Chapter 56: Chapter 54: The radiance of growing souls

Monsters.

There are so many things in the world, both great and terrible. Some are constructs of the physical realm and there are just as many that stem from the spiritual. Simple houses, simple animals, simple people — These things fill up our days and make up the majority of the content of our lives. They are all simple things.

Yet monsters are anything but simple.

What is a ‘monster’?

The definition is, by its very nature, difficult to nail down.

Since time immemorial, children have feared the darkness and the monsters that scour beneath their beds. Great warriors and champions have wandered off into the darkness with blades in hand to fight these entities. We title our enemies, both pragmatic and political, as monsters.

But this is simply the metaphysical use of the term.

In our more grounded reality as adventurers, a monster is an entity that does not belong to the collection of races that we as a whole deem as civilized.

A soft slime, wandering the forest on the hunt for field mice and rabbits, is a monster.

A drake, proud and dangerous, soaring through the air, is a monster.

A goblin mother, nursing her precious young and singing to them, is a monster.

These creatures vary in their make-up and their capabilities, stemming from wildly different blood. But they are all monsters. Each and every one of these things would kill and eat a human if it came down to it.

For our purposes, this simple criteria is enough to classify something as a monster.

Monsters are very real and they do not need to be as abstract as a shadow beneath one’s bed. Although, we know this to be a very real possibility as well.