Tale of the Week 289: Behemoth - Winner's Circle

**Swaeft** · March 21, 2019, 11:35 PM

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Behemoth

With thanks to Pinarius

for the use of his Picture of the Week 526 submission. Please rep him by clicking on the little green cross.

After two rounds of voting, we finally have a winner! Congratulations to Kilo11 for his win! He butted heads with NorseThing in an exciting tie-breaker vote and after emerging victorious in a closely fought battle, he now has a total of twenty-one Writers' Study competition points.

If you missed a chance to read the tales you can catch NorseThing's entry over here and read Kilo11's winning entry below:

Tale of the Week 289: Behemoth Looming. That was the only word for it. It stood ahead of him, that terrible grin fixed to its grotesque mouth, and it loomed, a spectre of evil made flesh. He knew he would find it here, knew it would greet him with its hungry maw, and he came willingly. After all, that is the business of heroes. To walk blindly and willingly into the grip of doom, with no thought for safety or good sense.

As it stood before him, its taloned toes clicking maddeningly on the stones, he wondered why he wasn’t nervous. By all rights he should have been, for though he’d faced beasts and demons before, they had all been petty things compared to this monstrosity. It filled his entire world, blurring the horizon between heaven and earth, and to call it merely huge would be folly, for its immensity belied any comprehension in a four letter word. It was no matter. The monster would fall like the rest.

With a confidence little earned the hero pushed his spear into the ground, its point upright. It was a holy thing, the spear of Redhorn, and it gave him an unfair advantage. However, he would take no chances this day. He swung from behind his back a long tube of smooth metal, its back end displaying the fins of a rocket. Something to soften the beast before it lunged at him. Something to give him an easier target when he finally struck.

The hero then did something that baffled the monster. He turned his back on it and sat on the dirt, his legs crossed beneath him. The behemoth was not a thing endowed with a great measure of intelligence, but what little it had sung of hidden intent on seeing such a careless move. It roared with a sound fit to crack mountains and sunder kingdoms, seeking to intimidate the hero into some sort of action. But he remained still, his back turned. Fury rising within it, the beast bellowed and swung its long arms, tearing up the ground and casting it into the sea, but still the hero was still. A cold sweat began to form upon the monster’s brow as it raged on, until slowly the man with his rocket launcher and spear turned to face it, a fiendish smile twisting his handsome features.

He raised the metal tube to his shoulder when out of the corner of his eye he saw the tip of a tail longer than worlds swinging toward him. Terror finally gripping him his gaze flickered back to the monster ahead and there he saw only satisfaction in its eyes. It had outsmarted him.

The strike blasted the roguish smile from his face and cast him far to the east. When finally he landed he saw that he had fallen atop a mound of corpses, of fallen heroes, and as his eyes closed he wondered whether he should perhaps have been nervous after all.

A big thank you to everyone who submitted an entry or voted in the poll from me on behalf of all the WS Staff. This competition would be nothing without everyone who gets a Tale penned, and the quality of submissions was as excellent as ever.

TotW 289: Submission thread | Voting thread | Tie-breaker thread

If you fancy taking part in the Tale of the Week we have one submission thread open and ready for you to enter - feel free to have a look at the theme, picture and keywords and write up an entry if you so desire to.

**Turkafinwë** · March 22, 2019, 04:39 AM

Congratulations Kilo11 on the win! Thanks to all those who entered, voted and thanks to Swaeft for running this competition!

**Kilo11** · March 26, 2019, 02:41 AM

Oh, cool. I just noticed this! Thanks Turk, and thanks to all who voted, and even more to those who also wrote tales! That story was a fun one for me, and a bit of a different flair from some of my more grounded themes. Now I have to see if I can get together the artistic wherewithal to jot something down for the current TotW (and you all should too

)!