The Legend of Fer Shesk
Before the gods, both righteous and perfidious, shone their light upon the face of the world, a monster was born in a verdant valley in the Rakes. The monster would become the right hand of death: Caedis' champion, Fer Shesk.
The woman's labor was terrible. Agony wracked her full frame as blood spilled down her legs and into matted fur. The elk was long dead; flies swarmed its bloated corpse even as the woman screamed atop it. The woman was not a mother, but a vessel. She professed ignorance when peers had inquired after her bruised and sallow skin in the village she called home. But she knew. She was being punished. Whatever primordial forces remained after the Worldsmith abandoned His creation had conspired together to torment her for having forsaken the life of her unborn child.
She had not wanted a child; she was a child herself. But the elemental divines saw to her punishment all the same. "Life is life," she heard the trees groan. Between the pangs of agony, she cried. But the solace of tears was swept away from her as those vengeful primordial beings blew a great wind through the valley. There would be no comfort for the woman. She would know only pain.
Her dark, red blood splattered against the coagulated, rotting blood of the elk. As each great stream poured onto the elk's decaying mass, her blood flowed downward until it pooled in the creature's bile-filled entrails. By now the swollen carcass was covered in her blood and she felt that it would end soon.
A great quake began beneath her feet and she stumbled, reaching out for support on the bull's antlers. But the primordials had decreed her pain and so her hand failed to grasp the cold antlers and faltered instead. Terror gripped her for a moment before the woman's life was snuffed out by the brutal, cold, fly-swarmed antlers. They pierced her throat and her eyes and blood poured anew. Not the dark red blood that stained her legs and the elk's fur, but fresh, bright blood that pulsed with futile life. It sprayed over the elk's fur in whimpering crimson fountains.
Only now did the spiteful divinities rest. They watched as her body, entwined with the buck's, grew cold. But the woman's death begat life: in the belly of the elk, her lifeblood mixed with the elk's; some force more terrible than written record can describe imbued this mixture with power. An unimaginable aberration began to grow.
The child grew at a rapid pace, emerging from the carcasses of its expired parents in mere days. The monster gorged itself on its parents' corpses until nothing but the stain of their decay remained. It grew rapidly, attaining a 12-foot stature in mere months. Its appetite and brutality grew along with it. Residents of the valleys it plagued began to call it Fer Shesk, or "The Husk of Fear" in the ancient tongue. Ducal lords and kings commissioned crusades to destroy Fer Shesk, but its power was too overwhelming to contain. By the end of the second year, he--for the beast had begun to speak and called himself in that manner--was a veritable primordial force in and of himself.
He was beyond the reach of the primordials by that point. His monstrous form and aura of decay settled upon the abandoned, crumbling towns and pristine mountain meadows like a blight. There he remained until the bleak days of the Divine Crusades. It is not known when he was approached by Caedis. History has only recorded the aftermath of that infernal pact. Imbued with the strength of the Cozened Gods' leader, Fer Shesk carved his way through the forces of the Luminarch Gods. According to the legend, tens of thousands of mortals perished at his unholy hand.
Only a force as cunning and brutal as Fer Shesk and his evil patron could have stopped him: The King-eater. Once known by another name lost to history, the King-eater served Magiarr in the Divine Crusades. However, he grew disenchanted with the Luminarch cause and coveted the immense power wielded by Fer Shesk. In a previously unimaginable turn of events, the King-eater forsook Magiarr and pledged his soul to Kygarivax to seal Fer Shesk away beneath his impregnable keep in The Blight. The King-eater, assisted in his treachery by four powerful lieutenants, thus imprisoned the Cozened Gods' most powerful champion. Unable to punish His daughter, Caedis cursed the King-eater, withered him, and erased his name from time and memory. Thus the King-eater was born and Fer Shesk was imprisoned beneath the dark, imposing castle on the banks of the Gravedeep.
Historical Basis
There is no evidence that this myth is fictional or correct. No one has ever visited the Keep of the King-eater and lived to talk about it.
Spread
The Legend is known by almost all adults across the planet. The story is told to children to coerce them to behave in many cultures.
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