The Beast Hunter Path

The world has no good monsters. It has necessary monsters.

The world is not as the tales describe it. Monsters exist but are rarely evil in the simple way villagers prefer to believe. The beast devouring sheep in the eastern forest may be a creature that lost its habitat when humans felled the trees where it hunted. The vampire draining livestock from the northern villages may have spent centuries trying not to harm people. Or maybe not. The Beast Hunter learns early that the question is not whether to kill the beast but whether the beast deserves to die or whether the problem lies elsewhere — and the other problem usually has a human face. They themselves are monsters of a certain kind: mutated by potions most bodies do not survive, with superhuman reflexes and eyes that change color in the dark. The villagers need them and fear them in proportions that vary depending on the day and the last time a beast attacked. Between the war between exiled elves and humans that has been growing more bitter for a century, the sorceresses who accumulate power from their towers while pretending to serve the kings, and the beasts that climate changes are pushing toward inhabited lands, the Beast Hunter Path has never been more necessary or more lonely.