The night was Albie's time. The streetlamps candles had all melted to nothing. The coble stone streets and victims of the invaders were unfamiliar to the young man. His newborn abomination swaggered down the street its shapeless body twisting in the moonlight. Albie followed the creature closely. The mage saw the bodies and the scavengers who made a feast of them as he passed. Every rat or fly to brave to flee his presence quickly died as tendrils of moonlight touched them draining them of there life force to sustain the dying mage.
Perhaps he was eating too much. Maybe he was destroying the worlds balance to keep the pain at bay. Without the stole life force his body would weaken and twist until he would need a stick to walk. A slow husk. He mused to himself if he was harming a balance he had tried to maintain since he had been tasked with helping the fields grow. It started when he desecrated Cat.
The pail Lurker the monster bees were unnatural. His senses told him that they were only the beginning. The first and smallest of many larger creatures to come.
The skeletal face of the pail lurker turned its head 180 degrees to look at him. The rest of the body not deviating from its stager. The eyes of a dead man stared at him from the boney eye sockets. No life could be seen but some horrid distain for the living seemed to have taken its place. After a moment the head turned again until it faced forward.
The pair walked the streets passing by a large pile of corpses. A tall stack half Albie's height of dead men women and children. Rats and flies died as Albie passed into the next street. Here the street was free of the dead. except for another corpse pile a block down. At the end of the street was a walled in complex two-story brick buildings with a few lights flickering in the windows. The buildings around it were ransacked but the streets were clean.
As Albie got closer, he could hear the men inside. Music was playing. Men were laughing. Albie did not understand how the men could be so carefree. He had killed all the men in the gatehouse and turned one into a raging monster. Captain lock still seemed to be rampaging and these men sounded like they were having a festival. Standing next to the wall the young man felt anger. He looked at the bone faced lurker who climbed up the ten-foot wall with ease and skittered along it to a fence guarded by a lone century.
Albie sneaked close to the solder as the lurker twisted its body down on the young solder. Its arms stretched to absurd size as it made ready above the solder in the orange coat. Its fingers stretched to bee a foot long. It hung over the boy for only a second before grabbing the guard by the neck and hoisting him into the air like a noose. The orange coat grabbed at the slimy back fingers surrounding his neck. His feet kicking desperately trying to find the ground. No scream escaped the guards gasping mouth and he could not remove the hands of his captor. His struggle desperate but pointless. He slowed down and then stopped moving. The head hung to the side. Face locked in permanent fear.
The pail Lurker let go of the body that fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes. The corpse lay in a motionless heap. Black marks like burns ore rot scared the neck were the monster's fingers had coiled around him. The monster opened the iron gate for its creator. Albie walked into the compound waived off the lurker that crawled up a wall and began looking into the windows on the second floor. It saw something it liked in one. The glass windows closed to keep the night air did not stop the creature. Its arms flattened and pushed trough the cracks followed by its legs and chest. Even the creature's skull flattened to squeeze into the closed window.
Soon after the silhouette of it hunching over strangling another victim could be faintly seen thy the young mage. The mage stood over the dead orang coat and pulled the second bloodstone from a pouch.