Killing Zahaar is a curious thing. I’m not sure if that can be said about many people, but it can be said about Zahaar, weather he… it is a person or not. The captain may think that it’s innocent, a helpless, mute creature that he can soften with the blood of plunder and his own purity; I know better.
I saw what he did that one time. Someone killed him. Someone killed Zahaar. I was hiding, away from the sword of the sharp-eyed bounty hunter who had come seeking the blood of a child. But I was watching. Zahaar’s horns hit the ground first, followed by the inevitable, meaty thud of the rest of his head hitting the ground. His body fell as well. He was dead- I could tell. Even WITH the instrument the captain gave me, I could tell. But his body jerked a few times, his head twitched, the blood seeping in short spurts.
The killer shrieked- I still remember the squishy crunch of Zahaar’s spine breaking- that sound- so resonant: the one structure that holds together the body’s core, so delicately crafted, having held up for so long, just breaking. The sturdier something is, the louder it will be when it shatters. The more life something holds, the more dead it will seem.
The hunter turned her head to me, his foot still crushing the small body underneath it. Her sharp eyes widened the slightest bit, and something about the subtlety of her expression made me understand. It was Zahaar.
He hid away in the bounty hunter’s body- he didn’t need food, nor did he need water, or even the bare necessities of life. The body, (of which I observed with great caution,) distorted and twisted- sunk into itself and re-distributed skin and fats, ridding itself of the… unnecessary things in the hunter’s body. I suspect the hunter’s instrument was one of those things, as I found discarded chips of burnt soulwood scattered around Zahaar’s solitary chamber. By the very next day, the hunter’s body was indistinguishable from Zahaar’s former… abode.
Disturbing as it may seem, no one noticed. Zahaar didn’t even seem to notice. He went about his usual tasks, though he was fairly more wary of me, in his silent, slinking kind of way.
And I’ve had the utter HONOR of seeing that… those bodies of his obliterated again and again over the years.
He’s a pathetically weak thing. He can’t leave that body of his- only crouch in it for safety until it decomposes completely, at which point he would be devoured by the forces that despise him most.
So, he lies in wait in that drying husk- attracts living vessels to himself- and when they make any sort of contact with him, even touch his blood- he seeps into their very being, ripping them open, stuffing their mouth and nose and every other imaginable orifice with his being, shoving them to the farthest corners of themselves to be slowly devoured by him for energy, or forcing them out of their own body if they put up too much of a fight.
I’ve even see him do things like hitch rides in his friend’s bodies. Once he was killed around that ridiculous lover of his, Xex. (I have no doubt that they are lovers, they sing to each other all the time, deny it as they may.) Xex, though horrified, crept over to the body and gently touched it… and the next day zahaar was back, looking the same as ever, side by side with Xex. I regret to say Xex’s personal nurse was never seen again after that day. It’s always been rumored that the young composer had no trouble feeding allies to the dogs- I didn’t really realize how literal that rumor was for a long time, though.
You want to kill that monster? You would have to guard it, make sure no one comes into contact with it. And even then, it may not be devoured. It isn’t very easy to destroy creatures of his sort- it’s much easier and more effective to trap their beings. Zahaar, being a creature that cannot move without a vessel, would be particularly vulnerable to this sort of treatment. But I wouldn’t count on killing him and not soon seeing his face hovering over you in your sleep, that mournful whisper of his echoing through your head in your final moments… I prefer to think it’s much easier in general if Zahaar is not an enemy.