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[CW: indiscriminate violence]

Once there was a woman and there was a man. They pressed their lips to the soil and begged hoping that the earth would hear their wish for a child and grant it. Days passed and their neighbours, encouraged and embolded, knelt or lay beside them one by one each with their own wishes; for good health, for bountiful harvest, for long life. One day on the horizon came a small but distant figure. It grew as it neared and he disembarked from his horse with a cooing babe in arm and garden seeds aplenty sewn into the seams of his otherworldly dress. By pressing his palm to foreheads he gave old men the gift of youth and young men the gift of age. He drank broth with them and all made merry. At the close of his visit he kissed each villager as his own brother and was gone.

Many years passed and the first villagers grew grey and old and their few children, hardened by lives of hard work without magical intervention and softened by watching their elders tell tales of the wanderer, reckoned that old stories of a gift-giver from the south were stories and nothing more. Their children did not carry on the tradition and faith in the wanderer from the south dwindled until suddenly one evening a small child cried that a visitor on horseback was slowly but surely approaching, framed by the setting sun over the mounds of sand in the far distance.

Scarcely able to believe what they saw the villagers gathered with open arms and small gifts of welcome. The saviour from the south rode into the village centre disembarked from his horse and slaughtered each and every villager with his bare hands. He took a baby still crying from the back of its dead mother, tore food up from the soil in handsful for his own rucksack, and set off on foot as the whinnies of the horse echoed behind him.

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