It was the darkest of nights I had seen in recent times.
The gloom of a moonless sky enveloped me as did the opressive nature of the wetlands I traversed.
No more than the steady squish of sodden earth giving beneath my feet breaking the silence, silence that had but scant hours ago been broken by the jovial commentary of the woman whom had accompanied me.
She had something of an overlooked beauty with straw coloured hair, sun bleached like her attire, weathered like her skin.
The venus of the farm lands.
I had suspected from the start that it was awe that had her acompany me into the caves I had ventured to, awe that had her believe that I, a mere man, toned as I was from my many years within the fields, could have caught her eye.
Even now I can still see the reverence with what she looked up to me, for I stood a full head above her, feel, the manner in what her gaze lingered upon my back as she watched muscles shift beneath the simple leathers I wore.
Leathers.
How could I have been so foolish as to think leather would have been adequate to protect me, to allow me to protect her from what lay ahead?
Her screams, oh god, her screams as that fiend of a man plucked her from before me, teeth. Teeth like daggers tearing into her as I staggered, turning my back upon her running away as screams turned to sobs and sobs turned to silence.
I... I don't even recall how I managed to escape, wounded as I was by the claws of that thing, that thing that plucked the delicate flower I had been so foolish to allow to accompany me. That delicate flower that had been crushed with the sound of gurgling sobs and cracking bones.
I was all alone as the night set in, as the moon refused to look upon one stained with such guilty cowardice.
All alone in the wetlands, swampy earth beneath my feet and the stink of rotting vegetation all about.
I almost failed to hear it at first, as the silence of a swamp filled with animals that fearfully hid within their burrows took on the sound of laughter - laughter that I thought at first had to come from I, for the horror of what I had witnessed surely had unhinged me.
Yet that cackling laugh came not from my lips, but all about.
Blood seeped over my leathers from the wounds as the fiends, fiends who's forms danced through the darkness towards me closed in.
Was it my guilty mind playing tricks upon me or not, I cannot say, yet those things felt as real as you or I.
No.
They felt as real as I, for the world I see since that night feels different, as if I am somehow waiting to awaken from my dream.
The world I see, the accusing stares of those that know I did not do everything in my power to save the girl I took out into the wild with me, it all feels somehow wrong.
I feel as if I died out there in the marshes, yet the whispered words of the people about me, the memories of my battle for survival - selfish survial in what I thought only of myself as I lashed out with the short sword that I carried with me, tell me otherwise.
I returned a changed man, dead inside, wishing only to wake from this horror.
I am 'Ragnar' Hauntedcastle the Glum Trumpet of Balls and I know now why I fear the night.