Hunger of the Gods: A Short Story Anthology.

Prologue

The maid did fine work, dabbing his wounds with a smelly poultice, humming a tune known only to mothers and wet-nurses and high-priced whores post-coitus.

He watched with interest the dirty green glint of her eyes, the dark curls draping her downcast face, and the sway of her small breasts beneath her thin linen dress.

She is a widow, and alone. He mused.

He heard their footsteps through the earth as they approached. The night air filled with the clanking of chainmail and the heavy footfalls of a pair of soldiers, his hearing still keen as a wolf's. He chuckled to himself as he heard the soldiers scraping their feet along the stone walkway leading to the hovel as they slowly approached the cabin. They're shuffling, sneaking... He thought. They are far too cautious for mercenaries. They know of me or my reputation, likely. That means there is still time enough to claim her.

Snatching her throat was easy. He was fast and she was kind.

Her slender neck filled his thick hands, her flesh filling the gaps between his fingers with sun-worked skin. He pondered as he squeezed how much time she must have spent working the fields for her skin to have leathered so about the neck, despite her obvious youth.

He observed as what was left of her began to convulse, her body battling for air... She is dependent on this world. She cannot let it go. He smiled warmly at the thought, despite his disappointment. Did her eyes plead for mercy, or did they flare with anticipation for the forever life he would give her? Free from the dark and deadened halls of Barabaas! Saved from the blackened maw of his greedy god!

He released her throat, allowing her this partial breath as she gasped, only to be broken as he engulfed her mouth with his, as his god had shown him; the macabre kiss of the Devourer. The killer slammed his fist into the top of her guts till her thin ribs cracked in protest and her last breath came spilling forth.

He slurped as he sucked, gulping greedily.

He pressed his fist against her lower chest a final time and pushed as he sucked, squeezing out any remnant of the final breath, the ever-sentient pneuma, like squeezing out the last bit of juice from an overripe fruit. Using all his strength now, he made a final push into her chest till he heard the crack of her neck bones as the joints gave, wetly twisting and crumpling inward.

He felt his manhood rise as her pulse fell, till he was certain she was a corpse.

The hollow embrace of the limp weight reminded him it was over. The husk... He grimaced, cursing the word in his mind, and spat with disgust in her pale, dead face.

He took in every feature, setting as much of it to memory as he could. Adding a new spirit wife to his harem was a rare and splendid enough thing, and filled him with great joy at the thought of how she might help her fellow maiden-wives in the life beyond death to teach each other to weave and cook and please him in all ways.

They would be free from an eternity without corporeal form, but a lowly spirit in the afterlife of Barabaas. He and his wives would be given a new world, new bodies that could touch and feel and never age; an immortality truer to the word than any other. His god offered no compromises in his rewards to the penitent and seemed to have no lack of power to produce their works.

To leave no body behind is the purest of gifts his divinity could grant me. He pursed his lips, watching his spittle drip from the tip of her long, thin nose grown pale as milk. One day. He vowed, his face twisting to revulsion as he let the broken body of the maid slip limply to the floor.

The scent of wet shit and sick fouled the air as the husk began to loose its bowls. If I'd only had more time with this wife before she must be claimed... raping corpses is disgusting.