The miscreant’s outer fingers, thick with dirt and clotten blood of animal and man alike, twitched nervously like antennae, his thumbs and indexes still pincered in the skeleton of an oloid. He watched the lickspittle candleholders grovel and worm their way forward on dirty knees. It had been a hundred half-years or inverse that since they’d taken to worshipping him, but he was yet to grow accustomed to it. They looked pathetic, their faces soilward, no doubt resentful of their lowered stations. It was a far better arrangement than he’d held with the humans prior, but still left him feeling uneasy. What they’d given almost freely could just as easily be taken away from him. It would never do to remind them of this reality.

The two candleholders, ranked higher and more learned in the magicks than the rest, had been the ones to lead their paltry human procession to him on this visit. The miscreant’s nose twitched. His grotto was small and he could smell the heat of all their bodies, could feel the heat of the twin candle flames. He didn’t like their bringing warmth into his home: it somehow made apparent the cave’s dank cold, and so they would pay for it dearly.

‘What offerings do you bring me?’ He brushed aside the unfurled deer-heart that was pinned to the flat slab used for a study surface. The natural topologies drew his fascinations of late.

A flesh-lacken child shuffled out from behind the two candleholders and laid a glass bowl down carefully. The boy ran back into the herd as the miscreant descended the hollow’s steps, eyes fixed on the black eels sloshing in the bowl.

A candleholder spoke. ‘We offer you eel to feast upon. They heard the whale-song yet still live.’

The miscreant raised the bowl high then to his lips and swallowed its waters in long gulps, only biting down to sever an eel once. Clouds of red inked the soup instantly. He wiped his face of blooden saliva and saltwater with a forearm. ‘The offering is accepted. Now what of sacrifice?’ He could feel the grin form as the words left his lips.

The first candleholder looked to the second. ‘Will you not first hear our request to decide upon your levy?’

The miscreant crashed through the dark of the cave, furious and serpentine and pulled the child back from the cloaked herd by his scruff. He turned to address the candleholders before they’d registered his true direction. ‘I did not intrude upon your home. You intruded upon mine. Word was given once. Accordingly all your lives are forfeit until suitable sacrifice is proffered.’ He could hear their hearts beating, could smell the child’s blood where his fingers had cut into its neck. The boy did not make a sound though a woman bleated from the cloaked herd.

‘Please. Mercy, please.’ Said the second candleholder. Yes, he saw some resemblance between them now. ‘Let the child live and I give you my own life.’

The miscreant released the bony child, and within a human eye’s blink had crawled and galloped to the candleholder, snaking this way and that through shadow and darkness. He pinched out the candle-flame, instantly killing its holder before the man had even registered any movement. 

Then the miscreant licked the molten wax of a snuffed human life off his fingertips of clotten blood and dirt.