The beast trekked into our forest once again today, his servant of death latched to his side. It was a small thing, shiny and black, and it surely must have been death itself, because how else could it cause destruction in the mere seconds?  It can be held by the fingers and all it takes is a whispered command for it to act.

I almost fled from the scene,  but paused on my wake when I saw a shadowy figure behind him.  The beast had brought a human friend, clearly a smaller one. It was a  fawn, 1 a young child, younger still on the look in his face, fresh and ignorant. Had he been taught? Surely, if he were here, his father must have already taught him to use the tools so generously given to ones like them.

          I should have left right away, fleeing without a second look. But a part of me wanted to know. If they had fawns, then they were like us! They had always been different, the beasts, from the other moving that inherit the Earth. They show no emotion of fear, and when they show up, they are full of concentration. Only a few of them come, but they come often, and they order a monstrosity of devastation, fear never peeking out in their callous faces.

But now I wondered. Could they not all be horrid? Could humans, so casually known as beasts that the former name was almost unfamiliar to us, be like us? Perhaps the young one was not a beast. Perhaps not all of them yearn for destruction.  And so I stayed, out of wretched  curiosity
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The child looked solemnly at his father, and communicated in a way I didn’t understand. They use sounds, these beings,not actions, to express their thoughts.

“What do I do, father?” He cried. And that was when I saw it. I did not understand what he was saying but his eyes had changed. They were bigger than before and his teeth were no longer bared wide. Was he fearful? I had never seen a beast fearful before. I heard a soft, tinkling sound of his hands entangling together. His breath was startlingly loud, a whistle in the wind that drew repeatedly.  No, this was not the behavior of the beasts that entered my forest.

“Come on boy, you are almost twelve!  Time to carry our family tradition. Your littl’ sister would do better than you!”  The beast drove his hand and rammed it onto to the shoulder of his fawn. Then he opened his teeth wide, giving a startling noise, almost like a bark, a leer that would have frightened my pups if they were here now. It’s the noise I sometimes hear when he plays his everlasting game.

That is when it happened. The young pup, touched the servant, the black smooth layer cloaked with deadly power. Run. I saw my mother, when I was a pup, showing me the action. She had taught me to believe that the beast is night cloaked in color. “He seems like us, but he is not.  He will hurt you much more than a lion or a tiger. He will kill you all in a mere second for no true reason at all.” She had showed me the words so long ago before she finally acted on them with her last breath. 

Yet, I couldn’t move. I wanted to know. I had to know. No pup could commit such an act.  Could he? Surely, the night in him could not have taken over. Curiosity bound my legs in chains to the floor and I was unable to move the slightest bit of my body but my head,  twisting to look at the beast and his pup, alternating again and again. They were in front of me, so my eyes, unable to see all but the world to my sides, turned to that angle repeatedly, twisting left and right. 2

“DO IT!” The beast had fire in his eyes now. The fire that erupted when we escape from him several times in one day. But I had not moved this time!

And then, I saw with fear that erupted like a lion’s roar, the very act I had dread. I heard the man’s gruff voice saying something I could not hear, and then I saw the young fawn raise the weapon of destruction, and had only time to think, “Night erupts in them all. He has become a beast now.”  Run. Survive. Survive. Run. Survive. I bent my knees and leaped into the cold, frigid air. A loud, ear-splitting sound erupted that pained my head. A high pitched shocked scream.  A man’s ringing tones.

1: Note: A fawn is a baby deer. The main character does not use the world “son”. Instead, she uses “fawn” as she would call her own children.

2. Most prey do not see straight ahead like humans. That is a predator trait, to have eyes in the front of your head. The main character, a prey, can only see the its left and right, because his/her eyes are on the left and right.