The Beast

The Beast: Part One
One year prior to the Cataclysm…

She’s gone.


I’m sorry.

Davyn clutched the paper in his hands, a cold, sickening feeling fell into his gut like lead. He tried to stop the tears but they fell like pouring rain. The letter continued on about a horrific slaughter committed by the underhanded betrayal of the Forsaken, and how she fought as valiantly as ever but in the end, fell in battle. A precious, secret treasure he had guarded for years was ripped out of his heart. Davyn had very few friends, turning himself into an outcast for praising the heroics of a creature other humans called a monster. They cared not that she spared his life and risked her own to bring him to the safety of the Eastern Kingdoms. But his loneliness had been thwarted every month with a letter from her, letters of spectacular adventure and epic battles she had fought and won.

But her last battle…won her.

He paced back and forth in his room, the cold shock quickly vaporizing into a fiery rage. Grunting, he dug his fingernails into the walls of his room, wishing for the strength to tear down the walls. The unmerciful moonlight lashed out on his pale skin, and he fixed his eyes upon it in hatred. Davyn felt his lanky body growing, his bloody fingertips blackened and warped into claws. His throat dried up like desert sand and turned his anguished moans into guttural growls. The moon kept its cruel eye upon him, and Davyn started to scream her name, knowing that he could never call her back from the distant heavens.

“Davyn? Davyn, what’s wrong?” Davyn’s mother Annika heard her son’s cries and rushed to his room. She desperately tried to turn the handle of the door but the lock was unyielding. She pounded on the door and cried his name again, but her only answer was the sound of shattering glass. What she feared was the fear of many of the citizens of Gilneas. Many had lost control. She summoned her own inner beast and kicked the door down with amazing strength, but all she found was an empty room, a shattered window, and a crumpled piece of paper speckled with bloody fingerprints. She screamed, and rushed down the stairs.

Davyn ran through the streets, snarling in his breaths and growling out his pain. The city guards tried to confront him, but in their weaker human forms they were no match for his maddening power. Even the arrows that pierced his shoulder didn’t slow him. Annika ran and screamed at the guards to not harm her son. Davyn made a tremendous leap at the great gates of Gilneas, and dug his claws into the wood as he climbed up it. The moon still tormented him, as if it were dangling her soul on the string of fate right between his eyes and just out of his reach. He knew he couldn’t outrun his pain or the cruel white beacon, but he ran just the same. The shouting guards and screams of his mother faded as Davyn disappeared into the forest. The trees tried to shield him but the white orb of fire still seared him.

Fatigue burned in Davyn’s lungs and sapped all of his strength. He fell to his knees, but the rage still boiled his blood. The air was like poison, and Davyn wondered if the poison she had breathed in with her last breaths had smelled the same, tasted the same, and had caused her the same pain. In the distance, he could see the sickening green glow of that very poison, in huge glass and metal orbs stored in the village of the foul abominations that had caused the massacre. Davyn cursed the Forsaken and the moon, vowing to destroy the creatures that no longer deserved to exist.

Traitor…vile fiend…I will destroy you! ALL OF YOU!

Davyn grasped the black tufts of his hair, and threw his head back, crying her name in a final, desperate howl.

“Kersha…!”