Through the tent’s fabric, the firelight produced a weak orange glow that danced with the flames and the shapes of those without. The warriors of Vangöst celebrated their victory over the Westerners with ale, meat, and women selected from the camp followers. But it had not been their victory. That dubious honour rested with the figure lying bound on the floor of the tent, grinding his teeth and clenching and unclenching his scared fists.

Tal Cádu stared through bulging eyes at the shadows flickering across the tent roof. There would be no woman coming to visit him as champion, as was his right. That would not be safe. Neither did he want company while he fought that other war inside him that ceaselessly raged. It was always so after battle. He must submit to the chains for the sake of all, for it was not unknown for the Crooked God to enter him again, and then none would be spared. In his eyes, there were only corpses yet to be made.

The Druids would return at midnight with a second draught of the wolfsbane, hemlock, and fungus concoction that they had given him after he had left the field. This one would be weaker than the first, though still strong enough to kill a normal man; it would allow him to move around and take food and drink, but it would weaken him enough that he was unlikely to fly into a killing rage. At least, that was their fervent hope. But for now, he must lie in the semi-dark and attempt to calm the thing that crawled up his spine and filled his head with a carnival of shattered bones, ripped flesh, pools of festering gore, and an appalling joy at the destruction still to be wreaked.

As always, he pointlessly cursed the day he had fallen foul of the ancient, vindictive god that used him as an instrument. That day, when full of childish bravado, he had swaggered, in the company of his friends, through the gate in the palisade wall to the field on the edge of the village. The field where the farmer’s plough had struck a rock embedded fast in the good, red soil, and in digging to remove the rock, he had discovered it to be an ancient twisted standing stone somehow sunk into the earth. Age-worn spirals were cut into it by some forgotten hand, and for a month or two, it had become the talk of the village. The elders were asked, but none knew the story of the stone. Then, a wandering holy man who arrived at the gates a week after the stone’s discovery had squatted, on the lip of the pit that had been dug, nervously fingering the bone necklace he wore and stared for some time at the portion that had been uncovered. He had called on the elders to leave the stone be, to cover it over again and to forget it. But everyone knew that the holy man was perhaps a little crazy, that he liked to take his potions and dance naked under the moon, so he left with gifts of bread and wine from some of the villagers and, casting strange glances over his shoulder, he hurriedly headed for the forests to the east.

 Tal Cádu had announced to his comrades that he would rid the field of the stone, that, in some childish way, he would be the hero of the village. The Rock Breaker he would be called, and stories would be told about him. His friends laughed, egging him on, and so, climbing down into the pit, he had managed to heft his father’s great war hammer above his head. For a moment, all time appeared to stop. The buzzing of the insects ceased, the calls of the others faded away, his very breath held in his lungs, and there, for that second of eternity, it seemed that there was something else, something somewhere waiting expectantly. He brought the hammer down against the spiral-covered stone face with all his young might. There was a sound, like the ringing of a bell in the far distance, and the head of the hammer rebounded and struck him on the forehead with a sickening thud, flinging him back against the wall of the pit. As he lost consciousness, he could have sworn that something dark and jagged unwrapped from the stone and engulfed him…

The boys had dragged him from the pit and fetched his father, who had carried him back to their long, low, timber and earth hut. The lump on his head was huge, and the flesh turned a vivid purple and then green and yellow as the days passed. The healer, who was called, washed his head with vinegar and bound it with mullion flowers mixed with sweet oil. Then blew cleansing smoke across his prostrate form and left with the less-than-reassuring words that it was in the hands of the gods. But little did they know to which god’s gentle ministrations he had been left because that is when the visions began and twisting up out of the darkness in his head had come a hunched, crooked form with a skull face of black bone like the head of some long dead giant Elk from which grew a warped tangle of antlers and spiked protrusions. The eyes in the skull were flames set on burning tar, and smoking breath came from the fleshless mouth. Long, thin arms with knotted cords of muscle like ivy vines wrapping around branches and strangling them uncovered themselves from a billowing filthy darkness that the thing wore like a cloak, and in the gripping taloned hands, it held a curved sickle as if the crescent of the moon had been dragged down into some subterranean pit.