The Word For Fear Is Forest
Sad Albert was the first to die that night.
From his position in the watchtower, he gazed at the night sky above him. Morrslieb hung low, just above the tops of the trees, its green-tinged glow sickly and unwholesome, while Mannslieb, its more benign neighbour in the heavens, was a curling silver shaving, its influence on the canopy of darkness feeble and small. It was an ill night with an ill wind whose cold edge promised winter. Sad Albert shivered in his threadbare cloak.
The watchtower was an anachronism really, a rickety relic of a time when orcs and beastmen had raided the village from deep within the nearby forest. The village of Kreizig had once been protected by a wooden wall, but it had long since disappeared, dismantled for timber when the council hall had needed refurbishment. There was no call for such defences now. Kreizig prospered and grew, and anyway it still had its watchtower. Sad Albert sniffed philosophically and twitched the long, drooping moustache that had given him his nickname. He suspected it wouldn't be too long before the watchtower disappeared, too. Such was the price of progress.
The thing that was to kill Sad Albert had lain in the shadows of the forest's edge for many hours waiting for the sun to go down. Now it padded across the hard-packed earth that marked the boundary between the village and the wild, malice in its narrowed eyes and vengeance in its heart. It was a relatively small thing, hugging the ground low like a fox or a hunting dog, yet its front claws were thin and dexterous, and a rusty blade was clutched in one of them. It reached the base of the watchtower swiftly and began to climb, its footsteps light, like the patter of raindrops on forest leaves.
Sad Albert looked around at the sound, but the thing had already gained the small platform at the top of the tower and it sprang at him with a ferocity for which he was completely unprepared. The knife slashed across his windpipe and blood sprayed across the snout and whiskers of his killer. A thin, animal tongue slipped out to lick fastidiously at the rich, dark liquid and the creature strode to the edge of the platform, crouching low below the guard rail. It bared its yellowed teeth, venting a rasping hiss into the night air. A quiet rustling rippled along the forest's edge and suddenly the open ground around the watchtower was an undulating mass of fur and claws and bright animal eyes that reflected the meagre moonlight with a feral, cold intelligence.
The taking of Kreizig had begun.
"I don't like this," muttered Johann. "I don't like this at all."
For what felt like the fiftieth time since entering the forest, he glanced around him nervously.
"Oh, dear," said Willem, his voice dripping scorn. "Poor little Johann doesn't like this. Poor little Johann."
Johann scowled, but the mockery of Willem Narrmann was becoming less discomfiting than the rustling branches and whispering leaves of the trees around him. He was beginning to conclude that the disdain of Mayor Narrmann's eldest son was a small price to pay for escaping this gloomy, oppressive place.
And they'd only been travelling for half an hour or so.
"What's that?"
Willem stopped them. The forest path they'd been walking along, thin and ill-defined like a fraying thread, had led them to a clearing. Yet, if anything, the forest was gloomier here. The trees, ancient and hoary with vine and moss, seemed to lean towards each other, furtive, conspiratorial. The sunlight filtering through the russet and gold leaves was weak and watery.
There was something in the clearing. Unease fluttering in his gut, Johann followed Willem, as the older boy edged towards it. At first, Johann had thought it was a stunted tree trunk, but, as they drew nearer, he saw it was... something else.
It was wooden certainly, but it was no tree and Johann found it impossible to tell for certain whether it had been carved or simply moulded by the elements. In appearance, it was nothing more than a thin, gnarled pole, its colour a deep rich brown, its uneven surface smoothed and polished. But there was something about it that scratched at the darkest corners of his mind.
"I don't... Let's get out of here, Willem. Please!"
He had braced himself for another barrage of scorn, but Willem only let out a short, clipped laugh that was swallowed whole by the brooding silence. Johann stared at the surface of the pole; its irregular bumps and grooves were strangely suggestive – although of violence or sexual depravity, he couldn't quite determine. The thing made him feel dirty, unclean.
"I'm not scared." Willem's voice quivered a little. The older boy began to fumble with his belt.
"What are you doing?"
The soft hiss of Willem's urine splashing against the wood was the only answer. Johann stared, the unease he had felt ever since Willem had suggested this 'adventure' blossoming into full-blown panic.
"What are you doing?"
Rearranging his clothing, Willem turned and shrugged. "I'm not scared," he lied. He looked around him and spat contemptuously on the ground. "Let's go back. I'm bored of this place."
Johann watched rivulets of moisture run down the pole's dark length for a moment. Casting one last nervous look around him, he hurried after Willem back towards the village.
Johann woke up suddenly, trying to work out what was wrong. His room was dark and quiet, the shadows flickering on the wall the only movement. Shadows... flickering?
He scrambled out of bed, reaching for his breeches quickly. Stumbling to the window as he awkwardly tugged them on, he gazed out at the village square. What he saw stunned him for a moment.
"Pa!" he screamed hoarsely. "Pa! The hall's on fire! Someone's set the..."
And then he saw the shadows moving along the far side of the street, furtive shapes crouched low, entering the houses of his neighbours with the sound of breaking glass and splintering wood.
Panicked, he whirled round, suddenly aware that from the downstairs chambers he could hear movement, clumsy and loud. The fear he had felt in the forest, that had lingered in him all through the day, now seemed to have assumed a terrifying solidity and breached the walls of his very home.
From below him, a horrible braying sound battered at his mind and he started scrabbling desperately at the catch on the window, a wild plan to leap from the top storey of the family home forming quickly in his mind. The clatter of hooves on the stairs lent his fumbling fingers even greater urgency. He had just opened the window and was getting ready to heave himself over the sill, when something burst into the room behind him, bounded over the little bed by the door and grabbed him by the hair, pulling him viciously backwards.
Yelping with the pain, Johann found himself being dragged across the floor like and then down the stairs. His knees were scraped red raw and tears pricked his eyes, as his thin body was thrown against the walls and the floor.
He didn't get a proper look at his abductor, until it was dragging him towards the shattered front door. Johann whimpered. The thing was tall and muscular. Were it not for the light coating of chestnut hair on its back and shoulders, its body might have passed as human. But it's head was a different matter entirely. Curling horns, grey-black and encrusted with old dried blood, sprouted from the front and back of the thing's skull. As it turned to thrust him through the splintered ruins of the doorway, Johann caught a glimpse of an elongated face – part equine, part bovine – whose eyes glared with a mad and ancient intelligence.
"I'm sorry," he sobbed. "Please... I'm so sorry..."
And suddenly he was out in the street, the man-beast pulling him towards the village green, hearing the wailing and shrieking and screaming of a village being torn apart by the fury of the untamed wild.
Some days later, when, having halted the beastman incursion in pitched battle at Honiger Falls, the 3rd Stirland Infantry arrived in Kreizig, they found a place of obscene and savage devastation. Hardened veterans of the Empire's campaigns against the greenskins in the south wandered through rubble-strewn streets in horrified wonder, every step revealing a new atrocity.
Bodies and bits of bodies, charred, broken, gnawed upon, defiled, tumbled from the shells of ruined houses, or sprawled on bloodsoaked ground. Dotted at random locations throughout the village were piles of flesh, drifts of the dead, pale and rotting, food for crows which rose and billowed like black cloaks when the soldiers came near.
But it was on the village green, before the burnt-out shell of the old wooden hall, that the soldiers made their most disturbing – and puzzling – discovery. Two young men, not much older than boys, had been bound together by strong vines and then, in turn, tied to a curiously misshapen length of wood that had been hammered into the soft earth of the green. From the expressions on the boys' faces, they had taken some time to die and they had done so in agony, although they had not suffered the same savage brutality that had been visited on the other villagers. The two corpses carried the strong ammoniac stink of stale urine. Heaped around them was mound after fly-throbbing mound of the beastmen's foul, stinking ordure.