[ IP ] Big Bad Wolf

Have you ever heard the idea that belief is a force of creation? It could certainly answer a lot of things - the mass of people around the world who believe in a personal God - because there really is one, created and sustained by the force of their belief. 
 Of course, this has its darker side. And that's where I come in. I am not paid for my work. I owe no taxes to my king. In fact, I do n't even have a country anymore - I go where I am needed, and I take my coin in favours, mostly. There are a string of people across the world who know to listen for my knock on a god-forsaken night, and are ready to drop everything to do what I tell them. 
 
 That's because I hunt monsters. Not exclusively - when my travels take me to more enlightened areas, the prey tends to thin and I take odd jobs, or hunt other creatures. One of my most pervasive foes is the storyteller. 
 
 I fucking HATE storytellers. Because they, the men with the imaginations, tend to create the monsters that are hardest to kill. They forge the blade of adult imagery, of pervasive, gnawing fear, and then they shape it for children. And children quench it in the iciest depths of terror that only a child, who truly *knows* there is a monster under their bed, can conjure. And the result is a double-edged weapon that cuts both ways. I have slain formless creatures of shadow that exist only in the absence of light and give voice in the darkest depths of night to a clotted, chuckling laugh that comes upon you just as you drift to sleep. I pin them down in cellars, surrounded on all sides by bright, flaring alchemical fire so their only refuge is a pocket of wan shadow in an old tin box, and then I ensorcel them, calling favours from forgotten gods to seal the creatures away forever. 
 
 Those are the easy ones. I have scars that pull at my very soul when I turn in my sleep. Old wounds that can never heal, torn into my essence by vorpal claws and transubstantial fangs. Those were caused by the... difficult ones. The ones that spring fully-formed from the waking nightmares of straitjacketed schizophrenics, the ones who crawl from the corpses of suicides. The worst things humanity has to offer. 
 
 The last one I found nearly killed me. I had spent the summer clearing a small forest of some minor mischiefs - boogeymen, night terrors. Insubstantial things, just for pocket money and bread mostly. Then I began to hear rumours. The same story, over and over again - a dead girl who walked the forest paths at night, pale as a ghost with hair darker than a moonless night. And a crimson cloak, billowing behind her like a spray of arterial blood. I began to track the rumours down, believing - of course - that the girl was the root of the problems. In fact, as it turned out, she was just the symptom. As I dug through the towns and hamlets, becoming tinier and tinier as I ventured deeper into the heartlands of an ancient kingdom grown lousy with elder trees, I began to notice a pattern. Always a girl, between flowering and full womanhood. She was always beautiful, beloved by all. 
 
 And she always disappeared, only to be discovered - piece by piece - near the town's borders. And the deeper I went, the less they found. It was as though the beast's appetite was growing. I had never seen anything like this before - surprisingly enough, considering the grim nature of my business, homicidal monsters were uncommon. They tended to frighten, to make mischief, and occasionally to wound and scar. A very few had the strength of essence necessary to walk upon the skin of the earth and cut threads. The vast majority of those that did found themselves unmade by their act, pulled into whatever came next by the departing soul of their unfortunate victim. This creature, it seemed, had truly *become*. It had woven itself into the tapestry of the living, beating world, a thing that should not be. It had wrought itself a body, become a daemon. 

