The Crooked-Headed God

He was here now.

Fear wrapped cold hands around my arms and slid them up to caress the back of my neck with light fingers. Not quite coinciding with his arrival, almost as an after thought, a bolt of lightning silently struck the ground where he stood, inverting the colors of the world for an instant before an incongruous sound, a soft squeak like a door opening, returned them to normal.

The Crooked-Headed God loomed over us, perhaps two stories tall with a rotund head sitting askew over a bent neck that gave it the illusion of constant falling. How could he stand with that great weight pulling him down? He looked so awkward and off kilter that the continued sight of him made my own neck ache with sympathetic pain. The elongated head and that awful face, that was more suggestion than detail, slowed my realization that he was a pale, naked thing, scrawny with small muscles over sharp bones.

When he opened his mouth slit to speak, I saw that he had too many teeth. "What do you wish to know, Thieves of Fire?