The start of a butcher

“What am I? Why I’m a butcher, always been one, always had. But my butchering been rather… different these days. Yes… I remember whom I was before this. As said I was a butcher, and damn the luck if there was a finer one than I. I could carve flesh from bone with one stroke of my cleaver, and how I loved my job. To cut into moist meat and chop it up proper, thin and lean for those with delicate stomachs, or thick and hearty for those that never had enough in their bellies. Ah those were the days, the simple joys of working around meat.

But then the magic… it was gone from my life. Pork, lamb, beef, or chicken, nothing I sliced up brought me joy. Every sinew I cleaved through only bored me, every hock of ham or leg of mutton I made brought only dullness. Everything I worked for was now my atheists, for what is a butcher that no longer takes pride in his cleaver and his skills. I was dead in mind and soul, melancholic without salvation.

Then he came into my shop. The ripper of men they called him, a murderer into my own quaint shop. At gun point he held me and demanded the last bit of coin I had. Like an animal cornered I swiped back with whatever I had. And fate decreed that what I swiped it was my own trusted cleaver, and with strength I didn’t knew I had, I cleaved through his blood, bone, and hide in one fell motion. His head rolled across the floor and I felt something stirring… I felt happy. More than happy, I felt astatic, I felt joy, I felt like I was alive again. There I knew… my happiness came with butchery, but not to cut the livestock of burden, but to carve my own follow men.

I knelt down and tasted his meat out of some dark instinct I didn’t knew was there, and he tasted sweet. In that moment I saw myself staring into the void and pouring out was my humanity. I knew that the gates of hell opened wide for me, and I walked through. To carve human hide was my calling, to devour the flesh of the wicked my pleasure, I was not a man, I was a monster. And yet… I knew if I went down this road I would be hunted, so I did the only logical thing. I became a hunter myself, an unholy weapon of destruction to cull other monsters, in the name of my hunger and on a much lesser requirement ‘the good of men kind’.

I could care less if I am forever remembered as a dark hunter of an even darker hunger. I will have it known that no matter what my job title is, or what they may say, I am as I always has been. A butcher, through and through.”