POV: Errol Nikolicai, 23 year old human/1 year old Forsaken

You ask me when it all started? I can remember it with the same enjoyment as the first time. It started when I was 14, when that dirty, old, queer Dwarf decided it was time to make a man out of me. I was able to scalp his beard and head all in one piece, and I kept it for quite some time.

But no, it really started when I was younger, probably around 6 years old. It was shortly after the end of the Third War, and violence was rampant. Orphans were common, and that's where I found myself, raised in an orphanage in a small village in Westfall. One day, we were outside playing when we accidentally tipped over a small merchant's cart. Some mining equipment fell from the top and struck our pet, a mangy old dog. It was heavily bleeding, and lied there whimpering pitifully, pinned by a pickax in it's back leg. The other kids screamed and ran to get the matron, but me? I was entranced. The sight of the blood, the smell of gore starting to leak from the wounds in it's abdomen. It was the most fascinating thing I had ever seen.

Nothing really happened after that, I got older, kept to myself, those images ingrained in my head, my own dark fantasy. I knew I was different than the other kids because of it. When we reached about the age of 12, the matron really stopped watching us as much, and I took off to Stormwind, tired of feeling alone. I lived on the streets, stealing to put food in my belly, but then I got my hands on a dagger. It was then that I realized that I could sneak up on animals, kill them, and use them for food. And even better, the forests outside of Stormwind were plentiful. I was so eager to do it the first time. I felt drunk with arousal. It became a fun game to chase down a rabbit or stray piglet and make them panic, make them fear for their lives before I gleefully killed them.

It was about that time the Dwarf found me one evening in a small alley in the Dwarven District. He grabbed me with his grubby hands and forced me against the wall and tried to have his way with me. His height was comparable to my own, but he was very strongly built. When I resisted him, he made his mistake. He hit me, hard, knocking me away from him and to the ground. My vision went red as I drew my dagger and dove at him, taking him by surprise. I was lucky I didn't get caught, my laughter was so loud as I plunged the blade into his gut repeatedly until my hands were slipping off the bloody hilt. His breathing was raspy, his eyes glazing over, but I made him look at me, I saw the fear in his eyes, the surprise, the regret...and I loved it. Oh gods how I loved it. Sex wouldn't even come close to the pleasure I found in the blood. As he lay there dying, I proceeded to skin his scalp like he was one of my animal toys. I giggled with glee as he squirmed in pain, too weak from blood loss to be able to fight back.

After that night, the animals became boring. They still made good food, but the fun was gone. Other people, which Stormwind was in no short supply, of became the new desire. And, being young, scrawny, and otherwise pitiful looking, it was easy to pull on the heart strings of some naive adult and to get them alone. Once we were alone, they found out that I was a child in body only, for my mind had become that of a predator. One day, however, my plan backfired. The person I was luring turned out to have the same desires I did. He wanted to torture me. When he discovered my tastes, he offered me a place of refuge, his gang of bandits, the only one at the time that didn't have a name.

They were a small group, and they ran the gamut of races and ages (though I was by far the youngest), but we all shared one thing in common: the love of causing fear. Pain. Death. I was 16 when I first joined, proving myself by killing a whole family in a small town Westfall by night. They fostered my love and taught me new skills: how to fight with a sword and fists, how to stalk people, new methods of torture, and my favorite thing of all, explosives. I took to the tinkering taught to me by our resident Gnome like a natural and made new devices to foster the cause; arrows that had hollow tubes so the wound just bled, spike traps hidden in innocuous items, and all sorts of interesting explosive traps. My favorite method was to catch a small child running in the woods outside their house, attach a timed bomb to their chest and let them go running, screaming and sobbing, to their unsuspecting parents. Oh, the panic caused by that never lost its fun.

We ran roughshod through Westfall, tearing down whole small hamlets, raping and murdering whole families. We were careful, and took steps to make some of the attacks look like Defias, who seemed to have no problem accepting the credit for the attacks. They were in it for power and glory, we were in it for fun, so we let them have it. Though, thinking back on it, they never took credit for my favorite trick, and I suppose even the Defias had their limits.

This went on for several years, but all things must end, I suppose. We tended to go our separate ways at times, as competing for victims and sharing in the events grew tiresome and you would long for the joys of doing things one on one. It was during one of these times that I was visiting the merchants in a small village near the border between Darkshire and Westfall, getting some basic supplies. One of the other members of our group, the same Gnome that taught me my tinkering, had started to lose his nerve, and he decided to put a stop to us. Nothing like being pointed out in a crowd as the man who had raped, tortured, killed and mutilated several families the month before. This village was too small to have any real guards to arrest me, and at hearing who I was, at learning that the monster they feared had a name, that Errol Nikolicai was responsible for their pain, the crowd decided to take justice into their own hands.

I can honestly say that I wasn't even afraid. They grabbed me and beat me and bound my hands together, and I just laughed. They led me towards the border, beating and whipping me as we went, to a grove of old growth trees, and as they did, I continued to laugh and proceeded to confess my deeds, telling them in full, gory detail how their relatives begged and whimpered and suffered at my hands. Soon, a butcher who had come from his shop, cleaver in hand, decided to shut me up. He knocked me to the ground and positioned my head over a rock that stuck out of the ground, seeming to offer the perfect cutting board. He took one swipe and took my jaw clean off. I howled in pain for a few seconds, letting them have some satisfaction before I resumed my laughing or the closest, wet gurgling sound I could make to it.

They lead me to a tree and pulled a wide leather strap across my neck. They realized a rope wouldn't work thanks to my missing jaw, but with the blood flowing down, the belt from a local militia man would work. It was several inches wide and lined with rabbit fur. How ironic that the same type of animal I had skinned and tortured as a child would now play a role in my death. The belt clung tightly to my neck and they proceeded to lynch me, cheering as they hoisted me up and watched me suffer. The world slowly grew dark as the blood loss and the lack of oxygen too my life. I felt my legs distantly stop twitching as the darkness over too me...

That should have been it. And in a just world, it would've been, but the plague of the Scourge still ran rampant and a year or so after my death, found itself into my shallow grave not far from where I was hanged. The one person who all of Westfall was happy to see dead, and who shouldn't have returned, came back. I awoke and felt pulled, felt compelled by orders I didn't quite understand. I fought the voice away, though it took me the whole night to do it and I almost ripped myself apart trying.

As the sun rose that day, everything came back to me. I remembered who I was, what had happened to me, and I tried to laugh. Instead I made a made a strange raspy noise. I laughed just the same with the realization of what I was and what I was now able to do. Thanks to that damn Gnome, they had hunted down and eliminated my whole surrogate family. It was time to give them something to really fear.

I proceeded to do just that, using my now Undead form to it's utmost, able to survive more punishment from weapons, not needing to breathe or fear poison or drug. Moreover, I discovered that I could heal my wounds quickly by eating of the recently dead. But there was a downside. I quickly discovered that my Undead form lacked the same amount of sensation, the blood and gore on my hands didn't offer the same pleasure as they once did. After only a few months of this I decided it was time to try and fix things, and I remembered an old acquaintance of our group, a very powerful warlock named Skolni Vorlash. He had supplied our group with small magical goods and even took part in the killing a time or two, but he was fiercely independent and supplied groups like the Defias with their poisons just as often. If anyone knew a method to return my human form by any means, then it was him.

Time to pay the old chap a visit.

to be continued