Three Laws of Monster Hunting
Charles George
Law (1)
Only a monster can catch a monster
To modify a monster, you first need to find a monster.
For a monster hides in plain sight and in the light. But when the light is waning and darkness is ascendant, it’s at that time that you should watch your surroundings.
Hunting monsters is not for the faint of heart.
I didn’t choose it, for I was apprenticed to the only monster hunter in the region.
The region was at the edge of the forests, and it was our job to keep the monsters at bay.
“They get slippery every year,” said Master Jovi. “You need to watch your step, and when trees cry.”
I perked up my ears to hear the tell-tale signs of any trees crying. Given a test, I wouldn’t have realized how to look.
But a whiff of the forest verdure, and it went to my head, without even a semblance of holding back, I was off.
Off through the trees hacking my way through the lush vegetation—the vegetation which the monsters took glowed with a certain hue.
Or was it for my eyes alone.
I’d taken this path before the start of my apprenticeship, but the leaves were green and the tree trunks their shade of brown.
They looked the same but also different.
“Don’t just get caught in the colors,” said the monster hunter. “See beneath the color. Smell the fear beneath the colors.”
But it wasn’t enough for me at the start. For every small twig which broke, crackling in the still forest air and the fragrances of the crushed weeds attacking my nostrils, felt like a hand or clues of the monster.
“Look beneath the noise,” he said.
And I had to look beneath the noise, I had to look within.
And when I looked within, I could see the entrails of the off beaten track— the trail of the one we hunted.
Now brambles and shoots didn’t hinder my ways but became my accomplices, my spies—to tell where the hunted lay.
“It’s taken a little girl, this time,” said my master. “It brought about its doom fast enough.”
“So, are they not doomed from the start?”
His eyebrows quivered, and he said something, which stayed with me even after I became the monster-hunter. “Every living thing is sacred.”
“Even a monster!”
“For once, they were us!”
I scoffed as I read the trail, becoming focused and dissipated intent on not losing it. Intent, so much that I thought that I had lost it.
“Take a step back, Till,” said the master. “Don’t lose the forest for the trees. Don’t let your femininity deceive you.”
I closed my eyes and opened them again.
The colors of the world and the underworld were more pristine, more vibrant.
It couldn’t be said that it was a walk in my mother’s medicinal garden, but close to it.
A red hood lay on the path just out of the trees. I picked it up, and smelled a faint whiff, of a child and something sinister.
I plodded on, and I looked back, to see my master trying to catch up.
He limped. I hadn’t seen him limping before, but this was the first time I had seen him, not fully whole.
But I couldn’t slow my pace. I had to climb the steep cliff face. I had to battle the thrush to the mouth of the cave.
“Glad of you to come,” said a beautifully dressed woman, when I stepped inside the cave.
I looked hither dither, searching for the child.
She lay on the cot with her face bandaged.
“Poor child,” said the woman. “Found her just below the path. Must have lost her way.”
For they hide among us.
A sheen like no other emanated from the woman’s eyes.
“What are you doing here, my lady?” I spoke.
“Came to escape the court. This is my hideout from everything.” I grasped the hilt of my dagger.
“Why don’t you have something girl? The broth is good. Come have some.”
I smiled and though the woman’s glamor flickered and held on to reality, I took out my dagger in one fell sweep and held it close.
“I’ll put some potion on the poor child,” she said, and turned and leapt at me.
Law (2)
Only a monster can see a monster
For an instant the glamor held and like a glass shattering it broke, revealing the woman’s true form.
With hair like cobwebs and eyes as dark as coal, the witch roared, and I felt her wrath.
Wrath for having been found out.
-For not all eyes can penetrate the glamor. A glamor to behold, for the Lady Mistane
I didn’t feel a thing, as I clutched the dagger. I was swinging it to cut off the wand she had raised, and the wand flew through her hand. And I was jumping over the bubbling cauldron, and my hand was with my dagger. For both me and it was one.
Then I was standing over the witch with my dagger buried in her heart up to the hilt.
The witch’s glamor flickered, as the blood flowed out from her. For an instant she was the Lady Mistane and for an instant the hideous witch.
I heard footsteps behind me as I untied the child.
“No one would believe it,” said the monster-hunter. “The Lady Mistane.”
“Was a witch, and the reason was so many disappearances.” “Quick,” he said, panting. “Unwrap her eyes. I fear.”
I hurried and as the bandage fell off, I saw that the child was whole. She opened her eyes and then smiled at me.
Not that there weren’t repercussions for doing good and weeding out the monsters, the vacuum in the court was considerable and inadvertently may have sown the seeds of the empire’s doom.
Didn’t the empire know about Lady Mistane? But it is for another time.
In the tavern as I downed one ale after another, the master asked me, “So you could see Lady Mistane—even through the glamor.”
“As clear as daylight, master,” I said. “More,” I said as I downed another ale.
He shook his head and handed over the medal. And he said something in the old tongue.
A tongue archaic enough to be obscured—and before the time humans saw the light.
I could palely make out the words, but understanding evaded me. But deep down in the very nature of my being, I knew.
Law (3)
Only a monster can kill a monster
As days passed the master grew more distant.
On the road the master kept his distance. He foraged for food alone and didn’t share his finds.
Most of the rabbits he trapped he ate raw and slept not near the fire but in the woods.
I tried to draw closer, but he kept his distance, never venturing close.
My eyesight improved and my sense of smell more than tripled. I could not only track monsters but even animals for food.
It was my tracking skills that got us food, it was my senses which kept us on track, and it was my sight which kept us true.
Was he jealous?
He didn’t manage to do any work except the scent of a quarry, and these he found not by his senses but by something a tad different.
A network of informers.
I don’t think he could have found it in any other way. So, he used his ‘people’ element, but I had talent.
But were people keeping their distance from me or from him?
For once on the trail, I couldn’t find him. He had been behind me, keeping his distance, but I couldn’t hear his feet scrunching on the forest floor.
Yes and no, for his feet had stopped scrunching.
There was a holler in one of the villages which skirted the forest.
A hooded monster had taken a child. The tavern was crowded even during the day.
The wooden tumbler fell to the floor. I hadn’t drunk a sweeter ale, but the scent took me, and I knew I had to follow the scent.
The entire world around me dimmed—a glow with a bluish hue.
The scent took hold of me, and I rushed through the tavern, through the rock-strewn path and branches and leaves crackled below my feet as I had the scent in my sights.
My body was secondary as I ran. I only became my eyes and my sense of smell. More so, I was my eyes, and I was my sense of smell.
I could make out a subtle difference. I could make out every subtlety and go behind it. The brambles and bushes kept coming in my way, but they met the sharp edge of my dagger, and I was through, without even an ounce of effort.
Rocks and mountains couldn’t stop me—what were mere branches? What were mere shoots of trees?
And like a clearing in the forest the colors and noise inside my head cleared and I saw clearly.
The entire clearing was shorn of trees, and on a stump of a tree stood a hooded figure without a bow.
That could well have been me.
The stump of the tree, which was as big as a dining table, held a child. A child with dark red hair—the disappeared one.
The hood fell off and it was the master.
I lowered my bow, then raised it again and my aim was true.
When the arrow struck, he didn’t cry out. With a few bounds I was at the tree stump. The child shivered when I touched her.
Good, she was alive.
“This was for you, Til,” said the thing which had been my master for so many years.
“A sacrifice to increase our power,” he said. His words seemed like a floodgate opening.
More power.
“We don’t sacrifice innocents,” I said.
His words were a scowl. “Tell that to the innocents we didn’t save.” He smiled. “We sacrificed, so that your powers grew. You’ve been a good apprentice, Til Stormweather.”
His words were a blur and his movements too, and he had claimed a knife, all poised to strike the child on the tree stump.
But my movements were quicker and in a moment’s respite I took the knife from his hands and buried it to the hilt in his chest.
“You will know, Til Stormweather,” he said in his dying breath. “Only a monster can kill a monster.
The child shivered as she got up. Her face had the same hazel freckles and the bush of red hair.
“What’s your name child?” I said, as I wrenched out the dagger from my now dead master’s chest.
“Mistane,” she said.
“Welcome child to monster hunting.”