“Unnatural” gets thrown around a lot near the Fangwood, but when a normal-sized 14-year-old child becomes a hulking 6’6” behemoth in two years… that’s a new kind of unnatural..
It didn’t happen in a vacuum. Zig’s father, a Nirimathi veteran, was called into service to help lay siege to Ramgate. Unable to stomach her husband fighting without her by his side, his wife and their son Zig accompanied him, staying and working in one of the supply camps. When all hell broke loose and the Hobgoblins began slaughtering civilians wholesale, their camp was one of the first hit. Zig could do nothing but watch as a hobgoblin blade tore through his mother’s flesh. It was an image that would forever be burned into his memory. But afterwards? No memory. None whatsoever.
The next thing he remembers is a Nirmathi healer pulling hobgoblin corpses off of him. The healer claimed there were at least seven corpses surrounding and covering Zig, all torn to shreds by the same parrallel cuts, like a wild animal. After healing his wounds, the healer sent Zig back home traumatised and still covered in blood.
His childhood friend’s family, the Sextons, took him in without question, but that’s when the “Growth Spurt” began. In two years the boy went from 5’3” to 6’6”, and gained an appetite that nearly bankrupted the Sextons. It got to the point where Zig had to get a job to fuel his food needs. He became a woodcutter, putting his newfound strength to use, but in turn further isolating himself from the community by spending long hours at the border of the Fangwood.
All this time, rumors abounded that the souls of the Ramgate massacre were inhabiting his body, or that he himself ate hobgoblin flesh and could not sate his hunger. The truth was far more sinister. Somewhere in Zig’s very DNA, something dark was stirring. Something that his anger and fear had awakened. He began hearing voices from the stars, seeing things out of the corners of his eyes. When he tried to pray at the altars of Desna and Erastil, his prayers were interrupted in his mind by strange voices in languages he could somehow understand. Bad omens followed: flowers wilting at the altars, cracks forming in the wood of the statues, it didn’t take long before Zig was barred from entering the shrine.
He could still visit the shrine of The Green faith without incident, and was given much advice by Vero Caligni, the shrine’s steward, on how to achieve a better balance with nature. Rather than things getting better, the voices started talking whenever they damn well pleased. Zig began to talk back, hoping that he could appease them, get them to finally shut up. Responding seemed to only make it worse: he felt the voices calling him deeper and deeper into the Fangwood with each excursion, calls he felt he couldn’t resist, and he began arming himself accordingly in case of encounters with the darker denizens of the forest.
What was a normal, even charming young man two years ago is now a hulking nervous wreck, hearing voices and talking back to them in Abyssal often without realizing, abandoned almost entirely by his community. If something doesn’t change soon, Zig will most likely lose himself to the madness entirely… or worse.
