A Tale from Ynys Prydain, Chapter 1.

Silence pierced the Lothian fields. On any other day the village of Y’gotanaoi would have been a sight of farmers tending wheat, children playing, women washing clothing, and shepherds tending to their flocks to a familiar sound of human traffic. But on this sunlit springtime midday, forty four years after the birth of a man no one in this part of the world had heard of, and eleven after his death, there was only one sound to be heard.



Heavy footsteps and a faint jingling of metal played the sole tune of this day as a woman strolled into the town. She stood a foot taller than the average man, long, powerful legs attached to a pair of wide, voluptuous hips holding aloft a muscular torso. A pair of perky breasts, each the size of a man’s head jutted out from her wide, but femininely proportioned chest. Broad shoulders were attached to a pair of wiry arms that managed to appear both slender and muscle-bound simultaneously. Cyan tattoos of eldritch origin ran up and them, conveying a feeling of arcane power. A muscular yet slender neck propped a uniformly sized head. Her jaw was as wide as her crown, where short, unkempt hair the color of an autumn sunset was tossed about playfully by the wind. Thin brunette brows stood sentinel over a pair of large eyes, their pale blue the color of ice. Slender cheeks and a small nose painted a beautiful picture that was her face. She wore a pair of worn doeskin boots for footwear, but nothing covered her muscular legs. A chainmail armored leather skirt that jingled slightly with each step made the forty six inch journey around her protruding waist. Her shirt was of similar material, but there was an opening in the armor at the woman’s naval. Nothing covered her arms, nor her head, save her crimson hair. On her left shoulder, she carried a large leather sack that reached down to her waist, even wrapped around her shoulder several times over. Slung across her back on a leather harness was a blade, nay, a cleaver six and a half feet long. The double edged creation of iron was a massive thing, nearly a foot wide and an inch thick at the middle. The oaken handle, two inches in diameter, added another half foot to the weapon, making it nearly as tall as its wielder.



The goliath of a woman strode forward several more steps into the center of the hamlet before stopping, icy eyes observing their surroundings. Several breaths passed until from around the corner of one of the small huts cautiously emerged an older man. In his fifties, the brown haired man had a pair of worried green eyes that hid behind a weathered face. His skin was leathery from years of exposure to the sun, and his thin but muscular body spoke to a life of both activity and malnourishment. He slowly walked into the middle of the dirt path, opposite the red haired woman. With outstretched arms, he addressed her:



“Hello traveler!” A gravelly voice spoke in friendliness, “Welcome to Y’gotanaoi! We’re only poor farmers, as you can see,” he continued, gesturing towards the ramshackle homes and shoddily made fences, “But we’re willing to help out anybody who-“



“You know who I am.” The woman spoke in a threatening voice laden with both venom and authority. Her accent was one that spoke of the Northern Highlands, the home of the Picts.



“I-“ The older man started, a look of worry on his face, “I, heard rumors… but-“



“My name is Anchoret.” She interrupted once more, in a voice that sounded as cold as her eyes looked, “You may have heard of me by my other names. Man’s Bane, The Wrecker, The Monster, The Eater of Men. Sound familiar?”



“Yes, yes” the man said softly, “Your… deeds are well known.”



“Then you know why I’m here.” She stated. The man looked down, mouth slightly agape in concern, or perhaps fear. After a moment of silent thought, he returned his gaze to the red haired Pict.



“Please,” the leathery man begged, a sudden unease consuming his demeanor, “We’re just poor farmers, just please, leave us be.” Silence returned as a light breeze gently tossed Anchoret’s hair. Her right hand slowly over her shoulder as her eyes flickered in between the houses. Eight men by her count, ducking behind piles of lumber, crouched behind buildings, watching from slightly open shutters. Her hand gripped the hilt of her weapon.



“I’m afraid I won’t be.”



Battle cries emerged from all about her as angry feet carried angry men towards her in an explosion of sounds. She quickly spun about as she effortlessly drew her monolithic blade. Seven more persons were emerging from behind her. Her fifteen opponents brandished pitchforks and blunted woodcutting axes; nothing to worry about. A boy of sixteen approached her from the right, axe hefted over his screaming head. Anchoret brought her blade in an upwards diagonal slice. Iron sung effortlessly through flesh and bone as she cleaved the child from hip to shoulder. His two halves fell to the ground with a wet plop as his entrails slid out of his bottom portion into a dark sanguine pool. Blood sprayed from the iron mass as Anchoret switched her grip to her left hand and brought it across her body at an incredible speed. The first half foot of the blade caught the upper half of a black haired man’s skull from some ten feet away. His skullcap slid from his mandible as his lifeless corpse fell to its knees, his long hair matted with the blood that squirted from his brain. Once more taking the blade in two hands, she brought it in a horizontal arc into a young man that approached her from the left. He brought up the hilt of his pitchfork to block the blow, but the wooden shaft shattered as the cleaver took off his arm and bit halfway into his torso, sending his corpse sprawling. Instinctively, she wheeled about. An orange haired girl of perhaps seventeen lunged at her with a pitchfork in her hands and a shout on her lips. Anchoret swatted the head of the pitchfork away with her cleaver, holding the weapon in her right hand, before grabbing the shaft of the farming tool with her left. She yanked on it, pulling the girl towards her. The girl lost her balance and fell uselessly to the ground at Anchoret’s feet. The seven foot tall woman quickly rose a muscular leg above her waist before slamming it onto the girl’s back. She shrieked as her spine shattered. Anchoret rose the blade over her head and brought it down onto an approaching brown haired man, who made ready to swing an axe at her. The cleaver cut from his skull to his sternum with a chorus of cracking bones and shearing flesh. “The man I spoke to.” Anchoret realized as she wretched her blade from his ribcage. Worried green eyes slid from their sockets to dangle several inches above the ground in between the two halves of the skull as the Pictish woman painted that dirt path the same color as her hair. She quickly brought her blade across the belly of an approaching assailant. He dropped his axe as he grabbed handfuls of his exposed intestines, trying to keep them inside of him. He fell to his knees as Anchoret pivoted on one foot and took off the head of a pretty brown haired man of twenty with a savage chop. The decapitated skull landed at the feet of the remainder of Anchoret’s would-be slayers, pretty brown eyes staring into nothingness.



The remaining eight farmers hesitated at the sight of this. They slowly backed away, tensely keeping their weapons in front of them.. Their bewildered eyes stared at the woman before them; seven bodies of the dead or dying lay about her, but she breathed as softly as she would if she were asleep. Blood covered her exposed arms, turning her blue tattoos purple and her fair skin red. Fragments of bones, bits of brains, and clumps of organ fragments fell from her blade to the ground, carried off by the running streams of blood that ran all along the iron in her hands. After a moment more of a silent staredown, the red haired Pict soundlessly reached down, holding her sword in her right hand. Her left hand grabbed the head of the injured orange haired girl beneath her. Her victim screamed and screamed at the pain, but Anchoret effortlessly lifted the girl over her head with one arm. She then very meticulously placed the girl’s rear on her face. After a moment, the girl began to slowly sink. Her orange haired head screamed in pain or horror or both as Anchoret’s mouth slowly formed around her rear, head growing to encompass more and more of the agonized teenager as the eight others watched in terror. Then, she swallowed. The girl’s cries became a sob as she was engulfed from her knees to her midback, Anchoret’s mouth pinning her torso to her thighs. A form-fitting lump appeared the large woman’s esophagus where the girl’s bottom was. After another audible swallow over a scene of silence, only the orange haired girl’s feet and head remained visible, the rest of her contained in a large bulge in the beautiful red haired girl’s throat. She quietly sobbed as Anchoret swallowed again, an exaggerated “Gulp!” heralding a movement of the girl into her. The crowd, horrified, followed the path their fellow townsfolk was taking as she travelled into this woman before them. The roughly girl sized bulge slowly moved down and down, until it reached Anchoret’s midsection, where it suddenly disappeared completely. There wasn’t even a bump to signify that there was a person inside of this woman’s stomach. The crowd continued in their flabbergasted silence as a faint gurgle came from inside the red haired goliath. After a breath, she opened her mouth:



“URRRRAAAppph!” Anchoret exploded as the eight before her threw down their improvised weapons and ran screaming, fleeing the village as fast as their feet would take them. Anchoret smirked to herself as the group abandoned the town, making for the forest’s edge. It was a shame she had scared them off so quickly, she hadn’t had the opportunity to bloody her blade in nearly a week before so, not to mention that that little girl didn’t even put a dent in her hunger. But, fifteen people meant as many as fifteen families. Fifteen families of soft, tender, unprotected women and children. She would get her meat, it’s only a matter of finding it…