Errant

It started when you recovered from your illness.

Or perhaps when you got sick in the first place, or…well, really it began the day you first picked up sword and shield again. Not that you’d have changed that: life as a knight is the only thing you ever wanted. It was—it is, it still is—your honor to defend the folk of the kingdom. To hunt down the unclean things that steal through the dark. It’s a difficult task; the forces of the crown are spread thin these days, and you’re the only appointed knight in the surrounding villages. With the increasing reports of witches and night things about the borders, you’ve been overworked ever since you took the post.

How long has it been? Shit, about a decade. Too long and with too little rest.

It was no wonder that you fell ill. Three weeks were spent wracked with fever and shakes, but hey, it was the first vacation you’d had in years. Little pins and needles skittered across your muscles at night, and you were reminded of a bout of sickness as a child: of the healer who hand laid hands on you and sent power needling, buzzing through your body, cleansing the infection of your blood. It felt like little humming darts of electricity, and decades later, you feel it aga—no. Not magic, you had chided yourself. It can’t be.

You didn’t want to even consider it. Arcane contamination was…it was a horror story. It happened to other people. It couldn’t happen to you. Seriously, it couldn’t, because you’re the only knight in this town. Who the hell else was going to do your job? You had to get better. You HAD to.

So you did. Eventually. Eventually you were able to stand from bed. Answer the frantic knocking on your door. Put on your armor and heft a blade. Do your job again, as always.

And then you noticed the…wrongness.

Small things, initially. At first, you honestly just felt better than before: the sun seemed brighter (a little too bright, actually—your eyes only found comfort in the shadows), the sounds and smell of the town more vibrant, the armor on your back more comfortable and right than ever before. You chalked it up to three weeks in near isolation. Whatever. You were just happy to return to your tasks; there’d been a string of new witch attacks the last few weeks, and the creature had gone from dragging off lambs to dragging off people. Probably some low-key village wix who’d meant to take advantage of your downtime, you thought sourly.

Then one of Potter’s boys had fallen into a den of pale, dead, scuttling things (we told him, we TOLD him not to play in grave fields, his father wept) and you’d gone down to purge the lot of them. They were not particularly strong revenants, but they were quick, and you found yourself deeply regretting the decision to wear your normal plate mail. One sprang at you, and even though you knew you’d never react fast enough under such a heavy load, you threw yourself to the side…

And made it, landing fluidly atop a sunken gravestone. The undead thing squelched harmlessly into a wall. You froze for a second, crouched catlike, more graceful than anyone in full plate had any right to be. Like it was part of you. A natural encumbrance.

Seizing your moment of confusion, the wights had rallied, and you had no time to think further as you were forced into a swift retreat.

Later, the townspeople were easily convinced to stuff the den with tarred hay (during daylight, of course) and burn the creatures out. A costly measure, but they were willing. “Seeing you shaken so badly is reason enough,” confided one. “They must be horrible to give you such a fright!”

You don’t tell them why you really came out of the pit pale and shaking and sweat-drenched.

You go home early that day, dread boiling in your gut. When you take your armor off, your skin peels and bleeds, reluctant to be unmarried from its shell. It’s so obvious to you now. The slight strangeness to your body, like when you went through a growth spurt as a kid. The discomfort that stripping off your armor brings you. The faint purr of need inside you, unslaked by either food or drink.

In training, some of the instructors took it upon themselves to scare the shit out of new recruits.

One old woman, her skin twisted with layers of dragonfire burns, sat you all down on a cold night to spin a yarn from when she was a squire. Her first master, she said, was one of the finest in the realm. He was known as The Lion for both his coat of arms and fierce temper. He’d hunted his quarry tirelessly, forgoing marriage and home in favor of his duties. His few friends would often joke that he might as well marry one of the lizards, as he spent more time pursuing their company than he did with other humans.

One day he set out after a flight of dragons deep in the wild and vanished. She looked and looked, but eventually returned the crown empty-handed, and was given a new master to train under.

“And years later,” she’d growled, peering around the fire, “Years later I saw him again. Just once.”

She’d been pursuing a dragon herself. When she came to it—its head draped limply across a broken tree—she could only look in ill horror at the clicking, snapping shape tearing into its still-sizzling innards. Metal gauntlets warped into delicate, scale-peeling claws. A dim glow of inferno trapped behind a tarnished breastplate that seared cherry-red, hotter and hotter, as the thing fed on the dragon’s magic.



A half melted lion insignia emblazoned on steel, hideously familiar.

She’d ended the story at that, leaving everyone to digest the implications. Arcane contamination. Not something you wanted to fuck around with. Take time away from the field, the veterans would be quick to remind, and never fight a magical beast if the stink of the last one is still on you.

As if you’d ever had much of a chance to do that. Later that night a knock comes on the door again, as always, and you answer the frantic rapping quickly. Again. As always.

You try. You really, really try.

You tell people you’re still healing, still weak. You schedule a trip to the capital to see a doctor—but the waiting list is long, and after some contemplation, you cancel the appointment. You already KNOW what the doctor will say because there’s only one thing you can do at this point: halt further exposure. Completely. There’s no cure after your blood devours that much magic, only the hope of arresting further progression. Your body is like a powderkeg primed to blow; any more contamination could set you off, warping you into some nightmare within hours.

An errant spell. The touch of a fae. That’s all it might take. You’d have to quit working, quit protecting, entirely. And for a while, you try. You truly do try.

But the knock comes at your door. Again. Always.

Carrol lost a cow, dearly needed by his poor family. A were-thing, most likely. The night is spent hunting, ambient magic of the deep forest tingling at your fingers.

Margot’s daughter breathes shallowly, the cool touch of the grave lingering over her. Witch’s curse. You do not find the culprit, but you spend three days looking.

Vevette weeps over the upturned grave of her husband, and the dead must be avenged for the living’s sake, so you track down the ghoul responsible.

Hendre dies. You butcher the basilisk found lurking over his corpse and sheath your sword with shaking hands, resisting the urge to lap blood from the blade.

Every time, you tell yourself that it’s the last. That you won’t answer the door again. You’re sick. You shouldn’t do this.

But every time the knock comes, you rise to greet it.

“It’s Cal,” whispers Patton. The young man’s hair is dripping sweat and he won’t meet your eyes. “He told me…God, it was her, it was the witch, and he told me to run, he’d lead her off, he knows the forest—“ His voice falters as his face twists in guilt.

It’s night, because it’s always night when this shit happens to you. You don’t have much trouble imagining what Cal and Patton were getting up to in the woods at this hour—try as they might to hide it, their clumsily sweet flirtations were hardly any secret. Hell, you’ve actually got to go; no one would blame you for writing him off as dead, but Cal was an experienced woodsman, and if you didn’t do it, Patton would certainly get himself killed taking matters into his own hands.

You tell him to grab your sword for you as you buckle together your greaves. He does so with stammered thanks that you cut short with a curt order to fetch the town medic. And maybe the coroner, too. You have no idea what you’ll find, but Cal will be lucky if he’s in one piece. Patton nods and takes off at a run out the door, face pale and tense.

The woods are cool and almost comforting, though your nerves sting at every little sound. The moon is full. Lucky; you can get away with no torch to give away your presence. It isn’t hard to trace Patton’s wild running path through the forest, and you creep along the trail of broken branches deeper and deeper into the woods.

Honestly, you get that these men liked their privacy, but couldn’t they cavort a little closer to civilization? You’d think that the exciting variety of flesh-eating nightmares in this part of the world would inspire a little more caution.

The thought is barely out of your head when a faint wheeze sounds to your right. You practically jump out of your skin. Whipping around, you see the shaken face of Cal peering up at you from the end of the trail. His cheeks are torn with bloody gashes, and you can see defensive wounds clustering his bare forearms. One foot is clearly twisted, but it seems like he was still forced to run on it.

Of course. She was toying with him. He looks terrified, but he’s fortunate—if the witch hadn’t felt like playing with her food tonight, he’d be a lot worse off.

Cal silently points behind you. You know what he’s gesturing at just from the expression on his face. You make a quick ‘go’ motion, and he gets the hint, staggering to his feet.

He runs in a hobble, disappearing into the woods in front of you. The back of your neck prickles.

You turn to her.



She’s a familiar face, surprisingly, and the feeling of childish betrayal nips at you. You hate it when it’s people you know. Vella, her name was. A friendly and witty travelling merchant. You’d share drinks with her and friends whenever she’d come to town. Now, half shadowed under the forest canopy, her eyes reflect animal-green. Her face is impassive. There is an unnatural slackness to her stance, half eerie limpness, half easy confidence.  Sharp, dark fingers tap at her sides, and you remember the long grooves marring Cal’s cheek. You know she’s strong—a weak witch would show at least a little wariness to your cold steel, and she’s got not an ounce of tension in her. She’s had this fight before, you realize uneasily.

Her fingers crook slightly, and it’s the only warning you get as she lurches forward, an inhumanly fast twitch that covers yards of distance. You barely raise your sword to catch the ebon claws darting to your helmet.  What little of your face that shows must betray your alarm, because she allows herself a brief expression: a smile, revealing teeth too tiny, too flat, and too many.

The sword spins from your hand and her arms are around you. They are vice-like, stronger than any man or woman of natural strength, and your armor creaks under the strain. She pulls you tight, smile widening into a smirk, and she says—she says…she

You don’t catch what she says, actually. There’s a calculated mockery to her tone (Vella is always so quick with a barb) as she drags you in, but you are only distantly aware of it. Her throat gleams silver in the full moon, pulse fluttering, and you can smell her: iron and ozone, blood and magic. It twists low in your belly like acid and desperation and a hot needle of want. You lean into her and her lip quirks, a second of confusion as her prey acts so strangely—

—and, a second too late, realization.

Sound seems to drain away from the world. Hands pound heavily at your breastplate, denting it. Then weakly so, the impact barely moving you. Fingers scrabble at the forest floor. Her mouth moves with an uncastable spell, profane words hushed by dark bubbles of fluid.

A human, you can imagine her clever voice saying, sardonic and annoyed. Bested by a human!

Well, no. That wasn’t entirely fair. You certainly were human when you set out tonight, when you fought, when you fell upon her.

But what stands up from the ground is decidedly not.





You’d expected…you’d expected to feel different. Madness. A wash of cruel thoughts. Aggression like a wild, rabid animal, for your filthy animal sins. But it’s not that. It’s not…right. Instead, you feel…you feel…

Relief. Oh, god.

It hits you all at once: that steel-tight hunch in your shoulders. The low hum of fear in the back of your mind. The shame. The shame. How many weeks, how many months had you borne it all in silent dread?

It’s gone. It’s just GONE. You’ve crossed the line. There’s no point in those thoughts anymore. No going back. Your breath catches in a little half-sob as that understanding sinks in, as the weight melts from you in glorious release. It shouldn’t feel so good, but…

Wetness cools your face, and you remember to close your mouth, flinching slightly at the new, alien glide and click of the jaw. You can feel a humming in your bones. The soft tingle of magic stirred to action by bloody catalyst, a dam broken after years and years of slowly crumbling foundations. You realize that your body is going to feel a lot more alien very, very soon, and fear threads its way back into you. What the hell are you going to do now?

The coppery, wine-rich scent of blood and fading magic drifts up from the cooling corpse at your feet, and you suddenly register that your earlier dalliance was far from truly satisfying. Well. Alright. You suppose that’s an acceptable short-term answer to your question. Hunger curls around your gut as you kneel, hesitating a moment before clumsily hefting the witch’s carcass up against your knee and bending over a gore-drenched shoulder. You feel a flicker of nerves, all of the sudden—but then it’s vanished, dissolved in the scent of still-warm blood and ozone. Your jaws slide open almost of their own accord.

Oh, that’s better. That’s so much better.

You idly recall, as teeth strip a pane of flesh from shoulder bone, that Vella had once spoken of her family: “All in the same business as I,” she had said slyly, the mischief in her eyes only now making sense. Perhaps they’re also as ill-minded towards normal folk as she. You’ve not lost your morals (well, not entirely), but if one must transgress…hm.

You lick a splash of blood from your glove. Silver gleams in a patch of moonlight not far away, and you eye your sword thoughtfully. What more does a knight need to survive, really? A sword. A purpose. And if you can no longer carry out your purpose here, you might as well fulfil it elsewhere. Perhaps now you can be truly unfettered in your hunt of unclean creatures. Vella’s family hailed from Cainsbury, you remember. A small woodland settlement. Plenty of places for you to hide as you, eh, figure things out.

And…your mind drifts back to minutes ago, when you drank deep of hot gore and searing, fresh power. Ah, such a waste to pause your meal and allow the heat of life to dissipate. Next time you won’t do that.

Bone cracks between your teeth. The head flops back, tendons barely stringing the meat together. Really, it’ll be the same as it always has: you and them. Hunter and prey. Again, as always.