The Hellish Hirsute Horror (Part 4): The Demon's Roots

The dank confines of Kreznic's boggy lair seemed to stretch back into the primordial ooze from whence all life first crawled. As the ancient warlock marshaled what remained of his energy to birth fresh new horrors to unleash, the walls appeared to throb and churn with viscous, sentient life.  

It was from this very same foetid pool of pre-human sludge that Kreznic himself was first spawned eons ago. Before kings and kingdoms, before even language itself, he had emerged - a shambling, primeval mockery of a man birthed from the festering discharge of the nascent Earth.

Towering nearly eight feet, his womb-born body was little more than a twisted mass of hairless, tumorous flesh and protruding bone. Devoid of human comprehension or intellect, he was among the first vile mockeries to draw breath on the young world. But where his squalid kindred were vacant, drooling husks acting only on base instinct, a flicker of malign intelligence smoldered within Kreznic's sunken skull.

His was an ancient cunning and inquisitive malice - almost fooling the unwitting into believing it to be the spark of self-aware reasoning. A mere century was all it took for the alien creature to study and mimic the fledgling human tribes, even as it pondered how to subjugate and extinguish their upstart species.

When at last its mastery over primitive man's ways was complete, Kreznic embarked on a dark crusade to amass arcane knowledge and power by any means necessary. It slaughtered and consumed shaman after shaman, draining their minds of every last ancient rite and ritual until their spiritual wells ran dry.

With each victims' occult insights metabolized, Kreznic evolved from a lumbering obscenity into a towering, beard-ridden humanoid form barely perceivable by man's limited senses. Its disfigured hulk now possessed the outward guise of a hunched crone armed with all the primordial magic of the uncivilized world.

Over the next thousand years, while man's paltry kingdoms rose and fell into the dust, Kreznic roamed the wild places unfettered and unseen by any human eye. All the while, it only grew stronger on the clashing auras, ley energies and chaotic forces far predating humanity.

It gorged itself on the spirit essences of every great beast unfortunate enough to cross its path, fully metabolizing their primal vigor and life forces. Consuming the heart of a slain Gyrfalcon bestowed upon it the dark gift of sight into places and realms no mortal could perceive. The rended soul of a slain Cave Bear became the burning furnace of rage that fueled its potent curses and hexes.

With each soul devoured and assimilated, the cyclopean witch-thing only mutated further into an unholy, primeval apotheosis of the Earth's most eldritch, untamed spirit. Its tendrils of matted hair - once thin, dry and brittle - transmuted into a living, prehensile mass of manifested life force and spiritual miasma. 

By the final century before recorded human history, Kreznic had become an apex predator of humanity itself. Entire clans of early Neolithic man would go insane or perish from withering illnesses whenever they allowed the demon brute's foul shadow to fall over them. Their wisest shamans counseled shunning and fleeing any land that bore even the slightest taint of its presence.

It was in the dark heart of these lightless primordial ages that Kreznic first encountered the few humans who, like itself, were born harbingers of unnatural abilities and unfathomable power. But even their formidable talents were no match for the eldritch entity's mastery over life itself.

Upon their inevitable defeat, the witchling predator rendered their essence down into demonic ichor to be subsumed by its seething beard strands. Every human spirit Kreznic absorbed only fueled its metamorphosis into a sentient, malign ecosystem unto itself. 

When at last the fell brute felt its power reach an untapped zenith, it psychically manifested a crude lair within the very heart of the eldest forests on the fringes of the primordial world. There it slumbered for hundreds of years more in a deathless, catatonic reverie - dreaming an endless cycle of fanged nightmares as it awaited the inevitable dawn of man's world.

Little did humankind realize just how ancient and profane a remnant of their planet's first spawned evils still persisted out in the wild places. With the modern age now upon them, the unholy monstrosity once known only as Kreznic would finally have mankind quivering in fear of the Demon Beard's unchecked power...

...

Wren was among the eldest mystics left in the mortal realm, a venerable sage whose spiritual longevity had allowed him to bear witness to epoch upon epoch of the world's hidden supernatural history.

He had studied countless prophecies and portents tied to the blighted Black Pine Forest - all of which heralded the nearing ascendancy of a pagan evil so immense and suffocating, entire civilizations once hovered on the bring of ruin whenever it stirred from its fitful slumbers.

The hermitic scholar had encountered the vile entity known as Kreznic and the horror of its malign whiskers century upon century ago, when mankind's own foothold was but tentative and unestablished. Back then he had but feeble powers to combat the demon, armed only with ancestral rituals and weak incantations from a bygone age.

Those paltry talents would no longer suffice. Wren knew that if Kreznic had arisen anew, then its true power stemming back to the primordial world would be a force none could hope to best alone. He alone of all living beings knew the dark rituals and slaughters the fiend had committed to attain its supremacy over the world's primal life essence. 

If even a fraction of the demon's grotesque secrets were to fall into the wrong hands, the carnage could be unimaginable.

Looking up from his dusty tomes of eldritch lore, Wren's wizened gaze settled upon the old oak staff clutched in his gnarled fingers. Ancient runes lay etched along its length - flowing inscriptions that resonated with primal spiritual might.

It was time to seek out worthy wielders of power to defend the mortal realms from Kreznic's return. Wren only prayed his advanced age would give him the strength to guide them to mastering abilities far older than the Earth itself...

To be continued in Part 5: The Kingdom of Yavamar