Wodan Veld stalked the raiders through the low heather on the rolling hills, upwind and out of view. He was far enough away to go unnoticed by their sentries, but still close enough to know exactly how many of them there were and what they were doing. He had followed their tracks for a week when he counted only a dozen among their party, but more and more had joined them over that time, and now the raiders numbered near a hundred.
To an untrained eye, the trail of destruction that his prey left behind appeared to be the work of a random, haphazard horde of destructive animals. But Wodan’s eyes were far from untrained. This was the work of an organized group, and a very brutal one at that. The evidence was in the tracks themselves. Here, a group of eight joined the original dozen from the southwest. There, two groups of twenty became forty. And immediately after, as they pressed north, the forty became an organized group that moved as a column rather than a ragtag band of barbarians.
This morning Wodan did not need to use his skills as a tracker to see exactly where the invaders had moved and what they had done. The trails of black smoke over a far hill gave him a clue of their deeds in the dark before dawn. The smell of burning wood and flesh turned his guts, confirming his grim suspicions. It smells just like a pig roasting over a turf fire, he mused. A flood of images he’d rather have not recalled right then flooded his mind’s eye. His neighbors’ farmhouse burning with the father and children trapped inside. The howling wails of the children’s mother, restrained outside the house by her brother as the able bodied and lame alike tried in vain to extinguish the blaze. His revulsion at later recalling the particular smell during a pig roast when he was sixteen as he uncharacteristically refused the meat. It smelled exactly the same. And he couldn’t forget the screams.
All this memory of misery was balanced by the rush of spirit he was feeling at being on the hunt again. It pushed aside the pounding in his head from too much barleywine and very little water from the night before at the hands of his gracious compatriot in arms. He reflected on the wry, affable cavalier who had cracked open the cask of his supposed “secret reserve” as an after supper treat to honor Wodan’s reputation as the Bear of the North Country. The old moniker now somewhat embarrassed Wodan, but free drinks were free drinks, after all, even if they were from strangers on the road. He could not remember the end of the evening, as the fog of libation closed a curtain over his recollections, but the violence of his awakening had spurred him onto his current course.
He lit upon a granite outcropping on a hill, overlooking a valley below and hid his silhouette among the crags. From here he could see the true picture of the carnage that these trespassers had brought to his lands. The village smouldered in the morning air, the fires that had consumed its homes and some of its people stamped out when the violence was over. To call this a battle would have been to give too much credit to the defenders who now lay dead to the last man. The corpses of the slaughtered villagers had been stacked neatly in organized rows to an end that Wodan could not yet discern.
Wodan peered closer at the raiders as they disassembled the husk of the village, and he saw that they were stripping it for its useful parts. In addition to the ones piling bodies, others were bringing supplies from various buildings in the village. Weapons, tools, cloth, and grain were being divided into neat parcels and prepared for travel.
As the raiders busied themselves about the remains of the village, Wodan focused on one in particular in the center of them. Taller and broader than the rest, he had an air of authority about him, corroborated by the air of deference by which the others regarded him. One such underling moved close to the taller figure and spoke, bowing and avoiding direct eye contact. When the tall one removed his helmet, Wodan’s flesh began to crawl. These were not simple bands of raiding men, hitting obscure towns on the southern border. In fact, these were not men at all.
From a far distance, the fiends looked normal enough. They walked like men. They were armored and armed the way a disciplined, yet poorly funded military might be. But now that Wodan saw their faces, the certainty that he was dealing with the familiar left Wodan entirely. They had skin the color of a bloody sunset, streaked with blue. Their ears were long and pointed, and their hands were long and clawed. From the fragments he could hear, Wodan did not understand the guttural tongue that growled and rasped from their large, fanged mouths. Yet he recognized the sound of the language as Halafal. This could only mean that these beasts were the Halafalok.
A true sighting of anything like these fiends had not happened in Wodan’s life. He had often enough seen creatures inhabiting the wilderness that he could call unnatural, but he could always believe his eyes and explain why they were there. He had in fact seen apparitions and miscreations while traveling lonely roads at night that had scared him out of his skin. Everyone knew that spirits, monsters, and maybe even the last traces of the gods themselves lived out there in the wilderness beyond the bounds of society, hunting the fools who wandered too far from the safety of their homes at night. But this was broad daylight, and here they were.
The Halafalok. Monsters dressed as an army of men, ripping apart rough hewn, strong looking villagers like they were the rag dolls of children. He had heard tales in his youth of them from wandering singers and batty old maids of the armies of fiends living beyond the borders of Kepala. They preyed upon settlers, travellers, and the lost. They were an army of brutes so savage that they ate their own dead rather than waste good meat. And yet nobody had ever brought him proof that The Halafalok were anything other than a story to frighten you into being home by sundown as a child. But here they were, as plain as the singers and batty old maids had said. The dead eaters. The monsters who marched like men.
The Halafalok commander stood triumphant in the center of his troops, as they began to drop to one knee, and raise their fists in a chant. “Strall Thratch! Strall Thratch! Strall Thratch!” they bellowed at their leader. By the proud way the beast raised his head and threw back his shoulders, Wodan could only surmise that this was the leader’s name.
Wodan was so lost in the disbelief of what he was seeing before him that he had not noticed that the wind had shifted. Not until the tall Halafalok commander’s head snapped to his direction, as he let out a braying howl of alarm, raising an accusing finger at him. Wodan snapped out of his reverie and scrambled to his feet, but it was too late. The outlying sentries of the invaders had already begun to converge on his position from three directions at once.
Reaching behind his head, he felt the handle of his familiar warhammer. The leather grip of the haft felt like shaking the confident hand of a strong friend. After quickly surveying the landscape from his rocky promontory, he spied his means of escape. He waited until the closest of the sentries had moved directly below his position, and then he lept. Wodan’s considerable weight crashed down on the fiendish soldier before he could ready his spear. He tucked into a roll and quickly returned to his feet to see the guard prone, the wind knocked out of him, struggling to overcome the shock of the old warrior’s attack. Not giving him time to recover, Wodan swung his hammer straight over to crash down on the monster’s head, his assailant’s skull making a wet cracking sound like the egg of a giant bird.
He heard the howl of two more sentries racing for him, as he tried to recover his hammer from the fallen brute’s skull. He twisted and pulled to no avail, and shortly realized the hammer and its victim were now one. Wodan reached to a hatchet hanging by his belt, and quickly hurled it at the first of his two attackers. The hatchet hit its mark, splitting his enemy at the collarbone, dropping the abomination to his knees in agony. Wodan did not waste a second as he rushed toward his fallen foe and, while sprinting past, grabbed the spear from the wounded guard’s hand.
He flung himself forward and without thinking hurled the spear before him to where he was sure the third attacker was. He missed the Halafalok sentry’s center, but the spear found its mark buried in its victim’s kneecap. The guard let out a horrifying screech of pain as black blood jutted from a split artery. At that he heard the fallen sentry’s call answered by the collective roar of the rest of the Halafalok in the valley.
Three I can do, thought Wodan, but the other ninety seven…
Possessed of a will to run that he thought reserved for wind spirits of old, Wodan careened north as fast as his well worn boots would carry him. He ran for what seemed at least five miles at his top speed before he was sure the beying taunts of The Halafalok had disappeared into the distance behind him. He ran all the way back to where he had begun this doomed hunt, the site of the destroyed caravan which he was paid to protect. Wodan found shelter nearby in the branches of a large elderwood tree and let himself breathe. His knees groaned and his lungs burned. His heart threatened to pound out of his chest as he struggled to catch his breath. He drained the last swallow of water from his travel skein, and gathered himself.
He thought to his home in the north country, to humble Arrain and the smiling face of his son, Brehon. His vision turned to a tunnel, and he lapsed into a grey haze.
Wodan awoke with a start, his awareness suddenly snapping into focus. He was able to steady himself in his cradle of branches a moment before he fell out of the tree. He quickly recalled the events that had led him here as he took stock of his circumstances, and debated whether or not to doubt his sanity. He heard what sounded like music in the air above him, strings plucked by deft fingers. He shook his head to dispel the phantom song in his head, but it wouldn’t go. He hit himself in the forehead with the side of a closed fist, and then the music stopped abruptly.
“You look like you’re a long way from home,” came a sonorous voice from above him. Again, Wodan shook his head. You’re going around the last knot, old man, Wodan thought to himself. He was, after all, very far from home.
Then the an acorn hit him about the head and bounced to the ground. “Hello, down there! Are you well?” came the voice from above him again. Wodan felt his neck creak as he inclined his head and rested his eyes on the form of a man in a bright waistcoat and well worn boots. He lounged half a dozen feet above him cradled between two branches. A strange stringed instrument rested in the stranger’s lap.
Wodan reached behind his shoulder for the sure grip of his hammer, but grasped nothing. It was still buried in the skull of the unlucky Halafalok guardsman a long way from here. Wodan’s heart sunk, crestfallen at the thought of being caught flat-footed.
“Relax, friend, I’m not in the business of fighting among the branches of the elderwoods. And if I do say, I think you’re in no shape to fight yourself. You appear to have been beaten like a dusty rug,” the stranger said.
Wodan surrendered to the situation, ridiculous as it was. After a stretch of hunting the creatures of horror tales, having a conversation with a troubadour in a tree was hardly the strangest way to round out the day. He slumped into his own cradle of branches.
“I was escorting a caravan,” Wodan said through a long sigh, “We were a few days out from Lake Tilian when we got hit by those… things. I dogged them for a week, but they got the better of me outside of some no-name backwater they were tearing to pieces. At least there’s three of them who won’t be putting farmers to the torch anymore.”
“Ah, thus your lack of armament, yes?” the stranger asked.
“There were nearly one hundred of the bastards. I couldn’t do them all on my own.”
“Surely you didn’t escort this conveyance on your own?” the troubadour wondered with affected astonishment.
“I didn’t. There was another, a cavalier. His name was… Wallace, I think. He signed on near the lake, and rode like a veteran. Once he recognized me, he opened a cask of midland grogh, and wouldn’t stop toasting me until the whole blasted thing was gone. At least I think that’s how it went.”
“Well, you are the Bear of the North Country, after all.”
“How could you have…”
“When one light of foot and open of ear roams the lands from Iceway to The Spur and from Sira Zelaad to Mera Calda and back a few times, the heroes of days past will get known to him. The burly and brash man from Arrain who journeyed with the king as a pup would stick out like a lump on your head. Even halfway up the side of an elderwood,” the stranger mused.
“I don’t deserve the praise. My outfit and bondsmen were butchered. All dead,” Wodan groaned.
“I think not all of them,” the stranger said with an arched eyebrow as he poked a finger at the ground beneath him. Wodan spun his head and saw a single figure on the road beneath him, standing amid the wreck of the caravan. He was stripped to the waist, and wandered in a daze through the kindling around him. His hair and beard looked as though small woodland animals had nested in it overnight.
“The bastard’s alive!” Wodan hissed. “Thank you, sir… what was it you were called?”
“You may call me Brinco, young Wodan Veld,” he said. Wodan regarded him quizzically as the stranger as he extended a hand with a flourish and plucked a few strings in a resonant major chord.
“Young?” the old bear returned.
“You best check on your comrade before he does himself injury, methinks,” Brinco said, nodding his chin at the wandering cavalier.
Wodan grunted in agreement as he rolled to drop to the ground floor, landing on his feet. He steadied himself as the caravan’s survivor continued to mill about, oblivious to his presence. “Wallace!” Wodan bellowed.
The man stirred out of his daze and turned to face Wodan as a look of disbelief and joy crossed his face. “Veld! You’re alive!”
“No thanks to you, you bloody sot! The raiders swamped the caravan and have been tearing up the south hills for near a week! How are you not dead?”
“Oh, it’s my way after a few too many of the old Tilian Urgewater. Two of my former wives swore blind that they thought I was dead after a good night on the lash. Out for days. Likely whoever it was hit us thought I’d already snuffed it, and decided not to bother following through. Lucky thing!”
“You remember anything of the attack?” Wodan asked.
“Not a blasted sliver, I’m afraid,” Wallace shrugged, then cocked his head, “Did you hear music just now?”
“It was the…” Wodan started has he turned to point toward Brinco’s position in the cradle of the tree’s branches, but he was no longer there. He looked all about, but there was no sign of the oddly dressed man.
“It was probably in my head. The ol’ Tilian Urgewater, I tell you. Shame about this lot, eh?” Wallace said as he surveyed the remains of their former employers.
Wodan shook his head hard to rid himself of the day’s vexations, and squared his shoulders. He took three steps toward Wallace and looked him in the eye. “You just woke to a different world to the one you passed out from,” he said to his fellow survivor, a grave look in his eye.
Tales of Kepala 