Grendel

Grendel eats. Enemies go into him whole and come back as toxic bile, and every soul he swallows leaves him more armoured than before — a walking gut of a frame, all appetite. It would be easy to file him as a monster and be done, and Drusus, who narrates his Leverian, refuses to. He promises at the outset that the exhibit will show a creature of surprising compassion, and then he makes good on it.

The city of Riddha was frozen and starving, and its Executor — a violet-scented brute named Karishh — kept himself and his sycophants in feast while the people beneath him wasted away. As they starved, he called for yet another banquet, his Dax at the doors.

Grendel arrived uninvited, cutlery already in hand — the blade called the Masseter. He set upon Karishh's guards and hangers-on and swallowed them whole, and then, engorged on the power he had taken from the powerful, he rolled down into the slums and gave it back: reinvigorating the sick, the lame, the hungry, the dying. The city rose behind him. Karishh fled for the mountains with the devourer at his heels, and what became of the Executor Drusus says he cannot tell — only that as the freed city feasted, a single satisfied belch rolled from peak to peak.

That is the whole of the trick of him: a glutton who eats the mighty to feed the meek, and hungers, Drusus says, but never at the expense of the needy. (The historian's exhibit closes on the same wink his neighbour's opens: wherever Grendel's traces are found, some trace of Gauss is sure to be near.)