In the middle of the night, two large figures lumbered along the edge of the Whisperwoods. The smaller of the two, who was still an enormous Bearkin, walked barefooted as he stealthily padded through the undergrowth. His easy and causal grip on a sinister, dark and jagged throwing axe, that would look like a two-handed monster in the hands of a lesser humanoid, belied his enormous strength. As he shifted easily through the trees, he occasionally stopped in his tracks to get his bearings with a quick sniff of the still air even as his ears constantly honed in on every sound.
Trailing behind this guide was a humongous and shirtless Minotaur who was covered in furs of an orange so bright, it seemed to glare in the dying light. This ginger Minotaur traveled through the forest in a fashion that was at odds with his travel companion, for he constantly bellowed in anger and occasionally struck out at innocent trees with his gargantuan makeshift weapon. Heated, sweaty vapors constantly emanated from this Minotaur, who was close to berzerking as he fought to keep track of his shadowy friend. The all-encompassing anger that threatened to cloud his mind was only alleviated with another swing of his “axe.” The splintered and blue tree-trunk in his hands with its monolithic shard grafted to its end bit angrily into another ancient giant. The Minotaur pulled it out angrily with another flex of his ginormous muscles before barreling after his guide.
“Nearly there Joantack,” growled the Bearkin as he waited in a sliver of moonlight that broke through the canopy above for the angry Minotaur to catch up. The distance between them was easily closed by long strides of the Minotaur’s cloven hooves on the soft loamy soil even as he haphazardly crashed and shouldered into mighty trees.
“How FAR?!” asked the Minotaur as he rushed on as if to crash into waiting Bearkin who stood still as a stone in his fur-rimmed jacket. But just a half a pace before the Bearkin he loomed over, the Minotaur steeled himself as he brought himself to a stop from his furious charge.
“Not far,” growled the Bearkin even if his pointed head only came up to Joantack’s barrel chest. The Minotaur stood with barely concealed rage, before snorting a puff of hot air onto his face in reply.
"I hope so, it's bad tonight," was all Joantack managed to say in an angry rumble through clenched teeth, before he raised his mighty horned head up into the sky and screaming out a mighty bellowing roar.
Hoarast turned away with a sad frown that exposed his sharp lower canines at the sight of his friend in such misery, before hastening towards their destination. If most of the villagers who lived in Pancreedy were to see the normally gentle Joantack as the incarnate of rage that he was now, with his bulging muscles and alarming veins, they would be left feeling alarmed and terrified. That was not even taking into account the unnatural heat that was eerily emanating from the normally placid and calm Minos.
The pair continued on with the Minotaur leaving a swath of destruction in his wake until the pair broke through the cover of trees by a riverbank. This was the lesser known twin sister of the river than ran behind Lem's ranch before joining in a fork and continuing to run into Pancreedy. It was only frequented by a few woodsman and hunting adventurers, and only during the day. But what the pair sought, could only be found in the dangerous veil of night.
They paused briefly for the Bearkin to sup upon the refreshingly cool waters, as his companion paced about listlessly before heading up river. The pair was now rushing along a barely perceivable Loper path, but by the ease and agility they showed, it was well used.
They ran parallel to the river, now dangerously deep in the woods for many, but not for the Bearkin. But for his formidable companion the dangerous denizens of the woods still posed a very real danger due to complicated reasons, even if Minotaur had enough strength to obliterate most foes. So Hoarast still maintained his vigil for he would have to fight for two.
They served away from the river and along a tiny stream that fed into it. Steam rose from this tiny streamlet into the cool night air but was quickly dissipated as it was dispersed by the branches of the grasping canopy above. As they closed in on their destination, Joantack’s control began to slip as he roared in pain like a poor child fighting against a full bladder. This caused the leading Hoarast to break into a sprint as his friend began to glow with waves of heat radiating off his skin. He quickly rushed along the trickle of hot water and to its source; a hot spring that was cordoned by a ring of squat blue scaly trees.
Hoarast knew these trees very intimately, for they were Bleaky-Silverbarks and the reason he and his lifelong friend had settled in Pancreedy nearly half a century ago. They have each built a life here rather than running away from one mishap or another, with Joantack spending many summer nights in freezing cold chains. The unusual trees provided succour to his friend from his highly unusual ailment. For his friend was suffering from a highly unnatural curse, a curse that would leave nearly any other dead, but not Joantack. Burningdeathlust was the natural spell of mature monsters that would be better called fiends: a Heinous-Conflagration.
It was a simple spell; for any life that you took previously, you would be afflicted with a stack per kill of an all-consuming rage along with flames licking your insides under your skin, that required a very high Willpower to resist and would result in berserking against friends or foes alike. This made fighting a normally Corium-ranked mature Heinous-Conflagration nearly impossible in a party. This was absolute folly to do so as whole cohort of bronze and silver ranked soldiers who followed a vain Dragonkin princeling, in his hunt for conquest.
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On random nights, Horast still recalled the nightmare of the huge monster that was more a crimson pyre in the shape of man as it easily tore the twenty-third princeling and son of Gehenna from shoulder to groin, resplendent armour in all. He still recalled how he ran into the woods and away from his own unit , the Heavyscout Auxilaries, in his darkened half-plate as fear overtook him. His presumed strength from his rare Treebane class and the safety of being surrounded by nearly five hundred brothers, was nothing as the Monster tore into them and activated it’s baneful curse.
Friends turned on each other like mortal enemies even as real blood-brothers and brothers-in-arms killed one and other. All the while, the Heinous-Conflaguration ripped fully plated soldiers apart even as it burnt them alive by proximity to it’s burning body. Like broken toys in the hand of flaming child.
He was one of the lucky craven few that ran away from the fight, but he was brave enough to return for the dead. Finding his shamed courage even as he ran so far away from the battle, he turned back with the determination to die and wash away his shame. But the young Hoarast of the past only came back to a dead cohort of soldiers and the sickeningly smell of charred meat. He found no one alive amongst the carnage, except for a badly burnt and near-death ginger Minotaur. Joantack the farmer had only joined the engineering corps to save up money to buy his own farm, there to only dig latrines and fortifications and die pitifully with no fighting abilities whatsoever if the real soldiers died in combat. He had fought the curse on the sheer dumb luck of never having killed in his life before, choosing to eat only vegetables and being kind enough to never eat a whole plant from his father’s farm.
Hoarast tended to the Minotaur, carried him away from the morbid scene and they grew into fast friends as they fled the Dragonkin empire together with as much treasure as the young Bearkin could carry along his patient. For there should be no survivors of a princeling’s personal cohort if the Dragonkin fell in battle.
But even if he fought the curse once the Minotaur still had to live with it and fight it as it flared up. Especially every year on the fourth of Hastendink, the day he was cursed. It was manageable at first, but the curse fully manifested as the Minotaur accidentally killed an Orc with an unfortunate punch in a bar brawl long in the past far, far away.
So after so many years of research and with many personal riches carried by the twenty-third Dragonkin princeling drying up, the pair found the answer in the Bleaky-Silverbark trees. For with a quick glance of his eyes that shone a ghostly silver as it reflected the moonlight, the Bearkin pointed at the best tree using his Class and experience. What he pointed at was the most suitable tree to cut, for the annoyingly hard Bleaky-Silvverbarks could only be cut at night, when they had softer defences.
Joantack rushed past the Bearkin with an angry bellow as flames trailed from his saggy fur on his head and shoulders, creating a bonfire of rage in the night air. He lifted his make-shift, tree trunk axe over his right shoulder before slamming the unrefined adamantium shard that was its axe-head into the trunk of the tree. It barely even nicked the tough palisade of scales that covered the bark of the tree, but working out the rage from the curse was also part of this remedy.
Joantack screamed in anger even as he pulled back for another swing, and another, and another. The tree was slowly scored with more and more marks as time went by, with the Minotaur seemingly inexhaustible as he was now a literally bonfire. Each hit of the barbarous axe screamed out into the forest with a resounding boom, but thankfully too far away to disturb the village.
As the Minotaur tackled the tree with his own monster in hand, Hoarast had settled a dozen paces away from his murderous friend as rolled his grip on his own menacing tool. The weapon he held was a masterfully-crafted from an alloy of Dwarf-Iron and Adamant, with its menacing visage actually a part of it’s charm. For his unnamed throwing axe was created to slice through the air and create horrible wounds in flesh and bone, no matter the angle it came into contact with it’s victim. But Hoarast had never even been nicked by the fell blade not even once, for he always threw the axe in conjunction with his Forest-flight skill and Tomahawk-return to ensure that it flew fast and hard before looping back into his grip.
The Bearkin gently shrugged off his white-fur lined jacket before throwing it onto a easily reach branch above. For he was sure to be doing a lot of killing tonight and he preferred to wash his own fur rather than wash out the stain of blood from his favourite jacket.
Finally the Minotaur broke through the outer aegis of the Bleaky-Silverbark and causing a blue sap to gush out of the wound. Joantack was pulling back for another swing even as the tree finally did what the two intended to provoke it into doing. For a corona of blue light flashed out from the wounded tree and encapsulated the flaming Minotaur before quickly shrinking back into the wound. With the pale icy blue pulse, the tree had siphoned the magically infused flames of the curse out of Joantack’s body and into the tree. But the first pulse was not enough, so the angry Minotaur threw another inaccurate and mighty blow at the source of the stream of blue sap.
Hoarast watched on with growing annoyance as the head lumberjack of Pancreedy, as his friend continued to miss the target with his frankenstien-axe in his cursed rage. But eventually the Minotaur hit the wound once more and provoked another pulse that caused him to collapse like a puppet with its strings cut.
But now came Hoarast’s part, for the Bleaky-Silverbark sap had another particularly annoying quality. It attracted nearby animals and whipped them into a murderous frenzy against the tree’s attacker. Similarly to the annoying curse they were using it as a remedy in the first place.
With a throw of his axe that shined in a green glow, Hoarast killed the first shadowy creature that sought to dare and harm his normally placid friend.
…..
A long while later, a slightly smaller and now non-luminous Joantack woke up to find himself sleeping with his head rested on a root of some random tree. In front of him was his friend Hoarast who was only in his trousers but otherwise spotless as he dragged some corpses to pile below the Bleaky-Silverbark he had attacked before in his cursed rage.
“Oh realms, thank the divines it’s over. Was I out for long?” was the first thing he asked as he got up.
The Bearkin rested his axe on his legs before putting his paws together as if in prayer, before activating a whispered skill. The same Bleaky-Silverbark that they had abused previously then reacted to the skill by reaching up its thick roots from underground, before constricting the corpses and pulling them under.
“Nah just about ten minutes or so,” growled the bear as he turned back with a smile that showed his formidably sharp teeth in the dim moonlight before picking up his axe.
“Alright then that’s the third and final one this week, so I should be good for a few months or so… let’s head to the Scimitar for a drink! I’m so thirsty I could kill a tree!” joked the Minotaur as he hefted his own axe that now felt unwieldy as his rage-strength left him.
“Alright just let me grab my jacket,” replied the Bearkin as he turned away towards the place he left it for safe keeping. As his paw was about to grasp the collar, he found that it was heavily stained with a particularly large splotch of blood.
A mournful cry roared through a small patch of the Whisperwoods that night, that scared many poor Beasts and Monsters from their slumber.