Midnight Erebus's Bestiary, Page 5

I have earned three silver earrings in my life so far. The first was from the Ice Banshee hunt. The first earring is a sign of a full-fledged hunter, so every hunter that survives to be a member of an unsupervised party has the one. All that come after are from particularly challenging hunts of creatures that have typically led to deaths. The second for me was the undead green dragon as dragon hunts have led to entire parties being wiped out in the past. They can be very much hit or miss so any dragon hunt, as rare as they are due to them being sentient beings, will result in a silver earring, with enchanted ones rewarded for particularly old ones. The third however was one that should have been the second most dangerous hunt of my life.
 
The Chaos Wyvern
Scourge from the Chaos Woods
 
Wyverns in general can be described as draconic creatures, with arms for wings and a scorpion tail. Older ones will breathe a poison mist, making them near impossible to deal with by any breathing creature without magical assistance. Assistance we acquired via a plant from the Regal Claw Valley called Aerospice. It is a type of wind element influenced mint that when condensed into a potion removes one's need to breathe for a day. The village keeps a supply of this mint for jobs such as this and we soon learned that the situation called for it FAR more than we realized.
 
You see this wyvern came from a place called the Chaos Woods. It is a font of magics of so many conflicting varieties that it results in, as the name it suggests, pure chaos. Wild mutations, random shifts in time and space, random explosions, all is possible in the Chaos Wood. And this creature had lived in it, coming out of it to hunt common folk from villages right outside of it that gathered that pure chaos into crystals to create pure mana stones. When we arrived, the sights were horrifying. You see, in most cases you'll find villages of dead from poison miasma. That was not what we found. The villagers were mostly alive, all in twisted shapes and mutations. Some became odd mixtures of many different races. Imagine for example you have what should be a human. Yet instead they had one arm like that of a troll, another a tentacle, a third clawed hand coming out of their stomach. Their faces twisted with a scaled lizardman snout, one eye that of a fish, the other appearing normal. I could go on and on but this sort of randomness and worse was common among them all. Some couldn't even physically function from the mutations, begging only to die. This we found is what the wyvern's poison could do now. It itself had its own mutations, becoming furry like a bear and a head of an iguana. It's wings and scorpion tail were very much still intact.
 
Apparently this wyvern attacked this village daily, eating those weakest first. It was the sad reason their fellow villagers allowed their friends, their family to suffer. They learned the wyvern would ignore the dead, so their best chance for survival was to let their helpless companions suffer until they were eaten. I remember the rage I felt that day. Anger boiling up in my blood from the sheer heartlessness and betrayal of it. I wanted to destroy this entire cruel village. I may have decided to do so had Kalolin not talked me down. Made me realize that they were helpless to do anything else. That no one else would help them in their current condition and that as cruel as it was, there was little else they could do to buy time for their survival. Had she not, I likely would have struck Hargak for his suggestion that we use one of them as bait. Instead, I found myself agreeing.
 
Words would do little to explain what happened that day when the wyvern came. You see, in most tough hunts, I would not have survived without my comrades. In this case they could only watch in terror and awe as I approached the wyvern. From their descriptions, I appeared like a demon with an aura that seemed to drain all the light of the area around me as I approached the wyvern devouring it's kill from behind. It seemed to sense my approach as it slowly turned but as it did, I had already unleashed a flurry of tendrils from my body that grabbed it's tail and ripped it from it's body. An act that caused even the wyvern to stumble in terror and unleash it's pure miasma from its mouth all around the area. I remember being reminded of the bram I killed. It was almost like I was on the opposite side. Instead of feeling empathy for the poor creature however I smiled. I was going to end this cruel creature in the most painful way possible and there was nothing it was going to be able to do to stop it.
 
Apparently sensing this, it began to fly away, but not fast enough as I grappled myself onto it's back and ripped its wings off, crashing into the trees, sending me flying off as we struck the ground. Several of my bones were broken, but I used my shadow magic like braces to keep moving. It didn't even hurt at the time, thinking back on it. The creature wasn't in much better shape. Even without my assistance it would die within minutes from the massive tree trunk it was impaled on. That wasn't good enough. I was going to systematically rip it apart. I had started with it's eyes, ripping them out before Kalolin struck me with her usual punch to the face. It was that moment I snapped out of my bloodlust. Pain seemed to return to my body as I just laid down. I can't say I feel bad about what I did that day. To this day I still feel that beast deserved every bit of pain for what twisted things it had done. At the same time however, I am glad Kalolin was there to ground me.
 
Truth be told I'm not sure how I tapped into as much shadow magic as I did that day. I remember tasting fear on the air in ways that I never quite experience. That as I drove that creature to fear I felt a rush of power, increasing my strength even further. We had talked with the village seer afterwards but even she couldn't entirely read what had happened to me. All she could do was give me exercises to further explore my source of my magic affinity and learn to better control it without giving myself over to my baser instincts. She also banned me from receiving magical healing for my wounds to ensure I'd devote myself to these exercises and to teach me a lesson for my savagery. My father wasn't quite as worried. Apparently he had received similar punishment several times in his lifetime, though in his case it was because he accidently singed his comrades more than a few times. Guess he saw himself in me in some regard. Took a while for Kalolin to relax around me, but she came around after a few conversations that convinced her that I still had full control of myself.