Auberon

Once they had entered the forest, they were in a different world. Shae was a place of bright spires, sunlight and laughter. Of beauty wrought by the queen. The forest was something else, though. Dark and verdant and savage, but no less beautiful for it. Here Auberon truly felt at home.

The hunt was what he truly lived for, though Titania would have disagreed. There was no better sport than a hunt. She had never understood that. She called it a blood sport. She was wrong, though. It was not about the blood so much as the thrill. The challenge of outwitting the quarry. The thrill of the chase, of the kill.

And because he was king, it was his right.

The hunting party had left Shae in high spirits, courtiers and man-at-arms a plenty excited for bounteous feast that such a hunt would provide for the tournament on the morrow. Saddled on their mounts, they led left in a procession of colorful banners and long spears pointed to the sun, while thick limbed hunting dogs followed close behind. Courtiers chatted and jested with each other as they told tales of the enormous black boar that they were sure to find.

The chatter had turned more focused as they entered the sun dappled darkness of the Greenwood. Hunters and hounds alike had scrambled to find traces of the beast. Auberon himself had been the first to find something, a snippet of coarse black hair wedged in the broken bark of a tree some distance in.

He knelt beside the trunk and examined the crack which bore the tuft of hair. It was boar, he was certain of it, but there was something else that struck his attention. It was not wedged in the cracked bark as he had first surmised, but was instead stuck there with a reddish substance, drying in the air. Blood.

Auberon frowned and returned to his mount, motioning the party to continue their search in the direction the boar seemed to be going.  They had failed to see anything on the straight trail, but as they curved back around, the hounds alerted them to another trace. Pointing to the East, they found a trail of crushed grasses and broken twigs with enormous boar hoof prints scattered amongst them. In the distance was a thicket of bushes and ferns, and he knew that it would be the perfect place for the beast to rest.

Auberon brought his horse to a halt and dismounted, patting his steed's nose. He loosened his sword in its scabbard, and then he turned to the men who were gathered behind him. He was not a tall man, but thanks to his armor and the crested helm, he seemed taller than he was.

"Huntsman," he spoke, motioning to one of the men.

The man nodded, and then he led his hounds toward the bushes. Rain followed with her bow strung, and then the rest of the hunting party. The hounds darted among the bushes, rustling the leaves and chasing their own tails.

"Auberon, look," one of the men said to him, pointing to the ground. There, in the dried dirt, was the unmistakable print of a large, sharp toed foot. It was not a boar, Auberon was certain now.

No sooner had he thought it than one of the hounds yelped in pain, and then another. One of the men called out as the hounds began to fall, cries of pain and anguish echoing through the woods. Auberon's eyes roved the forest floor, and then he settled on one of the men.

"Make a circle outwards from here," he instructed. "Stay quiet and be alert."

The man nodded and then moved away to do as he was told. Auberon himself strode deeper into the brush and then he stopped, crouching to examine the ground. He saw a few broken ferns and twigs, but the path that they had followed didn't seem to be from any beast. He knelt near one of the broken twigs and examined it, before he stood and continued to follow the broken vegetation. He saw a few marks that seemed familiar, though he had never seen them with his own eyes, he was sure that such a thing had never existed. There were so many creatures in the Greenwood, from myth and legend and everything in between. But this was something new. Something old.

Auberon pushed forward, motioning to Syr Lanval to follow behind him. They pushed aside the frond of a giant frond and came upon the boar itself. Dead, its body pierced by a long, thin blade that had passed clear through its breast. The body of one of the hounds lay a few paces away with a similar wound.

Auberon stared at the carcass and contemplated. Within the moment, he had ordered his men to fan out to search the forest. It was likely, he thought, that the boar and dog alike had been killed by someone, or something.

He lowered his spear and squinted at the corpse. The boar was enormous, larger than any he had ever seen. Its tusks, sharp as knives, were dark and jagged, and its eyes were deeply sunken in its skull. He inspected the cuts upon its hide, comparing them with his memory of the tusks of other boars he had hunted and killed.

This boar, he reasoned, was one of a kind. Perhaps the largest boar he had ever seen. What could have killed such a beast? The ground around the boar was matted and torn, clearly the site of great struggle, but he couldn't quite identify the other tracks mingled with the boar's as trampled as they were.

 Auberon regretted that the boar was dead, but what did he care for the life of a boar? It served no purpose beyond its meat, and the purpose of the hunt was the challenge, the test, the danger. That was what he lived for.

To his left, he heard the sound of a twig snapping, and then he heard the clearing of a throat. He turned to see Syr Lanval standing a few paces from him, pointing to the East.

Auberon followed his finger and saw what had distracted him. A beast he did not quite recognize at the edge of the clearing, mingled with the trees. It was huge, certainly of a size to have killed the boar. He could just make out a spotted body and the haunches of some great cat, but where a majestic shaggy head would normally reside, its neck instead swept to the massive head of some loathsome serpent. It stood frozen, staring at the king and his huntsman. Auberon lifted his spear and took a step forward, but then he hesitated.

The beast started at the motion and opened it's mouth wide. He could see massive fangs that must surely have been what felled the boar. It hissed and gave a massive, booming cough of a sound that he could feel even from this distance.

And then with a leap, it was gone.

Auberon had hunted many a beast in the woods. He had hunted deer with bows and arrows, he had hunted boar with boar spears and great teeth-gnashing dogs. He had hunted foxes on horseback with hounds, and then he had hunted them on foot with a simple spear. He had hunted deer on horseback, on foot, and in the bathing pool, where he had captured them by running them out of the water, where they couldn't run fast enough to outpace him.

He had caught them all.

But this was a different creature entirely.