Every story usually has a hero who is tasked with saving something, or someone; and every story usually has the forces of good vs evil. This story isn't one of those...

~The Prelude, Chapter One: Herdsmanship & Zombies~

Hello all, my name is Quel. Not my birth name, but my chosen name. I can't remember my life before age twelve, so I've no idea who I am, or where I came from. This story starts like all others: somewhere, sometime. Well let's stop procrastinating, and get to it.

"Quelly boy!? Where are yew?" said the voice of my nightmares.

"Mmmpphhh!" said I.

"Thar yew are laddy!" said the voice.

It was then that I felt a sudden tugging, and found myself being pulled out of the waste bin I had been "investigating". Hanging upside down, I had been grabbed by my right ankle and was now looking up at the face of my rescuer.

"Hiding agin?" said the Head Baker of Castle McCully, Mrs. Renee Derminster. Mrs. Derminster was the wife of Mr. Derminster the Head Marshall of His Lordship's Stables, and both were wyverians in their second century, which was young by their standards, and huge by ours. Now you see why she's able to hold me up so easily...

"No! I, errr, thought I saw some malachite at the bottom, and then I got, err, stuck!"

"U-huh. And I suppose a shakalaka named Gaspardh shoved you in deeper?"

"Not at all... Why are we acting like I'm a kid again...?"

"Because you are avoidin' yer duties as the head shepherd of our Lord's livestock."

"I was only sparring with Gondel in the training yard, and lost track of the time."

"Your test to become a junior guardsmen will have to wait, there's been rumors of a predator bein' spotted in the Veil."

"Ah... That's a different matter."

"Aye, it is. Yew need to ge' on yer gear and go investigae' it."

I was twenty-two, almost six feet tall, I weighed almost one-hundred and fifty pounds of solid muscle, I had blue eyes, brown hair, light skin, and I was still naive by most peoples standards. This was Castle McCully, and I was the head shepherd for the Lord of the Castle, Jason McCully. I had no other shepherds to assist me, so "head shepherd" was just a title. I was all alone... My responsibilities extended all over his Lordship's lands, from the far western coasts of the Black Crags of Dunmire, to the eastern edge of the Veil, the biggest forest in this part of the continent, which was largely unexplored, to the south, where the Lordships' duchy bordered his neighbor, and rival, Lady Heran's land, and finally to the north, where it bordered the vast wasteland known simply as the Frontier. Now this may sound like a huge swath of land, but in actually it only covered about two-hundred miles of land. No I wasn't the only herder in all of the McCully lands, but I was the only one stationed at Castle McCully. The country I was in was known as Evomere, and Lord McCully was head of the northernmost duchy in Evomere. Another thing to mention before I forget to mention the big details, and just mention the little details... Castle McCully was surrounded by a big wall, and around the wall was a moat, and around the moat spread the large town of Castle Town. Unoriginal, but it fit. Outside of Castle Town there were solitary houses, and farmsteads spaced on every hilltop.

Now I'm going to take the next paragraph to tell you all the woes of my job as a shepherd of livestock. Being a shepherd isn't easy, and it isn't tough... As long as you know what to do... What do I mean by that? Well you have to have the tools of the trade for starters. Certain monsters listen to certain things, and abhor certain sounds and smells. For instance to be a good herdsman, you need a herdsman's specially crafted herding stick, a flute, a horn, a pair of climbing gloves, a strong pair of lungs, and a limitless sense of terror. Every herdsman had his own trusty mount, and one of the first tests to be a monster herder was to capture your own mount. I had captured a mount that was a little bit.. different from the usual herdsman's mount. I had my own great baggi, who I named Crash. No I didn't name him that because he crashes into things... I named him that because he crashes me into things... Now back to the present...

Walking back to my hut, I found Crash eating something that crunched entirely too much for comfort's sake.

"We have a job to do Crash. Are you ready to go out hunting something vile, dangerous, and mysterious?"

"Grarrh..." replied Crash warily.

"No you won't have to go near Old Man Derrik's guard dogs."

"Groo..." replied Crash happily.

Saddling up Crash, I gathered my flute, herdsman stick, and a carving knife. Remember that other herdsmen gear I told you about? Too expensive for me to own. I also was smart enough to pack a small lunch of some dried bread, kelbi bacon, and kelbi milk. The ride out from Castle McCully was a beautiful one, with the Veil on the far right horizon, and the heights of the Highlands to the west. It was early in the morning, so a mist still clung to the Veil, and the sun was just now rising over the horizon, making the forest look both awesome, and spooky. I was heading into that awesome, and spooky forest. After riding over many a hilltop, and waving at some folk I knew, I arrived at the proper edge of Lord McCully's territory: the edge of the Veil. After riding across the small expanse of untiled land at the edge of the forest, I found myself in another world. Where the farmlands of Lord McCully had been bright, and windy, the Veil's edge was dark, and quiet. Animals large and small made noise in the underbrush, and birds flew in the trees, crying alarms at my presence.. or was it Crash that disturbed them so? He just snorted at the smaller animals, an stared with a keen predator intelligence at the bigger animal noises. It took us about ten minutes of travel along the small animal trail we were on to reach our objective: a small pen in which we sometimes kept kelbi, or aptonoth. The pen was in ruins. Only one post still stood, and the rest was pieces of wood scattered across the clearing. Scorch marks dotted the scenery to, and of the small herd of kelbi I had placed in the pen the day before there was no sign.

Getting off of Crash, I checked the scorch marks. Hopefully they were just a kut-ku's doing. If they were of something larger than a bird wyvern, then I was in trouble... Another aspect of being a herdsmen was the ability to be a tracker as well. Not being able to read much from a simple scorch mark, I began to investigate the rest of the clearing. Crash just stood there, looking at me and the surrounding forest. The broken pen yielded no results, as nothing had left any defining markings around it. I found no tracks, or claw marks. Nothing in the way of anything told me what caused this... The fact that there was no sign of a mutilated kelbi also clued me in to what must have done this: poachers. Poachers. There isn't a word more hated, or vile as that one word to any herdsman. Occasionally a herder is killed by a poacher, but we give no quarter to them in return. Fights between poachers and herders have gotten so bloody in the past that at one time the old King of Evomere, Keillor the Wise, put a 100,000z bounty on anyone caught poaching. in fact the war between poachers and herdsman once had a famous battle. The Battle of Glover's Holdfast. Not entirely a famous battle, for it was actually fought by ten herdsman, and thirty drunken mercenaries... But it is still remembered by us herdsman... Sometimes... Though admittedly the Bard of Gloverdale does a bad job of singing the lines of "herders murder their burghers" and "mercy mercenaries, for Percy!" Yes, I was most likely dealing with poachers right now... After checking the entire clearing, and finding nothing, I began to check the perimeter of the clearing. After completing my check on nearly half of the clearing's edge, I found what I was looking for: signs of something having left the clearing. From the looks of the tracks ten men at least had passed this way, wearing boots. They had walked single file into the depths of the supposedly unexplored Veil.

"Well this is interesting..."

"Grooowaaarr..." said Crash, also apparently interested.

I was about to whistle for Crash to come over, then thought better of it as my instincts told me I wasn't alone. Crash stopped his grumblings, and bird watching, and fixated his gaze directly to his right... which was six feet, or so to my right. The bushes didn't tremble with movement, the forest animals didn't stop their singing, and the sky didn't darken; but I felt something looking at me. I raced back to Crash, jumping on him just as the brush behind me erupted with movement, and a giant beast emerged silent as death, to rush at me and Crash. We had barely gotten into a gallop, when it was almost on us. I suddenly wished I had some other kind of weapon than a knife. I had no time to look over my shoulder at it like a buffoon, so I hunched down and urged Crash to go faster. Naturally being smarter than his curious master, Crash increased his speed, and was able to widen the gap between us and the beast by a large margin.

We emerged from the forest ten feet in front of the beast, and as it emerged behind us I dared to look over my shoulder. What I saw made me take in an involuntary breath. What was chasing us was something out of a nightmare, it was a demon. The decayed corpse of a monster chased us, but it was impossible to see just what type of monster, for it had a thick black cloud surrounding its body, with only the eyes being visible on account of the fact that they glowed red! It didn't have any trouble being silent, and if it wasn't for the fact that everything it touched rotted and died you probably wouldn't see it until it saw you. So there I was, running-well "riding" for my life, with a giant undead monstrosity of monstrosities following me with clearly violent intent. I had to somehow outrun it back to the castle, but considering that Crash wasn't used to long distance racing, and the beast would probably be tireless, I was in deep $#%&. I was having a splendid day...