A loud and metallic bang reverberated through the empty halls of the vault.

“More vermin, it appears,” Charles clucked with a sigh. The scraping of his diminutive talons along the vault’s stone floor was as gentle as a whisper. He strutted through the long, dark corridor away from the vault’s main chamber. His head bobbed with a precise rhythm, timed with each careful step which carried him through the hallways and the dim light of the sconces.

Patrolling the vault was one of the few activities he enjoyed. Perhaps it was because the perspective of being a chicken made things seem far more grandiose than they might have otherwise been. Or that it filled his day-to-day with something, anything, to do when no one was visiting the mistress. Maybe it was both.

  His dull, blood-red plumage consumed the torchlight while the lustrous gold of his beak and claws shimmered against it. He carried himself with a particular brand of dignity that only a proud chicken could. His breast was puffed and the midnight darkness of his comb was like a little black crown adorning a princeling.

Charles followed the sound’s origin and soon arrived at the dining hall and peered through the two grand doors which stood slightly ajar in its edifice. The chittering of mice in the kitchen, knocking over produce, and committing unacceptable havoc was enough to make the coals of his eyes turn an unholy and somewhat luminescent crimson.

“Mistress, did I not say that playing host to your chosen and feeding them too would inevitably breed infiltrators?” he asked with a twitch of his head and a few annoyed pecks at the ground beneath him. No one replied. Hmph, he thought. I suppose I’ll do away with this little incursion. I could do with a snack, anyway.

He turned his focus to the dining hall and made his way inside. His gaze was focused upon the kitchen where yet another loud bang shattered the placid ambience of the empty corridors beyond. There, just before he entered the kitchen, the source of the sound rolled out from the open doorway and along the floor - a stray, metal mixing bowl.

“Enough of this! I do far too much maintenance to be cleaning up after you little wretched produce-stowaways!” Charles declared as he scampered into the kitchen at full speed and then slid to a stop along the polished stone floor. His beak was agape to see not merely one or two pests, but a proper infestation of mice that had somehow managed to find their way along with the last “shipment” of goods into the vault.

His feather’s ruffled, and he was momentarily a fluffy ball of red beneath the kitchen’s modest chandeliers. Mice dug into the spice racks, the produce drawers, and even scaled the walls to nibble upon the hanging dried corn imported from Highmountain. Charles’ eyes erupted in furious arcane fire and his voice twisted into something entirely unholy to hear.

“UNACCEPTABLE!” he said in a tone which sound somewhat like a drowning ghoul. His feathers began to liquify and his small body collapsed onto the floor where it began to coalesce into a single, bulbous mound of undulating blood. Feathers dissolved, and any resemblance to what had once been a regal and alert guardian fowl had fallen away like a masquerade’s façade.

The blood-mound rippled and all of the mice in the room were suddenly struck dumb, their eyes glowing a dim red. Each mouse stopped and leaned up on their hind legs, then turned to face the sanguine blob in the kitchen. As they did, a single enormous elemental-like arm erupted from the mass. Then another. And finally, the crude shape of a crowned head and a body erupted as well. 

Some kind of blood elemental towered over the kitchen counters and cabinetry. Charles as he truly was. Light shimmered upon the rippling surface of his form as he moved one of his amorphous hands to the side like an open palm preceding a command.

“Be gone,” he sputtered. A hundred tendrils or more sprouted from his body and wove through the kitchen space like magic missiles and found their way to every mouse in the room. Each tiny creature was impaled without a sound, their minds entirely shattered by whatever dark magic Charles commanded. The tendrils enveloped their bodies in whatever blood or liquid was the make of his form, and as they did, the tendrils whipped them all back violently into the rest of his body where they began to rapidly dissolve.

Satisfied, Charles looked over the kitchen and began to gradually reduce in size. He became smaller, and smaller. Until he was simply a mound once again and that mound compressed and solidified into a ball of beautiful red feathers. A black comb popped up from one side, and then the head it was attached to. His beak perked up and once again caught the light of the kitchen. A glorious chicken once more, he bounced up onto his feet.

“Ba-GOK” he clucked. “Hmph. Rapscallions in my kitchen,” he muttered and then turned to trot back out of the kitchen and toward the dining room. “Perish the thought.” He burped, pecked the floor, and went on his way.