Khazrak the One-Eye

Most beastlords rule because they are the biggest thing in the herd. Khazrak rules the Drakwald because he thinks: a patient, methodical intelligence wrapped in scarred muscle and dark iron mail. His warherds do not blunder into battle; they close roads for weeks beforehand, bleed relief columns in a dozen feinted ambushes, and fall upon their true prey only when it is exhausted, lost, and far from help. The soldiers of Middenland call the deep forest Khazrak's court, and they are not entirely joking: within it, nothing happens that the One-Eye has not permitted.

His name was bought in blood. In a battle beneath the Drakwald eaves, the sword of Boris Todbringer, Elector Count of Middenland, carved out Khazrak's eye, a wound that would have seen a lesser beastlord's herd feasting on its former master by nightfall. Khazrak survived it, masked the ruin with black iron, and spent years repaying the debt with interest: ambushing the Count's hunts, butchering his knights, and at last taking one of Todbringer's own eyes with a stroke of his barbed scourge before vanishing into the trees. Since that day the two have hunted one another season after season: the Count with hounds, silver, and a standing bounty; the beastlord with burned villages left like taunts along the forest roads.

What no one in Middenheim wants to say aloud is that Khazrak could likely have killed the Count more than once, and has not. The herds whisper that the One-Eye keeps Todbringer the way men keep whetstones, for a hatred this perfectly matched sharpens both its edges. Every summer the hunt rides out, and every autumn it limps home short a few more knights, while somewhere beneath the black canopy a one-eyed shadow watches it come and go, patient as the forest, certain as the dark, already planning the next lesson.