Tuesday Showdown: Solomon Kane vs. The Demon Etrigan

Solomon Kane vs. The Demon Etrigan

There on that third road stretching out from Torkertown, the pale rider Solomon Kane did come to walk beside a stranger called Jason Blood. 

"It is a name, though I am not sure it is my own," spoke Blood. "I remember only this road, and preceding it a fall as if from a great height. I only know this moniker from the papers I found in my purse beside little else." 

Having felt the stranger's pockets and the contents of his purse, and finding no blades, Kane offered that they might share the path a ways. 

"I thank you for a direction, friend." said Blood after a short while. "Not knowing where I began, I have little sense of where I ought result."

"There are but two choices," replied Kane. "With the Lord in His Kingdom, or laboring in the fires beneath us all. All else between are respites. Rungs on the ladder either way." 

They walked amongst the bare trees in silence until the moon pulled itself from the horizon and strung itself amongst the countless stars. It was night in the Black Forest, and cold. Kane pointed to a place in the distance and that is where the two men dropped their parcels and went about building a fire. Blood attempted to construct a snare in the surrounding wood, but returned to the camp at the scent of rabbit on the breeze. Kane had come prepared, and offered the stranger a portion as well as a skin of water. They passed the evening quietly, for a time speculating only on the coming weather. The scent of stream water, perhaps to the west. It was only after they'd bid each other a good rest, that they spoke of more serious matters. 

"I dare not sleep, sir." whispered Blood as Kane strung his parcels in a low tree. "I dare not lose myself, or whatever remnant I have of me."

"You remember nothing of yourself or your journey?" asked Kane. 

"Do not think me mad, sir, but I remember not life but death. Conflagrations."

"Conflagrations."

"A demon. A yellow demon rending sinew from bone, grinding bone unto powder."

There came a low mournful call from across the fen. 

"I know of such demons," said Kane calmly. 

"You claim to know the means of earthly monsters?"

Blood could not discern if Solomon Kane was smiling by the flickering light of the dwindling fire. 

"It is their ends with which I concern myself."

"Tell me," said Jason Blood, propping himself up on his elbows. "If truly you are an authority on matters of the Devil's court–"

"As must be any man of God's."

"Is it possible for man to carry in him a demon, as if some inward shadow? Is it possible to have unknowingly swallowed up a monster?"

"I have seen it," said Kane, turning to him, face gaunt and white and unfeeling. "But what do you know of such things, Herr Blood?" 

"A poem, sir." the stranger said, quite weakly. As if it were all he knew. As if it were all he was; those three small words. 

Kane stood then, helped the man to his feet. He backed off a ways, retrieved his dark hat from the crook of a willow. "Tell me." 

"Change, change the form of man," muttered Blood, at first shakily. Then the words came more easily, lifeblood from a wide wound. "Free the prince forever damned. Free the might from fleshy mire."

Kane began stalking about the man in a slow and even circle. "What arcane verse…"

"Boil the blood in heart of fire," spoke Blood as his skin took on a redder tone, as if broiling from within. His frame throbbed with bubbling, cancerous heat and his limbs stretched past their allotment, groaning and twisting into a larger armature upon which his hide went taut. Blood screamed, a sound of pleasure betwixt agony and fear. Then, "Gone, gone the form of man." And as he said this, he shrugged away his ruined flesh as if a huntsman's coat of animal skins. What remained of the man called Blood was a hulking yellow fiend, a horned thing with eyes like unholy flame. He crouched there, bestial and heaving in the sizzling pile of his former self. 

"Rise the demon Etrigan!" 

Kane had already sought his blade from its sheath, and he faced the creature as a shepherd might a wolf at his gate. 

"Son of Belial! I might make of your a prodigal son and send you on your way."

"Man of Christ?" growled Etrigan. "Or man of blade? How doth wise Solomon ply his trade?"

"A demonstration?" Kane suggested. 

Solomon Kane vs. The Demon Etrigan

Who wins?

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