Chestnuts roasting over an open fire, huge helpings of turkey and roast potatoes with lashings of gravy, fingers wrapped in flayed skin, Christmas pudding with whisky sauce, minced eyes – those are just some of the things we like to eat during the festive season.
Few put on a banquet as well as the servants of the Summerking. We are lucky to have received an invitation to the Lord of Masks’ latest feast, so we’re just a bit busy trying to find our finest clothes. Why don’t you read this wonderful story they sent along with the invite? Now where is that silken cravat…
A HALLOWSWATCH BANQUET
Hark – a call goes out across the land! Thy year’s toil cometh to a close, and now is the advent of most noble celebrations, for Hallowswatch Night doth beckon. Hence, thy good lords make a decree of happiest frivolity; a feast is declared, and all are assured most fulsome merriment. Join us now in the singing of glad carols!
Upon the First Day of Hallowswatch, my good king giveth free – a hawk that standeth proud before thee!
Upon the Second Day of Hallowswatch, my good SIRE giveth free – two shimmering shields, and a hawk that standeth proud before thee!
Upon the Third FEAST of Hallowswatch, my good king giveth free – three retainers sent afield, two DRIPPING HEARTS, and a hawk that standeth FAMISHED before thee!
Upon the Fourth FEAST OF BLOOD AND BONE, my SIRE giveth free – three GORE-EATING WRETCHES, TWO DRIPPING HEARTS, AND A BAT THAT KNOWS NOT IF IT BE DEAD NOR ALIVE AND HUNGERS TO GUZZLE UPON THY HEATED BLOOD.
LOOK ABOUT YOU THIS IS A LIE YOU ARE BLINDED IT IS DELUSION IT IS FALSE IT—
***
One final time Banyan threw his shoulder into the cell’s rusted gate. Starvation had begun to eat away at what had once been an ample soldier’s frame, but desperation – or simple decay on the part of the iron door – finally came through. Hinges wheezed and popped before giving up, seeing the portal collapse to the flagstones with a crashing echo.
Banyan collapsed with it, grunting as he fell atop the door. Every part of him ached and shivered there in the dark. The fingers of one hand had dipped into a pool of what he hoped was stagnant water and feared was anything but.
Even in their madness, the ghouls will have heard that.
Banyan staggered upright and started running. There was no torchlight down in the castle prison, so he kept close to the wall, fingers questing to find any unseen passages. Occasionally something would hiss at him from the pitch dark. So long as it was a mad-eyed rat and not one of the flesh-eating cannibals that haunted this place, he didn’t care. Banyan didn’t even consider the rest of his patrol’s fate. He didn’t want to.
More by luck than judgement, he found a set of stairs leading up. Here the ghouls had managed to set torches burning, though even these seemed weak, sickly. The reek, too, was somehow worse than even in the dungeon. Someone – something – was cooking.
Crouched in the stairwell, breath wheezing, heart hammering, Banyan found a moment to glance around. The halls here were garlanded; holly smeared with blood hung from the walls, alongside dripping wreaths. He was squinting at them when he realised that they were slick intestines crudely knotted together; the realisation made him retch, though there was nothing in his bubbling stomach to hurl up. Blinking through tears of revulsion, he walked a step or two forwards. Sharp thorns prickled his hands; against the wall here the ghouls had set up some tree that looked like it had been hacked out of a local forest with manic abandon. There was still some Evenswinter snow draped upon it in places. Eyeless, rotting heads hung from its branches like baubles, flesh made blue by the cold.
A terrible, frenzied wailing from several voices along the passage to his left saw Banyan tense: some festive deranged choir. He set off at a loping sprint to the right, even as weakened and wobbling legs threatened to give way. He slowed only as he crossed over a wooden balcony. Rotten timbers creaked with each step, sending vertiginous thrills of their giving way and sending him tumbling to the floor of the hall far below shooting along his spine.
In that hall, the odious merrymaking of the ghouls continued apace. Great wagons had been dragged in and crudely smashed together, their cargo of bloody flesh strewn across the floor. Ghouls in thick, patchwork cloaks of red stood atop them, howling as they hurled scraps of meat out to the waiting throng or sent retainers scurrying with sharp gestures. Each of those monstrous little helpers carried sacks heaving with gristle or long lists that, as far as Banyan could see from far off, bore nothing but illegible scrawls.
Something screamed in the rafters near his head, seeing him scurry onwards. ‘Think,’ Banyan dared to mutter to himself, though his voice was hoarse and ragged. ‘Think. If they are sending out messengers, some sort of exit must be near…’
He tried to focus on the cold, the Evenswinter chill that permeated the drafty halls of the cannibals’ castle. Head down, Banyan doggedly pursued that cold, doing all he could to ignore the sagging stockings of torn flesh nailed to the wall. He might have made it, had that cold not in fact been leaking in through a grand chimney at the edge of a feasting hall.
The tables had been set. Shapes were stuffed and tied upon sagging banquet tables. It took a moment to realise they were the mangled corpses of his patrol, blood poured into cracked goblets. That time he couldn’t stop the bile raging up his throat, spewing out onto the floor.
Something shifted in the shadowy maw of the great hearth across the hall, sending dust crumbling to the floor.
On his knees now, Banyan could only watch as a bloated shape pulled itself free of the darkness it lurked within, knuckles dragging upon the floor as it approached. Perversely, for a moment, Banyan thought it quite the jovial sight. It too was clad in bright scarlet, with a bloated gut and flowing beard.
Then he blinked, and that beard became a mass of loose skin hung from a predatory jaw.
‘Now then,’ drooled the hulking, vampire cannibal, as it caressed his face with a long yellow nail. ‘Hast thou been… of noble spirit, this year?’
And then, with a shriek, it opened its mouth to envelop his head – and bit down hard.
What a riveting read! Right, we’ve found our cravat – wine-red, if you must know – and we’re off out the door. We’re famished, so we hope they’ve put on a good spread. Clear the table, because tomorrow’s Grotmas Calendar gift is a co-op adventure in the 41st Millennium.
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