The rays of the setting sun warmed Ash’s leathery skin as the servant girl made her way, timidly, with a rattling tray. Her permanently bloodshot eyes and heavily freckled skin marked her as a Worldwalker, and while it was clear that things were not alright she really was putting on a brave face, although it was a face with a hole on one side of the nose that some piece of jewelry called home before being pawned off long ago. She glanced nervously at Ash, then his hands, with their well-used steel knuckles, as she handed him the tray. Trying to appear non-threatening doesn’t do you any good if people know you’re an individual who is heavily armed as a matter of course.

“Know anything about why I’m here?” he asked, looking at her over the rim of the tankard. She jerked her chin towards a field to the east, arms crossed across her chest, leaning against a pillar.

“That one’s called The King. Biggest field around, feeds the whole village and then some. Few days ago a couple men were on the plow, and they hit something, woke something up. Killed ‘em all, and now everyone’s too scared to set foot on The King.”

They looked out over the fields together as Ash worked on a particularly tough bite of mutton. He swallowed it with a grimace.

“Did you see it?” he asked, forking another piece into his mouth. The woman gave a small shake of the head.

“Barely. A sheep got out yesterday and wandered out before anyone could stop it. Maybe twenty feet long, tall as you are, four stubby legs. Grabbed the sheep in it’s jaws and dragged it underground.”

“What color was it?”

“I don’t know...off white, light brown maybe? I’m not sure. Big circular mouth with a bunch of appendages around it.”

Ash thought for a moment, flipping through his mental encyclopedia of monsters.

“How would you describe the appendages?”

The waitress shrugged, waving an arm off-handedly.

“Kinda armored-looking, I guess. Darker brown than the rest of it, glossy-looking.”

Ash nodded, his gaze flickering to the black-clad widow in front of the tavern. They watched her, a melancholy determination growing between them. The stewardess opened her mouth to say something, but changed her mind. It must’ve been something depressing.

Ash sat underneath an old oak at the edge of town, his back against the ancient bark. His knees were to his chest; his sword lay between them in it’s three-quarter sheath, hilt resting against his right shoulder. His quarterstaff rested against his left leg, and Ash held both weapons in the embrace of his arms, hands loosely clasped in front of him. A gentle breeze waltzed through the air, fluttering his cloak. It did little to disguise the whispering of the group of boys watching him. He ignored them, the choice experience had taught him was the best option. It was like clockwork: once they had confirmed that yes, indeed, he was the Hunter, there he is, right there, the stories, the rumors, would start. That Hunters could see in pitch blackness and through fog, that they have the strength of ten men, nay, a hundred, that their blood was green, or blue, or white, or all three somehow, or that they had no blood at all, that they were the spawn of a witch and a dragon, no, a succubus, that they feasted on the beasts they hunted, that they drank monster blood like wine, that their swords were made of asteroids and their daggers made of dragon’s teeth, that their cloaks were made of wraithskin, and so on and so forth, the rumor mill working at record speed. Occasionally, one of them was true, or at least partially so. But if you give a million chickens paintbrushes, sooner or later one of them will paint something interesting, or at least recognizable. Ash ignored them; they were still young, and free from the malice that causes bullies to goad the weak into going along with them in doing something stupid, such as throwing a rock. Young enough to see Hunters as heroes, or at least more than a necessary evil. That was the thing about Hunters. Without them things would fall apart, but they were, in a unspoken way, never exactly wanted, and certainly never ‘one of us’, whatever ‘us’ meant.