teeth loose in a spray of mucky saliva.

The Red Beast laid there in Salvar's merciless snows, limbs askew in a red spattered halo that framed the tangled black hair that radiated from his skull like a dark crown. He had enough time to see the head of the axe flash coldly in the sunlight before it fell, and the cold and the pain carried him away into quiet oblivion.