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Once, there was a traveler, who was caught in a terrible snowstorm. The full moon was hidden behind the roiling clouds, the snow heavy and cloying on his skin.
He ran, as fast as he could through the icy forest, for he had heard the deep blare of a hunting horn, and the howling of hounds, full of hunger and longing.
He knew what that sound meant. It was the sound of the Wild Hunt, the sound of the Erlking’s great horn. Should he stop fleeing, the First Hunter and his pitch-dark hounds would be upon him in an instant.
It was said that once you heard his call, it was already too late. Those motherfuckers had made sure he’d heard it loud and clear.
The traveler ran, muscles straining, every part of him consumed by the fear of death, the primordial need to stay alive.
He fled along the snowy path, cutting through brambles and branches, looking for any way forward, and as he did, his cloak was torn away, his clothing ripped and shredded, his shoes left behind in the freezing mud.
And yet despite the exposure to the cold he ran ever more swiftly, bounding through the forest like it had always been his home.
He came to a cabin, obviously abandoned and rotten with age, and prayed that it would keep him safe. Civilization was anathema to the fair folk, but all civilization eventually returns to nature.
He ran through the sagging doorway, its door long since gone, and leapt over broken chairs and tables, through what had once been a kitchen, before his antlers caught on an archway and he fell, dragged to the floor by his body’s momentum.
Antlers? He thought, and he found that he had become in part a dawn-colored stag, with fine cloven hooves and curling, sweeping antlers.
In this mockery of a home, he had become a mockery of a man, the perfect quarry for the Erlking.
He no longer felt cold in his new coat of fur, but this brought him no comfort at all. Surely the Erlking would skin him for his soft pelt, sever his head to display his horns as handsome decorations.
And as the stag tried to get to his feet, twisting this way and that, he felt a heavy boot stamp firmly on his chest.
He cried, a bellow of despair and grief, and he knew that he had given up. There was no hope, no escape anymore. The Erlking had made him his in body and mind, and he was doomed.
The Erlking had taken the walls of the crumbling house away. Not destroyed, not flung away, just gone, leaving only the wooden floor and the elk pinned to it.
Surrounding him on all sides were the Erlking’s hounds, snapping and barking, beady red eyes full of desperate hunger.
They could not cross the threshold proper, but their spindly arms and pedipalps pushed past where the walls had been, as if trying to force through the barrier.
Like the stag, the Erlking had great antlers, curling above his helmeted head to reach taller than the tallest trees.
He looked down at the stag and chuckled darkly at his quarry’s predicament. The stag flinched, sure he was about to meet his end.
The Erlking lifted his foot and the stag scrambled away on all fours, careful to avoid entering the strike range of the hounds.
They howled and growled with desperate hunger, not for his flesh but for his fading humanity, seeking to complete themselves by ripping him apart.
Each red eye, wet with tears, seemed to beg him for forgiveness, and the stag was filled with such pity he almost stepped forward into their lethal embrace.
“Halt,” said the Erlking, to both his hounds and his quarry. “This one is mine and mine alone.”
The hounds slunk away into the forest, disappearing into shadows and snow. Their mournful howls became the shrill winter wind, and their mandibles and claws became the biting cold of the night.
The Erlking reached down, piercing the stag’s chest with his warm, calloused hand, to clutch his quickening heart.
The First Hunter made a thoughtful noise as he stroked the organ with his thumb, as if committing something to memory, and then he yanked hard, pulling the heart free from the stag’s chest.
The stag screamed again, another terrible bellow of pain and despair.
There was no mark left on the stag’s supple coat, no blood staining the Erlking’s hand, and yet the stag’s heart, red and shiny, beat furiously in the Erlking’s grasp.
The stag could still feel the warm, calloused fingers gripping it, could still feel it beating wildly. He waited to die, to collapse from his grievous injury, but he simply stood there, breathing raggedly.
The Erlking turned away, content with his hunt. He stepped back to his chariot, raising his hand to alert the scattered hounds that it was time to move on.
“Wait!” said the stag, finding his voice, though he quavered. “What have you done to me?”
The Erlking tilted his head in thought. “I have spared you,” he said, finally, plainly.
“But what am I now? What am I supposed to do?”
“You are alive, and you will live,” said the Erlking, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
The stag was suddenly furious. What was he to do, trapped in the body of a beast? Who would welcome him back, after they had sent him out to die? Who would trust him, knowing he had been touched by the Erlking? And what would become of his severed heart, still held in the Erlking’s grip?
“You may as well just kill me,” said the stag, miserably. “There is nothing else for me to be but your quarry. Is that not why you cursed me?”
The Erlking looked through him, coldly, dispassionately. “You have been spared. I have what I want from you, prey.”
The stag’s pulse quickened. “What will you do with my heart, now that you have ripped it out of me? Why not just kill me, and take your vile prize after?”
“The heart must beat, prey. That is why I have spared you, and will not allow you to die. The heart must beat, swift and true. This I will present to Life herself, as a show of my loyalty and skill. She must not be displeased, quarry. More than you could ever imagine is at stake.”
“I don’t care about that! I care about—“
The Erlking grabbed the stag’s face with his warm, calloused hand and plunged his victim into eternity. The stag saw the first thing to ever be, consumed by the second thing to ever be.
He saw the world enveloped by flood and flame, creatures he had no names for gorging upon one another in the infancy of the world, insects but not insects, fish but not fish. Shells cracking under vicelike jaws, viscera spilling into the water like a shadowy ghost fleeing its own death.
He saw things crawl free from the warm, shallow sea and take shaky breaths only to be eaten by whatever had gotten there first, the cruel, uncaring law of a universe governed only by the need to survive.
Crocodiles, birds the size of men, dragons, red in tooth and claw, then rats and dogs and cats tearing each other apart and then he saw himself, a speck of dust with the gall to talk back to the world.
There was no justice, only the crunch of carapace in jaws. There was no fairness, except the divvying of meat after a kill.
The stag fell to his knees and wept.
“I have made myself clear,” said the Erlking, patient as the stars. “Leave this place before you freeze to death.”
The stag looked up at the thing before him, a god, a fae king, a predator. He, too, had once been small, smaller even than the stag, a speck of dust in an endless ocean, swimming alongside other, smaller specks. “Do you miss them?” he asked, hollowly.
“I have no need for the company of beasts,” said the Erlking.
“What of your hounds, then?”
“Useful tools, but not companions. That is all they need to be.”
“They used to be men, though, didn’t they? Humans?”
The Erlking laughed. “Are you so proud as to think yourselves the first to know the gods? The hounds were once men, yes, but not all human men.”
The stag gulped. Somehow that made things worse. “I could accompany you,” he said, slowly, carefully, as if offering a treat to a testy dog. “I could be what you have been missing.”
“You wish to be another of my hounds?”
A flash of red and black crossed the stag’s mind. “No, sir. If you cannot make me human again, then this form is better than a hound.”
“As prey you have nothing to offer me,” said the Erlking, “except for your heart, which I have already claimed.”
“I know, but, if you need me to live, you can best do so by keeping me close.”
“Why do you offer yourself so willingly? Fight back, or flee. Do not stick your throat out for me to slit. That is not the way of prey.”
“Because I saw what it was like to be you, my King. I saw the abyss you hold in your heart. If it would ease your pain, I will give myself willingly. And I would also like to live, if possible.”
“You are strange, quarry,” said the Erlking, though he smiled through his mask. “Something so small thinking he pities something so much larger, the krill pitying the whale.”
The Erlking continued after a moment. “It amuses me. Fine. I will make you my pet.”
The Erlking gripped the stag’s neck between his warm, calloused hands, and squeezed slightly, his thumbs massaging the stag’s Adam’s apple. When he pulled away, there was a leather collar around the stag’s neck.
“P-pet?” The stag quavered, suddenly of the opinion that running off into the woods might not have been so bad after all.
“Well, you are obviously not my peer,” said the Erlking. He waved his hand and his chariot appeared, and he ushered the stag to sit next to him.
As he did so, the Erlking grabbed his face again to stroke his cheek. “The fur is softer on a living specimen. I wonder if that is true all over.”
The stag made a small noise and held very still as he considered the virtues of running off into the woods.
“We return to my hunting lodge,” said the Erlking, “where we will dine on venison and mead,”
“Venison,” said the stag.
“And mead,” repeated the Erlking. He caressed the stag’s thigh with his warm, calloused hand. “Perhaps an extra helping of that for me, eh?”
Desperate to change the subject, the stag asked something that had been on his mind for a few minutes. “What’s a krill?”
Nobody ever really searched for the traveler. Only by chance were his ruined clothes were ever found, and a small stone in the ruins of an old cabin, which appeared to have been burned to the ground.
The stone held an imprint of a creature like nothing anyone had ever seen, like a bug-eyed fish with a dozen fins and odd, curling antlers.