The village of Duskmoor was the kind of place forgotten by time. Hidden beyond bramble-thick paths and stone-clawed cliffs, it lay in a hollow where ash trees whispered to the wind, and smoke curled from thatch-roof chimneys like prayers to an indifferent sky.
They feared what lay beyond the woodline. They feared the old blood, the curses carried in certain names. They feared the beasts who howled beneath red moons.
But not as much as they feared the boy without a past.
He arrived one winter—naked, nameless, and unclaimed. Just a child standing barefoot outside the elder's hut, frost on his lashes and not a tremble in his limbs. He was perhaps five winters old.
"Was he abandoned?" asked one.
"No," whispered Old Mira, the village healer. "No prints in the snow. Not even his own."
Some called him a demon-child. Others, a spirit in flesh. But it was Mira who named him:
Kael.
She raised him as her own, though no bloodline tied them.
Kael never cried. Never laughed. Spoke rarely. But he listened—always listened. He mimicked the hunters' stances, studied the farmers' hands, watched how the healer stirred her herbs counterclockwise.
His eyes were far too sharp for a child.
His silence felt too intentional.
He worked hard, accepted little. Slept light. Watched the woods.
And one day, he began setting traps.
Not the simple nooses other boys made for hares. Kael built his own. Crude at first—tangled wire, carved bone, sharpened stakes hidden under rotting leaves.
Mira caught him once, dragging a carcass into the trees.
"What are you doing, boy?"
Kael looked up at her, his dark eyes unreadable. "Learning," he said.
That was the only answer she ever got.
---
Then came the beast.
They called it the Hollow-Tusk—a mutated direboar, twisted by old blood and deeper corruption. It left claw marks the size of a grown man's chest and gutted livestock with surgical precision.
Three hunters disappeared trying to track it.
It never came close to the village center. But Kael saw it once—just once—at the edge of the forest, beneath moonlight fractured by the canopy.
It stood taller than any man, with black, spiraled tusks and rotted plates of bone fused to its shoulders. Its eyes glowed faintly red. It exhaled steam and hunger.
Kael didn't scream.
He didn't run.
Instead, he watched it vanish into the dark—and smiled faintly.
---
For the next seven nights, he disappeared during dusk and returned just before dawn. Mira scolded him. He didn't reply. The villagers assumed he was hiding from fear.
They were wrong.
Kael had been building. Preparing. Baiting.
His final trap was a nightmare of spiked pits, concealed spears made from scavenged tools, and a pressure-triggered snare strung with coiled sinew. He used offal and blood to bait the site. Even smeared his own skin with rot to mask his scent.
And it worked.
The Hollow-Tusk fell into the trap.
Kael heard its scream—raw, feral, betrayed by pain.
He ran. Not away—but toward it.
By the time he arrived, the beast was thrashing in agony. Its hind leg was skewered, its side pierced by splinters of steel and bone. One tusk snapped. Blood pooled in the snow like ink.
But its eyes still burned with murder.
Kael approached slowly. Carefully.
The creature roared—its voice more than just animal. There was something… aware in it. Something ancient and wrong.
It snarled, trying to pull free.
Kael crouched beside it. He stared, unmoving, while the Hollow-Tusk glared back in a mixture of fury and disbelief.
And then… he reached out.
His fingers touched the beast's throat.
There were no fangs. No blades. No sorcery.
Just hunger.
The kind that pulled essence, not flesh. The creature's power—its memories, instincts, hatred, and strength—drained into him like smoke through a crack in the world.
Its body decayed faster than normal death. Its bones crumbled. Its flesh peeled away in flakes. What was left was... silence.
Kael stood slowly.
His eyes glinted like silver in moonlight. His muscles twitched with new knowledge. He could hear the birds half a mile away. Smell the iron beneath soil. Feel the way his blood moved faster now—more aware.
And something else.
Something deeper.
The thrill of it.
He didn't know what he was.
But he knew he would never be the same.
He glanced at the broken trap, then at the bones behind him.
The villagers couldn't know.
Not yet.
He covered the site with snow, buried what remained. Then he walked back through the trees—unafraid, unshivering.
Mira was waiting at the door, candle in hand. "Where have you been?" she asked.
Kael paused.
"Learning," he said again.
And as he lay on his mat that night, eyes open, listening to the wind…
Something inside him whispered.
More.