Croatoan
I.
It had been a difficult winter. The biting cold had brought famine and illness to Roanoke, but the wind was perhaps the worst of it all. The hard, fast gusts of air destroyed any will to live. The sickliest died first, their corpses turning blue-black with ice. Those that were left–the once-burly men and the stronger of the women–now looked pale and dangerously thin, their features drawn long with hunger. They had no strength to bury their dead.
II.
They call me many names. Yehasuri. Widjigo. Wisakedjak. Skin Walker. Some call me Trickster or “The Flatterer,” as if these happy little monikers will protect them from my true nature, my avenging spirit. I am not the jolly little gnome they portray me as in their dances and songs. I am something much, much worse.
III.
The Croatan boy, at thirteen hardly a man–though they named him one–heard the wail first, a sound so loud that it could rattle your brain inside your skull and so terrifying that it would haunt you the rest of your days. Then came the footsteps breaking through the brush in the woods, coming closer and closer every day. The tribal leaders met, and needing to pacify their increasingly terrified people, they put the boy out of their lands. He would be a good sacrifice for the wood spirit, they said, since he heard the cry before anyone else.
It was not long before the boy heard his name whispered from deep within the forested land.
The transformation was quick but not painless. His limbs grew long and thin, and grey-white fur covered his body. Sharp yellowed fangs descended from his gums, hanging over his dark lips. They ached in his head; he bit his lips in agony, sending a deluge of blood from his mouth and streaking his matted fur with gore.
IV.
A young woman saw him first. She was clutching her half-dead child in her arms, desperate to give him the warmth he needed, if she could give him nothing else. She was too weak to resist the yellow-eyed monster hurtling towards her, though he was too quick for her even if she had been strong and healthy.
The rest of the hunt was just as easy. An entire village–men, women, and children–gone in less than half a day.
The nearby tribe waited and listened to the cries of the pale-faced colonists with a resolute indifference, knowing this was the price of the sin of cannibalism.
The boy, satiated, used his razor-sharp talon, now dripping with meat and tendons caught underneath his fingernails, and carved a single word into the tree to mark his victory: Croatoan.
