Excerpt: The Swordsman's Tales

...Standing before us was a man.

At least, if you could call it a man. It was like no man I had ever seen, nor are you likely to see anything as grotesque – hope that you never do. Thin he was, thinner than the scrawniest person you'd ever met, as though he had never consumed so much as a crumb in his life, his thin muscles and bones showing through his skin. And skin it was, he was no lit'ka, nor likely any sort of human. In the pale glow his skin looked ashen grey, and his unnatural thinness made him look like some horrible scarecrow. He wore little, a cloth skirted about his waist and little else, letting us see the cavernous inward curve of his belly, his ribs giving a horrifying counterpoint. Arms seemed far too long, his fingers seeming to dangle just to his knees, long claws where a man's fingernails would be. But his head – rather than a human's flat face, or even the muzzle of one of us, it was as though someone had broken off the skull of some enormous raptor, eyes gouged out, and beak splintered, and set it upon his neck. Dark red veins gleamed and pulsed across the dome, as the eyeless sockets peered back down at us. Another chuckle rose from the half-broken beak.

"So, these are the cheeky young ones who stole their way into our circus. I am Spectacle, and I will be your guide and guard."