B00GIEpunk

Once long ago, in a time when myths and legends were merely rumours and word-of-mouth, a child was born in a small fishing village on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. His name is unknown - lost to the mists of time and history, like so many countless others.

He grew to adulthood in the fullness of time, gaining a love of the stories and tales his parents and elders would tell - whether they were simple stories to entertain the children, or more sophisticated tales that gave hints about deeper concepts beyond life in a simple fishing village. The man eventually married and raised two fine, healthy daughters, who in turn eventually took husbands of their own and brought grandchildren into the world. He fished and cared for his family, he told stories and entertained the village children, and for many long years he was content. He became an elder of the village, and was loved and respected by all. His hair grew long and his beard became gray, but his heart was young and full with love. Life was good.

In the sixtieth year of his life, the elder returned from the sea to find his village in flames. Raiders.

He ran to the longhouse where his family lived, and found only a smouldering, blood-splashed ruin. His head swam and his vision bled red as he took in what remained of his wife, his daughters, his grandchildren - violated, slaughtered, torn apart as though by wild beasts. The heads of his sons-in-law had been severed from their bodies and set upon pikes.

Consumed by grief and rage, he didn't even notice the two men walking up behind him and laughing - then the iron hilt of a crude sword smashed into the back of his head, and everything went dark.

When the elder regained his senses, he found himself on the back of a cart, bound hand and foot along with three of the younger men from his village, being taken through an unfamiliar forest. A large keep squatted in the distance, low and menacing. They had been taken far north from their destroyed village, deep into lands controlled by the Kurgans - a savage warrior tribe who had followed the mighty Volga River south from their homeland, seeking conquest.

The captors dragged the four prisoners before their master, the lord of the keep - a man who ruled not by respect or example, but by casual cruelty, delegating violence as easily as breath.

With a bored flick of his hand, the three younger men were dismissed and hauled away to whatever fate awaited them. The elder alone held his attention - not out of mercy, but amusement. The quiet fury smouldering in the old man’s eyes pleased him.

On a whim, the lord decreed that the elder would spend the remainder of his life telling stories to his children: a grasping brood born of wives, servants, slaves, and any woman unfortunate enough to have drawn his attention.

And thus the days passed - telling tales for the amusement of a pack of puling, ungrateful brats and their yawning attendants. The elder, now known only as 'the storyteller' (for there were none left alive, save himself, that knew the name his parents had bestowed upon him) told his tales in a blank voice, reciting the words from the depths of the shrivelled, blackened heart that had died along with his family.

Many were the times the storyteller contemplated simply taking his own life and joining his family, so he could be free of these foul people who were like a cancer in his heart.

And yet . . . and yet the rage that had burned in him continued to smoulder, biding its' time. He would tell the younger of the lord's children simple, harmless bedtime stories to quiet their dreams and give them peaceful sleep, while he turned his attention to the eldest child of the lord - a pampered, vain man who was every bit his father's son. No bedtime stories for this little lordling, oh no. The sins of the father would be visited upon the son, and repaid a thousand-fold.

In the dead of night when the keep lay silent, the storyteller would make his way into the lordling's chamber and whisper into his ear as he slept. Night after night, in a hissing voice filled with spite, he filled the lordling's sleeping hours with untold terrors and unspeakable nightmares.

The change in the young man was subtle at first - he would appear tired in the mornings and listless through the day. As time passed, the lordling became more and more cowed, eyes constantly darting, jumping at shadows. Nervous twitches and tics would run rampant across his body, and he developed a stammer - only slight at first, but becoming more and more pronounced each day. Meanwhile, the storyteller waited for the perfect moment.

At last that moment came. After three months of nursing and nurturing the lordling's terrified paranoia, the time was right. On a night when the moon hid its face from the world as though it knew what was about to happen, the storyteller crept silently into the lordling's chamber one final time. He told the lordling a tale he had woven about horrifying demons and devils that wore the faces of children to lure their siblings and parents to a gruesome and grisly end. As always, the storyteller poured every ounce of his fury and hatred into the words he whispered, but this time . . . this time his words held the tingle of a newly-awakened power within him - power fuelled by pure rage, honed razor-sharp by dark malice.

The lordling woke screaming. Leaping from his sweat-soaked bower and pushing the storyteller to the floor, he ran to the keep's scullery and armed himself with a cleaver - a flat piece of iron with its' edge dulled from cutting through meat to prepare the lord's victuals. He then ran to the bedchambers of his ill-gotten brothers and sisters, and did the only thing he could - to stop the devils, to save his father, to save his people . . .

But the lordling's screams had awoken the keep. As the horrified lord and his staff and attendants came upon the giggling, blood-splashed lordling, guards had been dispatched to the lordling's bedchamber, where they found the storyteller on the floor, breathing heavily. He was dragged by the scruff of the neck to where everyone had congregated, because what was a slave doing in the bedchamber of their lord's son?

As both guards and captive beheld the scene, understanding blossomed between them like a drop of blood in clear water - and the storyteller began to laugh.

Quietly at first, then louder, until great wheezing bellows shook his broken frame.

The lordling, mistaking the storyteller's laughter for shared triumph, laughed as well.

"Yes!" he cried. "You knew, storyteller. You knew the truth, and you chose me to carry it - to save us all. These vile fiends would have slaughtered us, eaten our flesh, drunk our blood, crunched our bones. Your stories showed me what hides behind the veil of the world . . . and I have used that knowledge to deliver us from evil!"

Madness danced in his eyes.

The lord simply drew a dagger from his belt, walked to his son, and drove it into the boy's heart as he embraced him, his eyes flat and dull. Then he turned his gaze to the storyteller.

"What have you done, old man?" the lord asked in a low, dangerous growl.

The storyteller's laughter mocked him.

"The blood of my people called for a reckoning, and now blood is paid. You took everything from me, and now . . . now I've taken everything from you. The scales have been balanced. Do what you will."

The punishment the storyteller earned for his crime passed into legend, a dark tale told by parents at night to frighten their children into obedience.

They stripped him, bound him to a crude cross, and broke his body until nothing remained but pain. Sight was taken from him, then mercy, then even the shape of a man. His wounds were opened and salted, and into his flesh they burned the word чорт, so the earth would know what it was meant to swallow. At last, the lord ordered him wrapped in a filthy shroud and buried alive.

In the days that it took for the storyteller to die, he simply recited the stories he knew by heart, over and over, whisper-slurring the words through a shattered jaw and torn lips. The words comforted him, helping him forget his agony as his life faded.

Finally, the storyteller's body surrendered to the inevitable. The slurred whispering faded into silence, and the storyteller breathed his last.

But as any good storyteller knows, there is power in words.

Not the crude power of force or command, but the slow, inexorable power of repetition - of ideas spoken often enough that they begin to shape the world around them.

The power the storyteller had drawn upon for his revenge did not abandon him in death. It followed him.

When his body finally failed and the whispering ceased, the soul of the storyteller did not pass on. It was caught, suspended, wrapped in the accumulated weight of every tale he had ever told - every myth, every warning, every horror shared in the dark to make sense of a cruel world.

Words gathered around him . . . not as a prison, but as structure.

The spirit rose from the ruin of its desecrated flesh, no longer bound to it, yet not entirely divorced from what it had once been. Memory clung stubbornly to him - the shape of hands, the cadence of breath, the echo of a heartbeat long stilled.

He did not become a faceless thing.

He became intent given form.

The stories shaped him as much as he shaped them, knitting memory and meaning into a body that was neither living nor dead. A wraith made manifest - eyes burning with the same fire that had once carried his grief, his rage, and now his understanding.

This form was not disguise nor punishment.

It was a choice.

When the storyteller opened his eyes, the fire within them was no longer uncontrolled fury, but something colder and far more enduring. He opened his mouth, and the voice that emerged carried the weight of centuries yet to come.

In that voice, resonant across the gulfs of time, he said only:

"I can work with this."

And so the storyteller stepped away from the world of humans, becoming B00GIEpunk - not a monster, not a god, but a fixed and immutable constant.

The chronicler of humanity's darker truths.

After all, even the terrors in the night need someone who remembers their names.