Late at night in a large clearing of a dark forest, black fire danced in the palm of a spindly man. He whispered into a flickering black candle. His black cloak fluttered wildly despite an apparent lack of wind. Quite honestly, the man looked like a cultist. It wasn’t necessarily his fault though. He was a member of a species without eyes. He saw through the magic that permeated the world. Color was a hard concept to grasp for those born without the means to experience it firsthand.

Moreover, it was winter. He had purchased a cloak of high quality that was relatively cheap— cheap because it looked like something a cultist would wear— in order to stay warm, and the candle was also at a discounted price. These specific candles were not very fashionable this time of year. The locals believed it was bad luck to light them in the winter; that the fire would attract monsters.

He could have afforded more aesthetically pleasing items, but he hated unnecessary waste.

What was he doing with his candle? Well, technically it was an occult ritual he was performing in the hopes of attracting monsters. He was a cultist after all. That just wasn’t why he looked like one. You should never judge a book by its cover.

As the actual non-magical wind began to pick up, the monsters appeared.

Eight elephant-sized nid-hogs made only of demon-piggy muscle, rage, and love for apples stepped through the trees, splintering the ones too slow to move out of their path (all of the trees were too slow. Smokey the Bear would be so disappointed).

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Despite all the black fire already hovering around the clearing (Smokey the Bear would be so disappointed), it was the candle’s mundanely colored flame that rose to intercept them. It split once, twice, three times until eight orange flames stood guard over the old cultist.

Their temperature rose sharply until they shone an incandescent white that pierced through the night. Just as easily, they pierced through the nid-hogs like burning white arrows.

They squealed like pigs— Giant pigs, that is— before collapsing just within the confines of the clearing.

No other monsters followed after. The cultist was well-practiced.

With another string of whispers, the hog blood began to flow toward the man in the middle of it all, snaking across the barren dirt to lie in a dark puddle at his feet.

The flow of blood continued for several minutes before the boars ran dry, magically exsanguinated into jerky.

When no more blood moved in the clearing, the cultist acted again.

He lifted the puddle in a way that puddles definitely didn’t move and tossed it into the air like some kind of wetter pizza. Much like the aforementioned pizza, the blood flattened into a circle. Much unlike a pizza, it also stretched to cover the full clearing in a fractal pattern, glowing blue as it did so.

The ground below it started to burn white in an identical pattern.

While the cultist waited for the twin circles to complete their formation, he wandered over to the corpses of the nid-hogs to harvest what materials he could. After all, he hated unnecessary waste.