Night of the Bone Taker

In a ramshackle ale house a group of men talked while the wind moaned like a banshee around the corners of the edifice. One the men piped up,"aye what we need is a good spook-tale to top off our beers."

"I'll give you one," said a lone man at another table. His countenance was grim and he trank deeply of his alcohol before he told his tale.

Four children shambled morosely in the darkness. All around them was destruction & bedlam. Behind them was a plethora of scenes from their blackest of nightmares.

Their faces were covered in soot, dirt, and blisters from fire. One of the kids stared at the road ahead with eyes the width of dinner plates, for the poor tyke was in shock after witnessing his mother sliced in twain by a great axe, her eyes staring in a now sightless contortion of blood spattered terror and her guts heaped on the floor between her upper and lower and lower halves.

The air was thick with the scent of rancid guts, shed blood and the burning village. The marauders had done their work well!

The quartet didn't know where'd they go but it had to be somewhere. They'd put a mile behind them and dared not look at the field to their right where the dead rested in the crimson stained ground.

Suddenly they descried a troop of men lumbering in their directions. The armor clad raiders had not noticed the juveniles yet & they scurried into a bush and hid there shuddering in terror.

The soldiers screamed in fury and the sounds of furious skirmish broke the deathly silence of the post battle night. Then all was quiet again. The kids poked their heads out the bush and saw a black armored figure kneeling over the slain soldiers on the road. He had a large horned helmet and a beard that extended his breast plate. In his hand he held an ancient looking blade that appeared to be made of bone instead of wood and metal.

The figure flayed open the back of one the soldiers with a sickening sound of rending flesh. He then pulled out a portion of the dead man's spine.

This was the bone taker. Nobody knew who...or what he was. Speculation and stories circulated in grim whispers from around campfires and the deepest shadows of grungy taverns. Some thought he was a mad man. Others thought he was demon made flesh. The particularly superstitious thought he was some dread god's avatar.

The displaced urchins waited for an eternity in Hell as the bone taker finished his unholy work and placed the last of his trophies in a sack with a grisly rattle. Then he left with a clank of armor and bones.

The children were overcome with a grim determination to solve the mystery of the bone taker. For hours under the moonlight they followed him in silence. Once a twig snapped beneath their feet. The bone taker halted and looked around. Then thankfully resumed his course.

At last the grim figure descended into a tunnel and the kids followed. They entered into a volcanic hellscape. The heat was oppressive and the air smokey. Sure they'd acted foolishly and were now in the bowls of Hades itself. They hid behind a large rock and observed the bonetaker as he walked along a protruding slab of igneous rock surrounded by a lava flow and poured his trophies onto a massive pile of ancient skeletal remains.

The Friends did not know one of them had been trying to stifle a cough. No more could he hold back and it echoed through the abyss. The armored fiend turned and spotted them. His eyes flashed like fire and his hand tightened around the macabre instrument of his butchery. He picked up his sack and and lumbered toward them.....

"Well come on with it! What happened to those kids!" one of the drunkards demanded of this story teller.

"People say different things. Some say none of them were ever seen again. That's not true though. Only one did escape from that demon pit and I am he.