The three great beasts sat on a rocky ridge overlooking a small holding just beyond the Midgewater Marshes. Their keen eyes watched closely as the man and his son moved their goats to a pasturage nearer the base of the Weather Hills. Two small herd dogs moved with them, nipping at the goats’ legs, herding them where the man indicated.
Two miles beyond west of the pasture was the main house, and only the wife and two small children remained there. They were working in the garden, gathering vegetables for their meal that evening. One of the children was peeling some tuberous vegetables, and the youngest child gathered them up in a bucket for the pigs in the nearby pigpen.
Carchmoroth snorted. ‘How foolish of the two-leggeds not to stick closely in a pack, especially given how weak they are, how easily killed.’ He watched as the routine work went on, then rose as the women and children went into the house, their work in the garden done.
‘Come,’ he smiled, his grizzled lips pulling back to show his yellowed teeth in a gruesome grin. ‘The pigs are nicely stuffed, I think. And I have a taste for pork today . . .’
They took two of the smaller sows in a quick bloody raid, leaving a boar dead behind them and the little piglets squealing for their mothers . . .
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Eldest, that’s what I am . . . I knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless - before the Dark Lord came from Outside.
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