ACCLAIM

            It is a little known fact that, in the small town of Ashville, just north of the city of S’bell, there has never been a murder. What there have been are fights, beatings, lynchings, and, oh yes, suicides. A lot of suicides. But there has never been a murder, until the Dark One came to town.

            No one had seen his like before or ever would again. He arrived quietly in the night and took a single room in the town’s only inn. Mr. Avery, the innkeeper, stated later that he had never seen the like in all his days of innkeeping. “He just appeared there. I looked up from the bar and suddenly he was there. All smiles.” That alone should have set him apart. No one smiled in Ashville. There had never been anything really worth smiling about. The town had been ravaged for the last several years due to it’s lying between the county of Laborth and S’bell. It was a convenient road for marauding forces to take as they went back and forth in their endless war. But, strangely, none of the armies ever stopped there for long. They would trample through the fields, burn the houses, steal the cows and livestock, but they never killed anyone. It was as if somehow they knew better.

            But the Dark One was different. The few people who saw him agreed that he was not just your normal black man but he was the total absence of light. His skin was darker than night and the only light came from his eyes and his teeth. “I am looking for someone,” he asked Mr. Avery. “His name is Asteroth and I have heard that he resides nearby.”

            Avery, to his credit, did not say anything about Asteroth but merely grunted that the price of the room was five crowns and that he had never heard anything about anyone named Asteroth. This was, of course, despite the fact that everyone in town knew Asteroth and knew well enough to stay away from the wizard’s small estate.  The Dark One, who gave his own name simply as N, just smiled and went to his room.

            Later, that night, there were sounds heard coming from N’s room that were not comforting to Mr. Avery’s other guests. “Moaning and groaning as if someone were in great pain,” said Mrs. Tillinghast, whose room was next to N’s. But when questioned later, she could not say if it was N who made the noises. The next morning, when the chambermaid went to make up N’s room, there was the sound of screaming and a loud thud as her fainting body hit the floor.

            Naturally, the early customers of the inn rushed upstairs to find a curious site. N was nowhere to be seen. The chambermaid laid in a huddle in the corner and there, sprawled out on the floor, was what remained of Asteroth. What there was left was very wet and very red.

            A council was called. An investigation was held. Finally, the good men of Ashville decided that they should go out to the wizard’s estate to see what clues might still be there. So, it came to pass that a group of twelve men walked out of town at noon, when the sun was at it’s highest and brightest, to investigate that small estate. And never seen again.

            A second team was dispatched and, upon sighting the wizard’s estate, promptly turned around and went back home. It was a week before the mayor of Ashville declared that he had had enough and men entered the wizard’s home. What they found caused them to burn the estate to the ground and then cover the ground with salt. Mr. Avery was one of those who was there at the burning but he would never talk about it. Sometimes, when he was well and firmly in his cups (as he so often was after that day) he would mutter about pacts and debts and the evil that can come to men who decide to sell what they did not own to forces that eventually demanded payment. “He should have known better,” Avery would say, “after all, he was a wizard and a famous one, at that. He should have known that everyone pays eventually. But to pay his debts with twelve innocent men. You’d think he’d know better after living twelve hundred years.”