A hellboar is a fiend that looks like its terrestrial namesake. It appears quite pig-like, despite the fact that it stands eight feet high at its shoulder, has skin the hue of burnt blood and huge, blackened spikes of bone that erupt from its back. Unlike a common pig, however, a hellboar isn’t good for eating; the demon’s meat is poisonous to all but the most hearty beings, and no amount of preparation can render it edible. And even so, harvesting it is no easy feat; the demons are known for their incredible strength and foul temperaments. On equal ground, a hellboar can kill almost anything that walks on two legs.
    On the other hand, the longer you go without eating, the better hellboar steak begins to sound. Andrei groans silently at the thought; it’s been twenty-two days, four hours, fifteen minutes since his last meal.
    Focus on the task at hand, Andrei, he can hear her voice. He winces involuntarily as a twitch of pain flows through the scars on his back. She is gone, but he can feel her presence all around him. Smiling, mocking, always just out of his blade’s reach but never out of hers.
    So he does as she says. Focus.
    The hellboar is thirty-six yards away, down a slope averaging twenty degrees. At the top of the incline, Andrei watches it from behind the edge of a small ridge, lying flat on his belly and downwind of the beast to hide his presence.  The demon snuffles idly along the ground as it searches for a scent of prey. And it’ll find it, in another few seconds. Andre’s scent (his blood, really, just a drop but more than enough) lies just ahead.
    Fourteen seconds pass. The hellboar takes the tiniest, shuffling steps forward.
    Its ears twitch almost imperceptibly.
    “Found it, didn’t you,” Andrei whispers. “Just a little further now.”
    And indeed, the creature’s primitive intellect propelled it forward. So engrossed in the thought of wounded prey that it completely missed the spring-loaded snare buried just under the layer of dust. Hellboars have poor vision, but had it been paying attention it would have smelled the heavy dose of lethal poison coating the jaws of the device.
    The demon howled, and yanked its ensnared leg, tearing the trap free of the ground. With a stomp, it shattered the steel mechanism, but several poisoned teeth remained lodged in its ankle. It began to thrash wildly, tearing at its own flesh with its jagged tusks in an attempt to dislodge the little pieces of metal. Andrei watched eagerly, waiting for the poison to do its work. For a creature of this size, a small dose of poison would hardly matter, but Andrei had used every ounce of the stuff she’d left him. He figured the hellboar would fight for another half a minute or so before it would succumb to the massive dose he’d given it.
    After watching the enraged thing stomp and howl for nearly ten minutes, Andrei began to feel a bit frustrated.
    “Die,” he muttered, his hands clenched into trembling fists. “Damnation. Just fall over already.”
    If anything, the beast seemed to recover. It licked the minor wound once or twice, then went back to idly snuffling the dust.
    “No,” Andrei said, rising to his feet. “That was all the poison. That was all the poison, damnation!”  His whole body was shaking. Tired. Hungry… so hungry. And thirsty. His scars are burning with the hot sand and sharp flakes of stone that have found their way inside his shirt. And this hellboar, positively the weakest thing on the peninsula, sucked up every last drop of his poison like it had all the deadly potency of rainwater. He was nearly sobbing now, gulping down breath that was heavy with choking dust. The hellboar hadn’t noticed him.
    When his throwing knife embedded itself in the beast’s ear, it noticed.
    As the creature came charging up towards him, eyes alight with wrath, Andrei had a sudden realization of what he’d done. His arm was still outstretched. He looked at his hand with a detached sensation of horror.
    Oh my, look what you’ve done now.
    Her voice again.
    You better be ready to deal with the consequences, my darling.
    It was almost on him when he rolled. He got lucky, but the boar turned and was on him again before he could regain his balance. It plowed him over, but before it could disembowel him with a slap of its tusks he brought both his knees up into the creature’s fleshy throat, momentarily staggering it. He rolled to his feet, scooping a handful of dust from the rocks as he did. With a practiced aim he sent it into the boar’s eyes, blinding it. But the creature began to buck and jump wildly, and Andrei couldn’t get close for fear of its thrashing spikes.
    Adrenaline had carried him this far, but it could curb his weakness only so long. His legs trembled, and gave, and he barely caught himself as he collapsed to the dirt. His hands shook too hard to grip a blade, and the keen dagger fell from his grasp. His vision was blurred, his breath was an inaudible gasp. He heard a laugh.
    It was a throaty rumble that he did not recognize. Following the sound, he saw a stooped but powerfully built orc nearby. He chuckled as he watched Andrei’s predicament with interest. The orc wore resplendent robes of a deep crimson hue, and held a skull-tipped staff at rest in the crook of his arm. His long, ragged beard fluttered in the hot wind like the flag of an abandoned fortress. When it was clear that Andrei had no fight left in him, the orc muttered an unintelligible curse in his native tongue, turned towards the recovering boar and hurled a bolt of crackling shadow energy towards it. It erupted in a black cloud of ink-like vapor on impact, and the hellboar was torn to ragged shreds of blackened meat.
    Andrei watched as the grizzled orc turned towards him. He had been taught most of the Orcish tongue, but his thoughts were fuzzy and he struggled to find the words to thank his rescuer. Before he could, the greenskin whacked him with the skull-shaped head of his staff.
    “Ow!” Andrei yelped. “Damnation…” He tried to rise to his knees, but he had no strength to stand. The orc grinned and struck him again. This time, Andrei didn’t even have the energy to cry out from the blow.
    The orc pummeled him again and again without mercy. Blood dripping freely from a wound in Andrei’s forehead flowed into his eyes, sparing him the sight of his bemused tormentor. He could barely feel the pain of the blows now. His only thought was that it would be such a relief to die, free from this hot, dusty hell of starvation and merciless training, free from the final insult of being a greenskin’s plaything.
    How many times have I told you, Andrei? You die when I choose, not before.
    Her voice. Not in his head this time.
    A sudden rush of fear, muted by his fatigue and nearness to death but still enough to invigorate him just a little, gave him the energy to struggle to a sitting position. The orc was standing with both hands on his staff, in the middle of a wild haymaker swing. A third hand, much smaller and more bony than the other two, held the weapon in place. Absynth smiled over the orc’s shoulder.
    “Now, now,” she said softly. “That’s my little boy you’re fucking with.”
    A long shadow fell over Andrei, and he saw a tall figure approaching. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he beheld a powerfully armored female troll. She had a huge shock of red hair fashioned into a fearsome mohawk that rested above a pocked and scarred face. Two eyes of molten bronze took in the scene with a look of utter hatred. A wicked and ornate crossbow of High Elven make rested with deadly ease in her hands. Andrei had never seen such a malefic being in all his life; he felt like the very air around her would reach out and strangle him given an excuse. He desperately wished he could crawl away, find someplace to hide from this vision of death, but he was rooted to the spot. This was a paralyzing terror that even his mistress had never caused in him.
    The troll glared down at Andrei for an agonizing moment, then turned her eyes towards the orc.
    “Step to da side, Absynth,” she said with a voice that rumbled with Hell’s own contempt. The rogue jumped away without hesitation. There was a sound like the twanging of a giant’s tendon, and an awful squelching. The orc toppled forward to his knees, his neck a geyser of blood. His head appeared to have been clearly severed, but Andrei could not see it, as if it had been vaporized by the impact of the bolt.
    The blood flowed quickly out of the corpse towards him. Before he could get drenched in the crimson fluid, however, a strong, bony claw hoisted him to his feet. His mistress, thankfully, was not looking at him, and he dreaded his eventual punishment with what little mental faculty he had.
    “Was that totally necessary?” she said, addressing the troll.
    “Ya know why I kill him,” the troll replied in the accent of the jungle devils. “I kill him to keep him from tellin’ tales to da Warchief about how me an ya are seen aroun dis human pup. I don’ need dat headache, mon, so I do what ya hesitated to do.”
    Andrei noticed another figure. Standing behind the troll he could see a small, ragged child with an unkempt mop of red hair. He instantly recognized that hair as belonging to Phillipe, his fellow victim of the mistress’s tutelage. Andrei was only a few years from being called a man, but Phillipe was just a child. He had suffered even worse than Andrei had, especially since his elder brother, another captive like them, had died weeks ago under the strain of their sadistic training.
    Something was wrong. The little boy was watching with vacant , haunted eyes. His hands were bound with ragged rope, and he had a gag of crude cloth wrapped around his mouth.
    Andrei lifted his head. “Phillipe… why… here?” he managed.
    Absynth spoke to him, but her eyes did not leave the troll’s. “I told you to stay put and continue your training while I was gone, but you wandered off. I had to ask a friend to help find you. Phillipe is the price of that favor.”
    “But he ain’t dat much more dan a snack,” the troll replied levelly. “You been starvin’ him, an’ such a pitiful animal is hardly enough ta pay for dis service. I wan’ somethin’ extra for my time.”
    “How about this,” Absynth replied coyly, still supporting the near-lifeless Andrei. “I know where you can find Rictus. That should settle my debt.”
    “I don’t need ya ta draw me a map ta Hell, mon,” the troll replied, her wide, baleful eyes narrowing for the first time.
    “If only he’d stayed there, where you put him,” Absynth said. “But he’s alive and well, in a manner of speaking. I saw him with Lurtch and Meliseria not twelve hours ago.”
    The troll bristled. Her powerful fist clenched down on her crossbow. Without warning two huge eyes opened in the shoulders of her armor, locking on Absynth. Andrei choked with horror at the sight, holding back an empty retch.
    “You know da price for tellin’ me lies, Absynth,” she said. Andrei could recognize the warning in her voice like it was written in ten-foot tall letters of fire.
    “No lies. He’s in Shattrath as we speak,” Absynth said, smiling. “Have fun, dear.”
    In a lightning-fast motion the crossbow was level with the rogue’s eye. Had the bolt been any faster, or Absynth any slower, the blood-stained hardpan would have seen its second decapitation of the day. The air rushed with a mighty wind over Andrei’s head as he was yanked down and out of the deadly projectile’s path. Hunkered down, Andrei was the only one who could see his mistress smile her awful, decomposing grin. The troll turned, and, dragging Phillipe behind her, walked back towards a powerful, majestic talbuk that waited patiently for its rider nearby.
    Andrei shuffled to his feet. Phillipe… the boy was only here because Andrei had chosen this for them all. There was no telling what that demon of a troll would do to him, but it would hang over his head forever if he let it happen. He gripped the hilt of his remaining dagger, and pulled it nearly a centimeter out of the sheath before Absynth’s powerful hand clapped over his and held the blade in place. Before he could react, a spinning kick to the face, courtesy of the rogue, toppled him spinelessly to the rock.
    “We live at her pleasure, Andrei,” she whispered to him. “Had she truly wished us dead, we would be. And if you had drawn your blade against her, it would have been death for me and the cauldron for you. And we can’t have that, now can we? You have so much training left, I’d hate for you to miss out.”
    Between despair, fatigue, hunger, and his new wounds, Andrei could take no more. Lying on the rock, he finally slipped into unconsciousness, the first mercy of the day.
    Absynth let him sleep and watched the hunter ride away with her other pupil. Andrei was the only one left, now. She knew she could use Phillipe's untimely demise as leverage over the boy; perhaps she would start feeding him everyday, give him two helpings at once, and tell him that the second portion was Phillipe’s. She giggled at the thought.
    Her mind drifted to her brother. No doubt he thought himself safe in the Naaru’s city, surrounded by friends, his precious Scryers, and the city’s innumerable protectors. But even then, he hadn’t made his presence known widely enough to alert Chariclo. To do so would be to court death. So it was only appropriate that Absynth be the one to tell her the facts.
    The long game was coming to a close between Absynth and her younger brother, she could feel it. Chariclo wouldn’t lightly suffer the insult of Rictus’ return to the living, to use a figure of speech.
    She looked down at Andrei’s sleeping form. Just in case things didn’t go as planned, though, she was working on a backup. She ruffled Andrei’s blonde hair in a mockery of motherly affection.
    “So much progress, in so little time,” she mused. “You were as deadly as a kitten when I found you, and today you came close to killing a hellboar. You’re almost ready for the big time. And you’ll make Momma so proud, won’t you?” She stood, dusted off her pants, and hefted the boy’s body over her shoulders. She started walking, following the tracks she and Chariclo had made. She would make a quick stop in Thrallmar for supplies, and then it was off to Zangarmarsh.
    She smiled to herself. As far as she knew, Andrei had never seen a naga before.