The Ghoul, The Thoul, and The Fool

A great abomination once walked the earth before man recorded history in written form. The Ghoul were shape-shifting Jinn that inhabited desolate places, feeding on the corpses of the dead. My family has hunted these monsters for unknown generations until only I remain.

We have had many victories, both small and great, that no one will ever know about. Our creator gave the first of us life and a purpose that was only for those of his blood to take on. Nothing about our existence, our lives, and our deeds was to be written or shared with any other mortal.

Victories were not celebrated. We burned the remains of the foul creatures we dispatched along with our dead kin and moved on. Not even the death of the last Ghoul was to be celebrated as a victory or told to any other mortal.

As the last of my line, I was cursed to wander this world until the last Ghoul is destroyed so that no more can be created. As a child, I was bitten by a Ghoul and survived the change to remain a human, but it cost me the ability to father a child. As time went on and I never grew old, I discovered that I did not survive the change; I only took another form.

I am a Vaetter! A human who had survived the venom of an immortal who is cursed to endure. Only a Ghoul can kill me by consuming my heart.

Only three of us are known. One was killed long before my time and the other in the aftermath of the flood when the Ghoul roamed freely, feasting on the dead. All others bitten or suffering claw wounds died after suffering horribly unless they were comforted by an ax.

For twelve thousand years, I have wandered the new and the old world and have not seen one of the corrupted Jinn since the days of Alexander the Macedonian. All I do now is search for something I cannot find. My task is unending.

There is at least one Ghoul still roaming the desolate lands, possibly the original. I have traveled far into the wild perusing it that I have become lost, but I feel close to it. The creature is always one step ahead of me, just out of my reach.

As I was about to despair, the smell of death came to me. In the warm air of the Alaskan tundra, the distinct stench of ancient death mixed with the pleasant aroma of wildflowers. The contradiction gave me pause.

I came upon a plane crash near a massive river one early morning. The pilot and three passengers had been killed on impact at least a year ago. The Ghoul had ripped their bones apart and feasted on only the marrow, signaling it was at peak condition and would be a challenge even with the modern weapons I now wield.

Ghouls only eat human flesh or animals when they hunger and are desperate for food. When well fed, the beasts only consume the marrow. Something within it gives them strength.

I followed the monster through Alaska and down into civilization. Seattle had grown immensely since my last visit and it was filled with cars and skyscrapers. In the late 1800s, the last I was there, the city was a small port with a train station and some fishing boats. 1957 was strikingly different.

Over the next month, I visited a dozen graveyards and found at least one disturbed grave in each. The Ghoul was moving south, and I needed to be at the next site before losing it. I was growing weary of life and my will was fading.

“Excuse me, sir,” a man in a suit said as he approached me on the street. “Are you the huntsman from Alaska here to track down our bear? We thought you had missed the boat from Juno.”

“Yes!” I stated confidently. “Yes, I am. Would you please show me to my hotel?”

The foolish dullard escorted me to a fine hotel and paid for my room. They thought it was a beast doing all the dirty work in the graveyards, but they were wrong. There was a magical presence.

After three weeks of hunting, I lost the trail and left in the middle of the night. Something drew me back across the sea and fifty years later, I found myself back in Seattle. After a day, I decided I didn’t like the 20O7 version of Seattle and decided to move on.

“NOAH, RUN!” As a powerful voice rang out. “Michael, you must quickly go, now.”

I found myself staring down at a frail little man who was frightened to near death. At nearly two meters in height, I towered over him and had ten stones of muscle on the man. Yet, there was power within him.

“I am Ash,” I said pleasantly to him. “You are human and therefore I mean you no harm. Which Jinn are you the master of?”

Most of the Jinn that I have encountered have helped me throughout the millennia, but some were less than nice to me. Killing their distant cousins was a point of disagreement with the more manipulative Jinn. I felt this Jinn would help but something was off that I could not place.

“I am not their master,” the man, Noah or Michael, returned calmly. “They are within me. The twins' bottle is not whole.”

“Hmm, so they are,” I mused after studying him. “I have seen Jinn take up residence with a human's eye before; however, it was only once. Persia or maybe Greece in the century after Christ.”

We stood there on the busy street corner near the Space Needle staring at each other for many minutes. The people on the street steered clear of us but they had no idea what force drove them to avoid us. We were free to talk.

“Ash, we are known to you,” the twin Jinn said to me. “This is Michael, and he is not to be harmed. He is tasked with finding our bottle stopper because it is his fault we separated.”

“Out of all of the Jinn I have crossed paths with, I dislike you two the least,” I said, half-jokingly. “I own the two of you for the thing with the guards back in Babylon and the stuff, so let’s work together. You help me track the last Ghoul and I will help you find the top of your bottle.”

The twins went silent while they considered the offer. This Noah, or Michael, had probably been through hell, as I sensed the Jinn had been within his eye for many years. I felt sorry for him being the fool for the twins but admired his dedication to helping the stranded Jinn.

“There are no more Ghoul, Ash,” one of the twins said softly. “None of us have sensed their presence on this world for nearly 2,300 years. A single Thoul remains.”

“You, Ash, are the Thoul,” the other twin continued. You only hunt yourself.”

We talked for another hour as we walked through the streets of Seattle. The human fool walked with us in blissful innocence as he was deaf to our words. Noah, or Michael, or whatever his name was, seemed to understand his exclusion from our conversation, or he didn’t care.

Only the Jinn and I know of the final victory over the last Ghoul, and it will remain that way. A victory the occurred over two thousand years ago that I did not realize until I was told that I was not one of the Vaetter, but a light walking Thoul. It seems that I did not survive the bit after all.