Sticky Ninja 3
A Baller Jarl
The Huntsman’s Spear
Prologue
“Gods damn it all. Just damn it all.” Although it felt out place to invoke the gods here, this was his prayer as he ran headlong. How long had he been in this place? In this world? it could have been a couple minutes or centuries since he'd seen the sun but now that he was outside running it didn't matter. He was a part of a ritual older than time itself; he was being hunted.His small shack in Bruma seemed so distant now; as if it no longer existed; his childhood, his mother. “Stay away from that group of mages Gallorn. They're just a bunch of know-it-all upstarts from Bravil.” she said, her worried eyes tired from another fruitless hunt in the imposing crags north of his hometown. Game was scarce in his area and his mother more than not came back empty handed, despite her considerable skill with a bow. After the Oblivion crisis, and the gate opening right outside Bruma there was a surplus of volunteers to join the city guard. So much so that the restrictions on funds and rations forced the captain of the guard, his biological father, to hire only the strongest, fastest and youngest of the pool. Gallorn had never met his father; he had disappeared in the mountains near cloud ruler temple when his mother was pregnant with him. Since his father had just been stationed there after graduating from the imperial academy, his mother had no friends and no family to look after her or her son. The only thing she could do was hunt the sparse wild game and pray to lord hircine for favor.
He should have listened to her and as he felt the blast from that horn again he knew that it didn't matter and that it would be all over soon. This time the sound was different it drove all same thought from him as he stood there in the open? The tall yellowed grass that almost looked burnt bent this way and that as if blown in every direction by the slightest breeze. The dark forest that he had recently escaped was now on the horizon behind him. He had to escape that horn. He had to run. It didn't matter which way.
Alkul. It was him; that sneering dunmer from solstheim. This was all his fault. He had had offered Gallorn 500 septims to join him and is posse of assorted mages and mercenaries to go to a the realm of the daedric prince Sheogorath’s and collect valuable items that were rare or nonexistent anywhere else. He assures the young nord that it was definitely not his first time to the Shivering Isles and that he knew the way back. This; however, was not what he had signed up for. As soon as he had put the ointment on his head and knelt with them at the ruin of the old oblivion gate outside his town, he knew in his gut that this was just a stupid desperate attempt from a young hungry boy who had to help his ill mother. The last thing he had heard before his world turned sideways and disappeared what Alkul, and two of his followers with toothy grins and hungry eyes turned silver rolled back into their heads, was chanting “we have returned lord. We pray your favor and happy hunting.”
His mind was quickly made up to run to what appeared to be south, for there was a lone silhouette on top of the low grassy swells that sat opposite the boughs he had escaped. In that direction the sun (if it could be called that) was setting and illuminated the entire horizon with a burnt umber tinge, and as he turned left to the river of blood coming from the mountains in the northwest that stabbed through the black clouds that plagued the sky; he knew it was watching him.
When he had first come to this world, he had been in absolute darkness for an indeterminable amount of time before hearing a voice like that of a great beast that seemed to come from above him announcing “the hunt has begun! Three hours it shall be given as our lord commands!” As he heard those words he appeared in what seemed like the center of the forest with the largest gray trees he had ever seen. They seemed almost dead, yet somehow malevolent, watchful. He wasn't helping Alkul on an adventure at all; he was his sacrifice.
He stopped his run along the red river that wasn't water at all and was making grotesque slopping sound where there would be whitecaps and rapids. Out of breath and given up. He saw now that he was surrounded. All around him there were bears some brown, some black, and some white with strange Nordic looking blue paint on their fur.
As he stood there surveying his doom, he saw the dark mounted figure he had seen on the berm. Except it wasn't mounted. What appeared like Huge Nord man covered in obscene tattoos standing no less than ten feet tall with the horns of an ox and naked except a dirty silver robe? This; however, was not what held his gaze.
It was the spear. It was a simple spear with a ash gray shaft about six feet long, with what seemed like infinite carvings of wild animals, and the crudest looking black iron shaft. The sight of it seemed to strangle Gallorn’s heart in his chest as he cowered at the stinking river’s edge, driven mad by fear, and letting out little whimpers like a dog who knows he has displeased his master. Curled up in a ball, bleeding from the tiny cuts the angry grass gave him, as he lay there in complete agony and pure fear.
He stood over him; the master of the hunt. Eyes with the purest, maddening, most completely insane bloodlust imaginable, for that after all was what he was known for wasn't it? He had trapped his prey and how it was time to fulfill the ancient ritual and feed the spear.
He didn't even feel the tiny wound as the spear touched his skull as he lay there. All he sensed was an evil invasive intelligence that tore its way into his. And for a moment as it basked there he felt himself becoming a part of it, then there was nothing. Thus ends the ritual.
