Huzzah. Short story is only three thousand words, because I realized I needed to work out who those guys actually were. I have a better feel for them, now.
Behold!
Actually, writing a ‘mere’ three thousand words had its points. Less BS, more getting to the action. Will contemplate. I got more stories to tell of these two if you like them.
Moving through woods that used to be an Old American ‘suburb’ was always odd. After hundreds of years, a lot of roads were inexplicably still there. The ones that weren’t left behind grassy paths that were only now starting to sprout trees. The path they were on was one of the latter, and the only thing that bothered the two men was the way it left them with slight rises on either side.
Both men instinctively knew how the way to track monsters was to follow your nose. There was just something about the way unnatural creatures smelled that couldn’t be scoured away, or covered up. And everybody knew the Universal Dominion to (and too close to) the west — easily the biggest monster-maker on the continent — didn’t even try to get rid of the smell. They liked it when people got a whiff of evil on the breeze. That made regular folks afraid, and fear was one of the Dominion’s best tools.
Which was one reason why Oxamn and Nat went after the hodag without really even thinking about it. Monster-killing was what fighters did. Besides, if the damn thing were breeding spawn it’d just make sense to kill it now, before the problem got too big for two swordsmen.
