A Piece of the Old World

In a slime-slick culvert below St. Gregory’s Bridge, the last of a species died.

Collapsed just shy of the moonshadow cut under the tunnel opening’s arch, the coat and lace-trimmed tunic which had let it walk among humans in daylight were torn by long slashes, soaking in yellow blood and murky runoff from the brickwork floor. Once revealed, it had shed what disguised the split of its wrists into many-jointed claws and un-knit its cheeks to open jaws to the width it used when catching a grown man instead of a child. Neither stayed the witcher’s blade.

Their fight was exhaustive, and when it finally fell, the creature’s thorax quivered with ragged pants a few minutes more, heart still pumping blood into severed arteries. The sickly fluid rolled in rivulets down its skin and dripped nearby from the monster hunter’s silver sword. Though he no longer held it high and wary, the witcher stood a few paces off, even now unwilling to stand within reach of his vanquished foe. A malignant laugh, though blood filled its closing throat and ran between its snaggled fangs, bubbled from the monster's gills.

“Does death amuse you so, even your own?” The witcher’s voice gravelly from his own mutant flesh and the toxic potions thickening his blood.

“You amuse me,” the monster gurgled, its hideous lips motionless. “By fighting, you hasten death no matter who kills who.”

It waited for the witcher to ask its meaning. The light dimmed as a cloud drifted across the moon somewhere above all they stood under. Above the bricks, above the cobblestone streets filled with horse droppings and indifferent guards, above taprooms thick with inebriating vapors and candle smoke, above steeples where bells swung and tolled demands for attendance or grief. Then the shadow passed, and the tunnel’s wet floor glistened again. And still the witcher opened only his cat-like eyes to the monster.

Resting its head on the floor in disappointment, the monster rumbled, “My kind were one of the reasons humans created yours. Back when they had no concept of distance, only dark forests growing around them forever in every direction. We were the reason they huddled around fires at night, feeding pathetic embers as if appeasing it could stop us snatching them away. Then they learned to hate the forests where we lurked.

“They learned to burn. They learned to hack. We did not understand, cutting with claws they *made* at things they couldn’t eat. Then the sun baked every inch of earth, and dead forests made walls we could not climb while dragging them away. By the time we learned to stalk their roads, they’d made you.”

One baleful, frog-like eye trained itself on the witcher’s ghostly face, trying to force on him the rage at centuries of unfair play, cheating enemies, and failure to understand losing. But the witcher’s face was no more or less stony than before.

“When we dragged them to our dens, you would find us before we’d had our fill. Never were our bellies full again. When you found our eggs, you smashed them. Never were our nests full again. When I die, the world will be empty even of the memory.”

The witcher’s breath was icy in the putrid air. “I didn’t come here to pity you.”

The rips in its cheeks curled up at their ends, a habit learned to imitate its prey. “No. You came to kill until no more are left. And then what monsters will the humans have? They’ve already burned the nests you come from. You die with me, one piece at a time.”

The froggish eye unfocused as a cough rattled its body. More juice ran from the jaws and a deep gasp lifted its stomach as the airway cleared. The witcher stood by, moving neither to hasten its end nor staunch the bleeding.

“There is one way we both survive. When they ask what dragged their nestmates into the dark, tell them of our terror. Remind them how we made them huddle around embers, and all the strength it took you to slay us. Speak of us, and they will remember how you protected them as they remember how we stalked them.”

“No.” The witcher answered, clear enough to fill the silence of the whole tunnel. Silence surged back in after the single word, which had stilled the monster's ragged breath a beat.

“Tell them,” it demanded, incredulous and anxious. “Tell them! Tell them and they will welcome you to their halls and put feasts on tables as we live on in their nightmares!”

“No.” The witcher repeated, infuriatingly still, and gave nothing more.

The monster’s fangs came together, knitting in familiar ways which yearned for the witcher’s flesh between them. “We hate you. We hate you for taking us to your own death. No animal can have life that will not claw through mud to keep it, they have no place in nature. Damn you for existing.”

The monster lingered a while longer, but it did not speak again. The witcher stood in stoic witness, neither stepping forward to finish it off nor retreating to let it find a means of escape. Without a place in the new, there died a piece of the old world belonging to monsters and the men who slew them. And a piece of him died with it.