#thwb

Chapter One: Infatuation

Please be warned, this is a dark fic. 

It was beautiful. For a savage little troll. A petite slender build with curved hips, no doubt from the runty brat Feral would sometimes see nestled all too comfortably in its arms, and snowy freckles in perfect patches coating his forest colored frame and cheeks. Even for a troll, there was something about it that completely drew his attention. A fascination really. However, it wasn’t until he’d gotten close that the pearl colored troll realized the stench of impure coming from the little savage. That slight difference, the fact that he could even tell while the runt simply stood in front of him. His old sense of smell from when Feral had been human,at least in appearance anyway,  seemed far more sensitive to him as a troll. An improvement, he supposed, if his trollish form weren’t so hideous and unbecoming, he might’ve considered staying like that. Sensitive stoneflesh that charred to grey cracked stone in the sunlight was another serious inconvenience as well. He’d completely solidify in the now deadly rays of burning light, and have to wait until the sunset to even dare trying to free himself! Even worse than that, Feral couldn’t have been more repulsed by the response of the other hideous trolls around him. The fact that he was considered ‘handsome’ by trollish standards, when he looked as he did, was utterly appalling to him. However, right at that moment, with the little barmaid savage smiling at him with those snow freckled cheeks and gold flecked cat eyes, he found himself smiling right back.

He’d first took note of this particular creature, Seban, as it called itself, when first arriving into Germany at the start of the year. Originally Feral had come to find a cure for his heinous physical form, and just as the past attempts in the millennia before have proven, this latest venture had also resulted in his failure. Yet, there was a silver lining found in his discovery of halfling trolls. Changelings, trolls taken, or given, at infancy to be mutated into something that can take on a human guise. The ironic thing, though? They were clearly more advanced than their brutal counterparts, yet they were referred to as ‘impure’. Feral then realized that these things were also smaller, and weaker, and more delicious than your typical troll. They were also cowardly, power hungry, and from what the troll himself had seen, submissive. So who was he to think of them as any less as the rest of his new species seemed to. What intrigued Feral more was their biological abilities to withstand the sun’s harmful rays, and switch from stone to flesh. If he could keep one to study, he hypothesized, then maybe, just maybe, there was a chance he could help himself and his situation.

So maybe that was one of the things that drew the large troll’s attention to the halfling impure. However, that wasn’t the entire reason, after all, Feral didn’t want to replicate that particular ability in a hideous impure. Who would? He might end up even more grotesque than he currently was with a deformed sample to study, and even though no creature cared for impures, he wouldn’t need the attention if word were to get out about a fellow troll experimenting on trollish creatures. However ‘impure’ they may be. Really, though, he would have two impures counting the little bastard infant the freckled savage would sometimes bring in. It wouldn’t hurt to keep the thing around for insurance once Seban was with him. That way in case it didn’t survive Feral’s study, he had a back up impure.