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The boy followed the worn path that disappeared into the spectral shadows of the forest. The same path his father, Lord Praecepsia as he was known to the common folk, had taken minutes before, his fading footsteps still cast in freshly fallen snow. The trees shivered in the wind, their white limbs, thick with hoarfrost, sending a flurry down upon the baron as they loomed like old, wary guards, watching him.Daringhim to go further.
He didn’t care about the cold, nor the thick, numb sensation that tingled his cheeks and palms. The rage that burned inside of him could’ve ignited the surrounding forest, if not for what little control still simmered beneath the surface.
Lights from the small hovel at the end of the path flickered across the surrounding trees. The sickly aura of betrayal on the air stirred his gut as he neared, his muscles flexing, spoiling for violence. The very thought of blood on his hands, that copper tang burning his tongue, had him fighting the inexplicable urge to piss himself.
His mother had warned him to control those dark, unnatural impulses, but the boy couldn’t help the venom that coursed through him. The blackness that consumed him every time he so much as thought of what his father might be doing right then.
A wolf bayed in the distance. An owl, perched on an overhead branch, watched him as he passed. And if the stories told by the village venators, or hunters, held any merit, surely, something dangerous lurked in the woods beyond. Yet, nothing could pull his attention from the small, frosted window, where he could just make out the blurred forms of two people inside.
He needed to see for himself. To lay his suspicion to rest with the truth.
As he neared with his dagger in hand, he took light steps up the wooden porch, to avoid creaking the tired wood. The images through the opaque glass moved fervently and the sounds of moans echoed from inside.
The boy breathed on the glass, the heat melting the surrounding frost, and he peered through the tiny viewing portal he’d made. His stomach gurgled, the fury in his chest expanding and pressing against his ribs.
Beyond the window, his father stood naked and hunched over his own sister, fucking her against the wooden table. She held an apple lodged in her mouth, her hands bound behind her back.
Having just turned sixteen years of age, the baron had been exposed to sexual acts himself, and he was well aware that to take a woman from behind, like an animal, was forbidden by the church. The very church that held his father in such high regard.
Shadows played on the walls, sexual scenes not matching the movements of the two, like some kind of lewd gathering, yet no one else seemed to be present in the room. Only the dark formations moving in the telling signs of sex. Whatever the shadows mimicked could not be seen. And in his distraction of them, the boy failed to immediately notice a shift in the room. The way the light dimmed.
The frost thickened on the pane. The eyes of his aunt turned white, as her irises rolled back into her head.
His father’s movements turned abrupt and aggressive, the way he twitched and curled his fingers into her milk-white flesh, springing drops of blood from beneath his fingernails. He bared his teeth, and what happened next seared itself into the boy’s brain.
What looked like long, black tentacles protruded from his father’s body, some of which wound tightly around the woman’s thighs and the legs of the table, holding her open. Another disappeared between the cheeks of her buttocks, moving in and out of her in the same rhythm as his father prodded her from behind. Yet another wrapped around her throat and, by the telling redness of her face, tightened.
A subtle movement of the older male’s arm drew the boy’s eyes toward black scales moving across his skin and catching a glint of light.
A monster.
Breath sawed in and out of the baron as shock hooked its claws into his lungs. What in God’s name! A disembodied voice told him tolook away, but he could not. To divert his attention might suggest that what lay before his eyes was real, but surely that could not be so. For he had seen some terrible things in his lifetime, albeit nothing so vile and absurd. The very abomination and sin, for which Bishop Venable had whipped and tormented countless others in the village. Perhaps he would have whipped the baron, as well, because there were things, queer things, that had happened to him on a few occasions. Inexplicable occurrences that defied human ability, or reason. Occurrences he would not dare speak of, lest he wanted to be dissected like the boys who, before him, had drawn Bishop Venable’s conjectures.
His ability to capture lightning in his palm without burning his flesh, for one, would’ve surely spurred rumors throughout all of Praecepsia. And to lift boulders four times his size and hoist them well above his head. To stop time and observe objects floating in air, as if suspended by invisible strings. He knew all these aberrations about himself, and that the world did not always follow human expectations of it, and still, as he stood frozen on that porch, staring into the scene beyond the window, the cold gnawing of shock left him pondering all the many things he did not yet understand.
His father had always been a beast, a cruel and wicked man, but the young baron could never have imagined the depths of his depravity. That he could physically transform into a thing of nightmares. It wasn’t possible.
He had to have been dreaming.
In spite of the cold, the baron felt a chill across the back of his neck, and he moved a step away from the glass, but not far enough to shield his view. A tickle of disgust flittered inside his chest as he watched something slither across the inside of his aunt’s belly. It took only a moment to realize the tail-like structure had slithered its way down her throat.
What a godless aberration!The limb that blocked her mouth moving inside her belly!
The knife fell from his hand on a clang.
His father’s head snapped in his direction.
Black, beady eyes stared back at him through the glass, and the baron backed away further, tripping over the stairs of the porch. Cold, wet snow sloshed beneath his palms, as he tumbled onto his back, never taking his eyes off the window. The shadowy form of his father appeared there, the tentacles slinking back from wherever they’d come and tucking into his body. Even across the small distance from the porch, the boy could see his father’s eyes had returned to their usual color, and branches of ice-cold fear snaked beneath his skin.
He slid backward, farther away from the small house, and ran as fast as his legs would carry him into the dark woods. Chilled air burned his lungs and fire claimed the muscles in his legs. The knotty branches and bracken of the forest bed reached out for his legs, digging their ligneous claws into his skin.
The moon sat high overhead, its faint, silvery beams offering little more than slivers of light across an untrodden path. Still, the baron kept on, the chaos in his mind evolving from fear to rage.
There was no one he could tell, not a soul in Praecepsia who would believe such a thing. His father was almost as respected as Bishop Venable. To accuse would result in punishment. In being taken down into one of the undercroft dungeons, like the other boys who were never seen again.
No. He would never speak of it, that much he vowed. But he would need to protect his mother at all costs.
He would kill the evil bastard for the pain he’d caused her. The misery he’d inflicted on the kind and benevolent soul, who grew weaker with each passing day. The insult she suffered, every time she’d been forced to lay eyes on the boy’s cousin, Drystan, and could undoubtedly make out the resemblance of her husband and his sister.
