Chapter One:
The River's Strange Release

No moon or stars shone tonight. The little lantern fastened to the bow of his boat was the only light Erik had. Its flame flickered falteringly as a cold wind blew down from the dark sky. Erik shivered, and the wind came down harder, as if it wanted to go on amusing itself with chilling him. Erik wrapped his cloak more closely about himself and he tried to look past beyond the ring of light the lantern cast out onto the water.

But beyond the feeble illumination of the flame, he could see nothing. The blackness of the river before him and the shadows of the sky above blended together so perfectly he might as well have been drifting into a void of non-existence. Perhaps he was, Erik mused to himself, which would explain why he had caught no fish tonight in spite of his many efforts. Yet no, he was indeed floating on a river, he told himself, for not long ago, he had perceived a dark shape up ahead, too solid to be a shadow, and Erik had been able to tell that this shape was a ship before it had disappeared into the awaiting night. Erik wished to see that sight again, however fleeting it may be, for he now drifted by himself on the river, and there are few places in this world so terribly lonely as the open water under a starless night.

Loneliness was something Erik was well accustomed to, of course, yet on this night, it seemed oddly profound. He would have turned back to shore at that moment in spite of his lack of a catch, but his stomach growled angrily in protest and Erik answered the grumble aloud in just as grouchy a tone.

"Very well, but once you have your supper, be silent, you never-satisfied scoundrel!"

Erik gathered up his fishing net and cast it out over the dark water. He waited as it sank, expecting it to still be empty as he drew it back to his side. To his surprise, however, he felt a great weight within the net as he began to pull it back towards the boat. At first, his mouth watered at the thought of having something to cook when he reached the shore, but as Erik had to use more and more strength to haul in the net, curiosity claimed him—this was no school of fish.

Erik at last dragged the net and its contents back into the boat. He paused for a moment to rest after the struggle, taking off his mask and splashing his face with seawater. Once refreshed, he turned to see what the river had yielded to him. Even in the deep darkness around him, Erik's fiercely perceptive yellow eyes saw that what lay before him in the boat was a man. The man was lying facedown and was so still Erik knew he had pulled a corpse from the water.

Erik had been kneeling by the man's feet and he now got up and moved towards the other end of the body. He reached for the man's shoulders to gently turn him over so he could respectfully cover his face with his cloak. Yet before Erik could touch him, the man moved. Startled, Erik stumbled back a few steps and watched as the man feebly coughed up water, then lay still again. Taking up the oars, Erik turned the little fishing vessel and quickly began to row back towards the shore—this man was barely alive, and while he was chillingly reminiscent of people who had fallen prey to "the siren's" song, Erik was not about to let this innocent fellow lose what little life he had left.

The rowboat grounded ashore and Erik leapt out, pulling it up more securely onto the sand. He then turned his attention to the man he had saved, needing to use all his strength to drag the weight of his limp body from the boat onto the beach. Erik laid the unconscious man on his back and then worked to light a fire nearby. After warming himself, he turned back to the man, curious to see what this poor soul looked like. What he saw made Erik leap hack with a surprise which made him feel sick in his heart, for he knew all too well what it was like to be on the receiving end of such horrified shock.

The man who lay before him had neck-length, flowing hair that was as golden as the sun. His hand bore the rough callousness of hard labor, his figure was lanky and yet, even in its present stillness, graceful, but what had made Erik recoil was the man's face. It was disfigured and yet its shape was such that Nature could not have possibly been the one to create the deformity. Erik had had enough viewings of his own corpse-like face as well as the bodies of other misshapen men he had met at various carnivals to know that no one could ever be born with a disfigurement which was so symmetrically even. No, hands more sinister than Nature's playful fingers had worked at this face, and those sinister hands, Erik could see by the flickering firelight, had cut this man's mouth into an eerily comical grin.