Respectfully touch a teufel horn, with their permission, your wish may just come true. Touch a horn that from a head has been shorn, death shall soon befall you. -- Anon Guest
They say a lot of things about the devilborn. Some of them are even true.
Touch a Teufel by the horn/ Making sure the head's not shorn/ Surely you will become bless'd/ If they tell you "be my guest".
Nobody knows exactly where it came from. Some suppose that the devilborn cooked it up themselves. They don't know how it really began. Which was in the middle of nowhere, and in the middle of the worst of the Xenophobia wars. Every intelligent species was fighting every other intelligent species, and the Hellkin, especially, were persona non grata just about everywhere they wandered. One wandering through anywhere was a curiosity. Two or more got trouble heading their way.
This one called hirself Sensibility, and walked into the town with the cautious air of one looking for the first sign of torches and pitchforks. What ze got was a lot of staring. Not surprising, since ze was bright red with hair to match. The hooves frequently alarmed many, when they looked that far. Too many were captivated by the horns.
They weren't angry, so Sensibility was taking that as a good sign.
It was a little kid who asked, "Are they real?"
Kids have a kind of bravery derived from not knowing what was dangerous. Nobody had told this little girl to stay away from Hellkin, yet. So Sensibility tried hir kindest smile as ze got to her level. "They're very real. Everything about me is real."
"C'n I pet 'em?"
That was the simplest and easiest thing anyone had requested of hir. "Of course you may." Ze stayed very still as the kid ran her spit-moistened fingers over hir horns.
"It's just like a sheep's," she announced, a little disappointed.
"Sorry if that's a baa-a-a-ad experience for you."
Ze got a giggle out of her before a parent noticed and swooped her across the street. Sensibility stood slowly, showing how harmless ze was, and carefully moved on with hir business.
The next day, when the girl was helping her parents woodgathering, she tripped and skinned her knee. The rock she tripped over was a solid gold nugget roughly half her size.
They searched for Sensibility, but a Hellkin who knows they're being looked for has ways of making themself vanish. So they went looking for other devilborn to try and catch that kind of luck again.
People with greed overwhelming their hearts and minds to terrible things. They tried to keep the Hellkin captive, and killed them when they tried to escape. Well, most of them were killed trying to escape. Some got out.
Hellkin, when they meet, talk. A few cluster together in out-of-the-way areas, and spread the word. Some mark the roads leading to the area with warnings to others of their kind.
Then a group of twenty came into the town in the middle of the night and slaughtered everyone over the age of ten, taking the children and infants from their beds before the blood began to flow. Those children were told that they were saved from a harsh judgement.
Luck is what people make of it, but the warning was out there, and spread quickly.
Nowadays, children skip to it.
[Photo by Mikita Karasiou on Unsplash]
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