Chapter Text
The Child Eater vs. the Soul Snatcher
In the middle of an isolated forest was an old tree with branches that stretched so high that they almost touched the clouds. It was inside this tree that the Snatcher made his home, and from here he monitored his domain. The land that he marked as his territory covered the majority of the forest, including an abandoned village and enormous well that could fetch water from icy, hidden caverns.
There were two places that Snatcher watched over, but he did not consider them to be areas within his control. The first was the wintery wasteland in which Queen Vanessa’s manor was located. He had been there in a previous life, and he preferred to keep as much distance between his present and his past as he could. But the second place was a different story. It was a part of the forest that existed in a bubble of lifelessness: very few critters lived there, and anything that ventured into this section rarely returned.
His minions also knew very little about this part of the forest, so Snatcher ordered two of them to see what it was like. They returned with information about a door that they could not pass through. One of them described to the irritated Snatcher, “It must be what those Dwellers go through,” referring to the serpentine spirits within Snatcher’s control. “They can’t see what we see and they have invisible barriers standing in their way. We can easily pass through those barriers, but now there’s something standing in our way. And we can’t go through that door.”
One day, a man in his late twenties fell into one of Snatcher’s traps. When Snatcher confronted him with a dramatic demonstration of his nightmarish powers, he was surprised to see that the boy was not afraid of him. Snatcher demanded an explanation, and the man responded:
“I have seen a monster who is much scarier than you. And I am going to be the one to kill him.”
Snatcher sneered, “Nothing is more terrifying than me. Do you know how many souls I’ve taken over the years?”
The man shook his head. “What I have seen possesses no soul. He tried to kill me when I was a boy, but I escaped from his lair and from this blasted forest. I won’t let him claim the lives of more children. I’ll kill the beast and lock his door to the forest forever. Then I will see to it that you never steal another soul!” With this battle cry, he charged at Snatcher with his weapon drawn: a dagger which he had kept hidden within his cloak.
The fool never stood a chance against the power of Snatcher, and his death was a swift one. Snatcher examined the man’s weapon and saw a name engraved in the blade: Cesario Garces. He kept the dagger as a trophy and stored it in his tree, in the hidden compartment of his ottoman. As for the body, he ordered his minions to bury Cesario close to the abandoned village. Snatcher only buried the victims which had truly earned his respect, and he had admired Cesario’s guts.
And he was grateful to the young man for providing him with a vague answer to his question: what could be living in the mysterious part of the forest?
About a hundred years after Cesario’s passing, Snatcher encountered another victim. It was a young woman, about the same age as Garces, but she trembled with fear and begged for her life when her captor appeared. “I’ll give you anything you want,” she pleaded. “Please, my siblings need me.” And she began to cry. Snatcher would have ignored her and ended her life then, but something she said in between her sobs caught his attention: “The monsters of this forest are all the same! I never should have come back here!”
Snatcher made a deal with her: he would not kill her and allow her to enter and exit his part of Subcon Forest as she pleased, but in exchange, he wanted two things from her. The first, naturally, was her soul, which she gave up willingly, but with great reluctance and sadness. But the second thing was what Snatcher was really interested in: all knowledge she had of the other monster lurking in Subcon Forest.
She was surprised by this, for her knowledge was something so small and insignificant compared to other things he could have asked from her. But she told him her story. She introduced herself as Alma Ferreira, the eldest daughter of a large family. When she was only nine years old, she had become lost in the forest in search of food. She had fainted from exhaustion, and that was when she had been captured by the Child Eater. “He was once a mortal, just like me,” Alma explained. “But he took the lives of innocent creatures. A priest during the Spanish Inquisition took him as a pupil, and one day, the student killed his master. He ate the priest’s heart while it was still beating!”
“How do you know all of this?” Snatcher had asked.
Alma shuddered. “He paints his crimes on the ceiling of his dining room. He writes the names of his victims on the walls! Don’t you understand? He keeps his victims in cages underneath the dining hall! We would huddle there, weeping, and waiting for him to come. He would make us watch his servants clean the pools of blood, he showed us where he keeps his weapon!”
“But why?” Snatcher demanded. “Why would he do that?” Then, after a moment, when Alma had opened her mouth to answer, he interrupted with, “What is it? The weapon?”
“A silver dagger with a gold handle,” she said. “He keeps it in a locked compartment in the dining room wall. And he has no reason to keep it a secret.” She bowed her head. “We were all doomed to die.”
“Then how did you escape?”
“His eyes, they failed him.”
“What do you mean?”
Alma hesitated. “He used to have normal eyes. But one night, they couldn’t bear to watch his cruelty anymore, and they fell from his face. He keeps them in the palms of his hands when he hunts and when he kills. I managed to escape because I...I stabbed him in the palms of his hands with a stick I had found.”
“What does he call himself?” Snatcher wondered aloud.
“He never hunts in the sunlight, only at night. His skin is pale and white. The people in my village called him ‘the Pale Man’.” Alma sighed. “He is completely soulless. Only one child had escaped from him before I did, and that was long ago. I was lucky.” For a moment, Snatcher felt a twinge of guilt. This woman had escaped and lived a normal life, only for him to take it away from her. But he didn’t have long to deal with this inner conflict, for Alma found a way out of her contract.
Snatcher’s minions found her body washed up by the Subcon Well and carried her to their master, then placed her on the floor of his home. Snatcher had screamed at them and ordered them to leave her alone and not to touch her. Of all of his victims, Alma Ferreira had been the most innocent. She had moved him in a way that no one had during his time as the lord of Subcon Forest. So he buried her by himself and made a decision:
Subcon Forest wasn’t big enough for two monsters. He could tolerate Vanessa for as long as she kept her distance, but the Child Eater, this Pale Man, had to go. And with this thought in mind, he set out to find the child-sized door.