.
.
There's only ever been the darkness, submerging, swaddling around him.
Loneliness.
Gods do not feel. Perhaps it's part of the curse bestowed on him.
.
.
The village says The Horror must have blood, every night when the moon grows full during harvest-tide, or they will all be slaughtered in their beds. And blood must be given as living sacrifices.
Klaus pities the young man and young woman beside him, sobbing and wailing and thrashing in a horse-drawn cart. Tough, knotted rope binding their hands and feet. Burlap sacks flapping on their heads. He says nothing to them, walking his mare along the dirt path towards the mountainous forest's edge. They've been force-fed wolfsbane and hemlock, to paralysis their limbs and sicken their flesh.
He throws away the man's vambraces and doublet chain-mail, and the woman's longbow into the shadowy, glimmering brook. Coming to the sacred grounds armed will only serve to enrage what waits.
One must deliver the sacrifices to The Horror. The lowest and most dangerous position. A villager who is scorned and criminal and deeply unloved would be granted this task. If he returns without finishing what is expected of him, Klaus will be the next sacrifice — not to a monster, but upon a public chopping block.
With certainty, Klaus has no such notion of a paternal or maternal figure raising him. Regardless, he had been one of the many in the surrounding villages born without coupling. A beloved, young daughter — she labored for grueling hours in the fields, until dusk, carrying back a blood-drenched, screaming Klaus in her arms. She died before the stars brightened overhead.
He glimpses her occasionally, shyly peeking behind the apple barrels. Her tangled, yellow hair. So young. Klaus doesn't know what to say to console her. She's his mother. And not fit to have been one before her eleventh name-day, let alone to have passed so violently out of the mortal realm.
The other babes were drowned in the river, but Klaus remains. There's still use for him. Thirty seasons of it. Once he was old enough to walk and ride a horse, the village elders pushed him for the reaping.
Once Klaus's cart passes the mill, they all reach the wild, dense forest where the animals tread wary.
He must too.
.
.
Hell's Pass.
In all of this time, Klaus never watches. He leaves the helpless sacrifices in the center of the grassy, moonlit clearing, and then wanders towards the tree-line, his back firmly turned.
As a young boy, he did once glimpse a towering, shadowy figure by the base of the cliff, and the gleam of a crimson tentacle whipping out. Klaus took off in the dead of night, running back to the village, exhausted from shouting out of pure fright. One of the elders threatened to stone him.
The reward for good behavior comes in a single piece of silver for trading, along with a change of freshly sewn garments and shelter whenever Klaus requires it. He takes to living with men.
Men who dealt tonics and cures for ails, persuading Klaus to bed them before they were generous about his own ails. Drinking from a skin full of ale and laudanum helps silence the apparitions. They linger near him, weaving through the forest, begging, shrieking, calling his name.
—laus! Klaus! KLAUS!
Stuffing cotton in his ears keeps the noises of the sacrifices being torn horrifically apart, consumed and guzzled, from reaching him. Klaus reaches for his wine-skin in his belt when he's yanked aside.
Dead, rotting blood covers the Horror's massive tentacle covering Klaus's arm.
He yelps, dragged to his knees, gazing up a towering, shadowy figure manifesting and solidifying.
The stench overpowers him, causing Klaus to wildly shake his head and gag. The bits of cotton tumbling out. Shadows fade away, revealing a handsome, angular man in dyed and leathered breeches. An open-collared tunic as pale as the moonlight. Death. The man smells of gore and sun-heated flesh.
Klaus struggles weakly, gasping for air, as a human hand jerks out, dragging open Klaus's own muddied, ragged tunic. Exposing the abrasions and bruises on his chest.
A set of runes carved above Klaus's neck-bone, by his own hand, shiny-pink and healing. One for protection against evil, and the other for travel. Safety for those whom lead those dark, winding paths.
"Diviner…"
This is more of a growl, monstrous and echoing, than voice. Klaus shivers, his chin lowered.
"I am no-one," he whispers.
"Alas, you speak true…"
Tentacles, pulsing and fluid-sticky, retreat. Klaus ends up on his bottom, wheezing, legs apart. He gazes back at the man, getting a pleasant scent of yarrow and velvetleaf beneath the carnage.
Eyes luminously red as summerwine.
"You have come to deliver those worthy of bloodshed. You have done so." The man says it as a soft command, like an warning roiling in the wind, his cloak fluttering around him. Klaus understands he should listen, but cannot put out of his mind… this visage The Horror bestowed on him.
"Who is he…?"
Of all manner, Klaus witnesses a brief moment of hesitation. Those red eyes transform into a flushed, vibrant amber, all-over, and then to a mortal's dark brown.
"Ben…"
"Ben," Klaus repeats, dazedly and murmurous as if he were slumbering far, far away.
"Insipid being, are you not?" A low timbre of laughter. Ben's face scrunching. Still handsome as Klaus has ever seen a man and grinning so tenderly. "Blithe. Comely."
"You flatter me…"
"The dead seek you and yet it has abstained from corrupting your soul. Fortune smiles kindly upon you." Another chilling shiver bolts through him when large, warm fingers grasp lightly onto Klaus's face. "Ben had been left abandoned in this forest to wither away… he took the root instead."
Klaus stiffens up, eyelids fluttering, anticipating when Ben's mouth trails over his.
"Tell them…"
.
.
The cart rattles behind him. His mare whinnies nervously, urging Klaus to move quicker to the dirt path, and farther away from the blackening slow-reaches of the wilderness.
Ben.
The village will answer for this.
And, Klaus will leave this world as he was born — covered in a layer of blood, screaming.
.
.
TUA isn't mine. YOOOOOOO. OKAY SO. I came up with a whole thing for this story and I kinda love it. Medieval fantasy horror for my OTP? Hell yeah? We got a fanfic AU challenge going on in the discord and I finally get to post this! I really love you guys on there and you have made my life so much better! HUGGGSSSS. ALSO IF YOU LOVE 4X6 OUT THERE,,,, YOU TOO ARE LOVELY AND VALID. I DON'T MAKE THE RULES. Thanks for reading! Any comments/thoughts appreciated!