Grendel oddity

The makeup of a monster

            Out of the dark depths of the foul-smelling waters he came. Up like a hungry wolf leaping from the still surface onto the black rocks along the muddy shore. For a moment he paused crouching, his gruesome bulk a shadowy mass bending him low between his knees.

            A new scent flowed into his nostrils and they flared out like that of a grim nightmare. He stood up revealing the eight feet of misshapen muscles shaped like gnarled roots. He stretched out his long arms of sinew and bone, his corded muscles flexing in the moonlight. He raised them as in supplication to the orb, its light bathing his mottled skin in yellow light. He was the reason old women whispered stories in the night, he was the reason the Danes had thick doors and heavy iron locks.

            Each of his eight thin fingers displayed a scythe like claw which were known to make the hardest of warriors shake in their hauberks. The rusted red of each claw stretched out toward the stars. The moonlight reveals the fungal moss on his mottled skin covered with warts and moles like studs on an archaic suit of dusky leather armor. With a grunt he strides forward from the water, his powerful legs similar to his long arms clad in the skins of previous victims. The skins trail water showing flashes of scale, fun and hair. His feet webbed for swimming step from the muck of the marsh water to stand in the soft peat.

            He swung his dreadful locks of ropelike hair around as he scented the air with deep breaths of air. His ears are revealed with each shake of his head, cauliflowered from innumerable fights with the hated north men. A crooked nose, pock marked with cists and scars juts out of his face like a knife. His black eyes shift around it as he peers out into the desolation. His thin slice of a mouth spreads into a mirthless grin that snarls as green fluorescent down his furry chin. His sharp teeth are colored like mold edged like broken glass.

            He drops his arms and looks about into the moor out into the gloom. At first he hesitates at the edge of the dark pool; then with sudden energy, he strides out into the night. This hellish fiend from the darker pits of Hades, holding one malevolent desire, the lust for flesh, human to be precise.

            This cursed monster, this unholy seed of Cain, strode through the fens with nothing on his mind but the cold murder on his mind. He would break into the Hall of Herot, slay these new strangers and feast on their meat. Grendel, the prowler of the fens, revenge foremost in his thoughts as he took longer strides. Little could he know that this would be his last night to kill, to feed. For tonight, Grendel, the terror of the Danes, would play a losing hand against the might of Beowulf if not a losing arm.