I consider myself to be a lot of things. I’m a smartass, and occasionally a dumbass. I’m smart, and I’m dumb. But I’m not an idiot. After escaping the wolf I was feeling particularly vulnerable and alone.

I know I told myself I’d rather be captured by bandits than rough it out alone for another night, but that wasn’t really the case. It was just something I told myself to calm my nerves while approaching yet another unknown party in this godforsaken corner of the woods. That being said as I approached the fire I took time to do my due diligence, wanting to see before being seen and hear before being heart.

The air in the surrounding woods near the fire I slowly trekked toward carried the scent of a cooking fire and fresh meat to me. For some reason I found this reassuring, the scent bringing to mind all the days I sat around the fire with visiting merchants telling stories or fires spent with the other kids of the village. It didn’t smell like home, per say, but it definitely smelled safe.

Still, there was a little alarm going off in the back of my head telling me things weren’t quite what they seemed. The air on the back of my neck kind of stood up on its own and the layer of skin on my arms felt both numb and tingling, my mind going that special kind of light that made it feel like I was somehow squinting my ears. There was something wrong.

As I got closer I heart laughing. It was loud and boisterous, deep and male. ‘So not Brook then.’ I don’t know if I was excited or disappointed that it wasn’t her, I hadn’t quite figured out how to deal with the whole relationship mentally. The eerie feeling came back threefold, and I was paralyzed in confusion. It took me a minute to figure out why my mind was screaming ‘danger, danger!’ at me. The laughing was off.

The laughter being carried through the trees to me, while faint, did not sound human. It was definitely humanoid, not canine or even like the harpies. It was just subtly wrong, wrong enough that I wasn’t able to pick up on it until my subconscious made me stop moving and squint my ears.

‘What do I do? What can I do?’ Somewhere out there was a bat-wolf, one that probably only let me go to hunt me down later if all the playing during out first chase was any indication. You know what, there is no need to be such a xenophobe. I decided I would investigate the fire, gauge just what I was dealing with and then go from there.

So that is what I did, I slowly crept up on the clearing doing my best to maintain stealth and silence. My spear was left stashed in thick brush a little bit of distance away and one of the boar tusk daggers was in my hand, in case someone popped out of nowhere. I took careful step after step, avoiding branches and crunchy autumn leaves, as I approached the campfire and the laughter. A couple times I stopped when there was a lull in the conversation at their camp, terrified that they’d heard something and were listening for more. Even after the chatter and laughing picked back up I remained frozen for a second or two longer before continuing.

By the time I made it to their campsite my calves were aflame from all the crouching and my heart was beating loud enough in my ears that I could scarcely hear them. Just a few more trees and a bush to traverse and I’d have sight of them in the clearing they were camped in. I stalked forward that last few feet with what felt like minutes between each step before peeking out of the bush into the glade.

With so much to take in, my mind decided it would shut down for a second before even attempting to register anything I was looking at. When it did decide to take things in, it did it a lot slower than it usually would and one thing at a time.

The first thing I noticed was that this glade was much the same as the one I’d ‘lost’ the wolf in. The grass that once stood here would have come up to my chest but had been cut away and/or trampled flat. All around the glade crude tents made of poorly cured animal furs were set up, ranging from deer pelts to wolves to many squirrels and rats sewn together, by the looks of it. Whoever lived here was most likely a nomadic people, I thought to myself.

Next up the campfire came into my mind. It was large, much larger than any campfire I’d seen. Were it not for the stakes of charring meat around the perimeter of the fire I would assume it a funeral pyre rather than a cook site. Bordering the fire on most sides were felled trees that the residents of the clearing used for seating. A fire hazard, no doubt, considering the size of the fire.

Finally the humanoids in the clearing were processed. Their clothing looked much the way their tents did, a miss matched hodgepodge of various animal furs that covered almost nothing. When I say almost nothing I mean that, when seated, the creature’s delicate parts were open for the world to see.

As for the creatures themselves, they looked like they had definitely been human at some point in their distant ancestry. They had the whole two arm, two legs and a head thing going for them, but were probably at least a foot and a half shorter than me on average. Their skin was a mucous-y yellow and uneven, covered in large cysts looking like they were being scarcely contained by thin layers of skin. From what I could see at this distance, the majority of them had either no hair or just a small patch or two and beady eyes that were sunk into their skull a little too far.

I watched as one of them waltzed up to the fire, his gait irregular and uncomfortable looking, just to reach out with fingers that were far too long and too thin for its body and rip off a hunk of meat from the animals being cooked. The morsel of flesh was unceremoniously shoved into the creature’s mouth, allowing me a sight of a mouth full of long needle-like teeth and a triangular tongue that was too large for its mouth.

A closer look around the fire showed that the nomads were primarily males and what few females that were located with the group were preoccupied. As disgusting as it was, I found it hard to peel my eyes away from the disaster that was their mating. First of all, the women were disgusting looking as well, their exposed breasts looking no less bulbous or pitted than the facial skin of the men. Because of the shortage of women, I noticed that there were at least 3 male nomads mating with each female, and that their fingers weren’t the only appendage that were comically larger than their bodies should have.

‘Fucking gross,’ I thought to myself, gagging and averting my eyes. I did a quick head count and decided there were at least 30 of them there, the tents alluding to the fact that there were than I could see. I made a mental note to watch out for scouts or hunters when leaving, which was almost definitely what I was going to do. My stomach grumbled, telling me that I was judging them based too much on their appearances.

I spent another minute there debating the pros and cons. Pro: Food smells really good, Con: I have no idea what they are eating. Pro: They seem like a really friendly people, at least with each other, Con: They might be… overly friendly. Honestly I don’t know how the decision would have gone had their leader not stepped out.

The man was at least as tall as I was and his skin was less saggy and pitted looking, rather it was stretched over rippling muscles that were visible despite the leather straps of armor he was wearing. A loincloth covered his delicates and he wore no footwear, his clawed toenails and heavy frame leaving deep imprints as he walked closer to the fire. On his head he wore a headdress of a wolf that looked very different that the one I’d seen not two hours ago, with larger eye sockets that were filled with what looked like small plates of metal, a dark blue and brown fur and two large canines that extended down half of the monster’s face, covering his temples and terminating just past his ears.

Most importantly was what the chieftain, as I’d just decided to call him, was dragging. Behind him was a battered looking human corpse, completely naked and cut in a few places. The chieftain dragged it to the fire before grabbing one of the large stakes with no animal on it and skewering the corpse, from its throat to its cervix. The stake was then driven into the ground again and leaned closer to the fire to begin charring and cooking.

The chieftain ripped off a hunk of flesh from another nearby stake, which I now recognized as a breast, and stalked back to his tent. This time I was unable to hold by the bile from rising through my throat, and almost didn’t swallow it back in time. The mutant nomads were definitely not friendly and I was not sticking around. I turned around and started to head back to where my spear was stashed before a scream on the far side of the camp, near another fire, caught my attention.

This one was also setting off alarms, but this time the alarms told me it was human.