Schwarzhund has a minion!

Wisht the Skelihaund

Old legends tell of a spectral hound that stalks dark and gloomy graveyards, lonely country roads, misty marshes, or the hills around villages. On stormy nights, if you listen closely, Black Shuck's bone-chilling howls can be heard rising above the wind. While he roams across the shadows of the land, his feet make no sound and leave no prints, but travelers may feel his icy breath upon their necks as they try to quickly finish their business and find their way back home. Indeed, they have a reason to be wary and skittish, because according to myth, anyone unlucky enough to cross paths with or even catch a glimpse of the Black Shuck is doomed to encounter death or misfortune within a year.

Of course, if you had the chance to ask the notorious Black Shuck himself, he'd say that it's all bollocks. When do legends ever paint large, imposing black dogs in a positive light, anyway? He's not quite sure exactly when they were given such a terrible reputation, but it certainly isn't very fair, in his opinion.

He's most widely known as Black Shuck, though he'll even admit that the origin of the name remains uncertain; it may have come from a local word, shucky, meaning "shaggy," but others believe that it was derived from an Anglo-Saxon term scucca or sceocca, meaning "demon" or "Satan."

Over the years he's gained a wide variety of other titles, including Old Shuck, the Galleytrot, the Shug Monkey, the Hateful Thing, the Churchyard Beast, Hellbeast, Swooning Shadow, and the Black Dog of Torrington. More recently, now that his reputation has spread over to the States, you can add Black Chuck to that rather lengthy list; thanks to Americans and their natural tendency to butcher anything of a foreign language, he's grown quite fond of the name Chuck, and has taken to calling himself Charles Schwarz whenever he feels inclined to visit humankind. It's an appropriately modern name, isn't it? Though he might be a hellhound, he still tries to keep up with the times.

As far as appearances go, Black Shuck generally is described as an all-black creature about the size of a calf. He has large eyes that glow yellow, red, or green as if hellfire itself shone through the orbs. Oftentimes he is headless, as he's rather fond of manipulating his form for the best reaction, yet his eyes - where they should be, anyway - still glow in the dark. A length of chain is usually curled around his neck, rattling ominously as he moves about.

Though the mood doesn't strike him often, he does find himself intrigued by humans every now and then, and when he feels the urge to interact with them he adopts a suitable human form. You'll typically see him with short cropped black hair, pale skin, eyes with a tendency to shift through colors, and unremarkable, nondescript clothing. Fashion is still something that is quite beyond the hound's grasp.

Not that you'll ever have much luck finding him to begin with, to be honest. The part in the stories where they claim he prefers to skulk about by himself in the foggy dead of night? That much is true, to say the least.

Under construction.

Artwork!
{x} by Leander
{x} by odduckOasis