Bovos Sharphorn

Whoever Bovos once was is the first innocent victim of his tale. He was tending cattle in the fields south of Tilshire, when a squall forced him to excavate a sod dugout to weather the storm and spend the night in. Nigh-entombed in soil and moss, he slipped into his last Human slumber. By malign chance, he had laid down atop an buried portal to Anathraad, its magic frayed, leaking, and unstable. Like the thunderhead above, the portal had been building up a charge, and the cowherd's soul drew a lightning-strike of planar energy that whipped out and snatched him from his hovel. With a thunderclap from both the sky and ground, the hapless herdsman vanished from history. He reappeared in a hellish mire of scalding mud. Streaks of flame darted across sickly purple skies, and huge bubbles of muddy ooze swelled and burst with a sound like a shriek of agony. Before him was a minor Demon, a mischievous imp calling herself ny. Her idle wish for sadistic new entertainment, made by chance in proximity to the portal's long-forgotten exit, triggered it to briefly open and shut. The mind of her new toy had shattered upon witnessing Anathraad, spoiling her fun. Rather than leaving the comatose flesh to the Pit Curs, ny infused it with a corrupted animal spirit, creating an infernal Skinwalker she called Bovos. Hyx wagered that the tear between worlds could sustain one last transfer, if properly provoked. Though now corrupted, Bovos was of mortal clay, and so could pass back to Teleria. ny bid Bovos form the nucleus of a cult to worship her and, in time, repair and expand the gateway to make a second Brimstone Gate. With him she sent a tiny effigy of seemingly innocuous wood and twine, which in fact was the symbol of their covenant and imbued with enough of Hyx's magic to grant Bovos mystic powers. Back on Teleria at the site of his disappearance, Bovos sought civilization, remembering nothing of his old life. He came across a half-rotted old barn and made it his lair, and located the nearby hamlet which had abandoned it. There, guided by the whispers of his talisman, he stalked its most vulnerable and weak-minded members and transmitted those whispers to them: the liar who slept drunkenly by the bonfire, the children abed with malcontent in their hearts, the adulterous spouse, the faithless and ambitious priest. Half the hamlet was ripe for Demonic influence. The cult began to meet by night every few weeks on dates of mystical numerological potency. Human disciples acted as intermediaries, only slowly revealing the 'divine mystery' of the bull-headed Skinwalker and the strange 'miracles' he could perform to others — many of the simple villagers had not yet seen nor heard of Skinwalkers, and their ability to distinguish subtle Demon-hexes from wholesome Lumayan rituals was poor. The most privileged of his followers could lay their eyes on the Bovosian Tablet, a great stone upon which Sharphorn's wisdom was carved, and upon which he later performed ritual sacrifice to his Demonic liege. But then the first stirrings of the Red Crusade swept through Anhelt. As paranoia grew, Bovos took drastic measures to keep himself secret, but it was not enough. Word of a man-beast was leaked to inquisitors and a gang of armed crusaders arrived in the hamlet. Bovos and his greatest loyalists barricaded themselves in the barn, but the crusaders whipped the town into a frenzy, and the creaking timber was no match for dozens of sledges and mattocks. Bovos and his fanatics stood defiant. A bloodbath ensued. The notorious tale spread like wildfire, and Bovos came to symbolize all Skinwalkers in the eyes of the Sacred Order: children of Siroth at heart and a manifestation of pure corruption.