“The Boy Beneath the Horns”

Verse 1
Come gather near, you frost-worn folk,
And fill your cups again,
I’ve got a tale from the mountain dark,
From the year of starving men,
Of a boy who wished for naught but peace,
No gold, no crown, no fame,
But winter’s teeth and the hearts of men
Can twist a child to flame.
Verse 2
He was not born with hoof nor horn,
Nor eyes like coals afire,
No chain dragged at his heel that night,
No breath like funeral pyres,
He was just a lad with a quiet heart,
And hands too small and thin,
Who dreamed of woodsmoke, bread, and sleep,
And never hurting again.
Chorus
So drink, my friends, and whisper low,
For snow remembers what men don’t know,
And not all devils are born that way,
Some are built by the debts men pay.
Yet somewhere deep where the lost things sleep,
Where old grief gnaws and the drifts lie deep,
There still beats faint through the ice and pain
The boy who longed for peace again.
Verse 3
His father was a bitter man,
Hard-eyed and full of drink,
The sort who let his temper rule
And never stopped to think,
His mother wore her silence thin
Like cloth gone near to thread,
And every night that little home
Was colder still than dread.
Verse 4
The boy learned early how to flinch,
How not to speak too loud,
How to vanish small in the corner dark
And not draw anger down,
He learned the creak of a boot on wood,
The warning in a breath,
The way a house can feel like war,
The way love starves to death.
Verse 5
Still every child keeps some small spark,
However bruised and worn,
And his was simple as springtime rain
On a pale and thawing morn,
He’d help the old, he’d feed the strays,
He’d shelter birds half-dead,
He’d tell the younger village ones
That all their tears were shed.
Verse 6
He wanted peace. Just peace, mind you.
A bed, a loaf, a song.
A place where no one raised a hand
And nights weren’t quite so long,
But peace is costly in a cruel world
That fattens wolves on lambs,
And boys who bend instead of break
Are often broke by hands.
Chorus
So drink, my friends, and whisper low,
For snow remembers what men don’t know,
And not all devils are born that way,
Some are built by the debts men pay.
Yet somewhere deep where the lost things sleep,
Where old grief gnaws and the drifts lie deep,
There still beats faint through the ice and pain
The boy who longed for peace again.
Verse 7
The winter came that changed it all,
The blackest folks still name,
When crops lay dead beneath the frost
And wolves forgot their shame,
The rich locked grain behind their doors,
The priest said “Endure and pray,”
But prayer don’t feed a starving child
Or keep the lash away.
Verse 8
His mother fell to coughing blood,
His father sold what stayed,
Then took his grief and sharpened it
Into a thing that flayed,
And when the boy stood in his path
To shield a younger one,
The blow that came near split his soul
And left something undone.
Verse 9
He fled that night through ice and pine,
Barefoot in the storm,
With blood gone stiff upon his cheek
And no place safe or warm,
The mountain took him in its jaws,
The wind became his guide,
And somewhere in that endless white
The child in him half-died.
Verse 10
Some say the old gods heard him weep,
Some say the devil grinned,
Some say the mountain answered back
And let the dark walk in,
Some say no god and no fiend came—
Just cold, and rage, and pain,
And that’s enough, in this strange world,
To make men beasts again.
Verse 11
Days he wandered, half-alive,
On roots and blood and snow,
Till peace, that thing he’d begged life for,
Was all he’d never know,
The hunger bent him, grief remade him,
Wrath taught bone to grow wrong,
And what began as one boy’s cry
Turned beastly, deep, and strong.
Verse 12
His shoulders widened like a curse,
His hands grew hard as yew,
His back bowed strange, his teeth set sharp,
His nails like black frost grew,
Then came the horns—small nubs at first,
Like sins just breaking skin,
And every wound the world had dealt
Seemed carved back out through him.
Verse 13
By spring he was no child at all,
By summer, scarcely man,
By autumn, mothers crossed themselves
Whenever tracks were found,
Cloven deep in muddy roads,
Too large for goat or stag,
And here and there through broken brush
A torn and rusted rag.
Verse 14
They named him demon, named him curse,
Named him judgment, plague, and blight,
As though the ones who made him thus
Had no hand in his night,
For men do love to birth a thing
Then act as if surprised
When all their cruelty stands upright
With fury in its eyes.
Verse 7
The winter came that changed it all,
The blackest folks still name,
When crops lay dead beneath the frost
And wolves forgot their shame,
The rich locked grain behind their doors,
The priest said “Endure and pray,”
But prayer don’t feed a starving child
Or keep the lash away.
Verse 8
His mother fell to coughing blood,
His father sold what stayed,
Then took his grief and sharpened it
Into a thing that flayed,
And when the boy stood in his path
To shield a younger one,
The blow that came near split his soul
And left something undone.
Verse 9
He fled that night through ice and pine,
Barefoot in the storm,
With blood gone stiff upon his cheek
And no place safe or warm,
The mountain took him in its jaws,
The wind became his guide,
And somewhere in that endless white
The child in him half-died.
Verse 10
Some say the old gods heard him weep,
Some say the devil grinned,
Some say the mountain answered back
And let the dark walk in,
Some say no god and no fiend came—
Just cold, and rage, and pain,
And that’s enough, in this strange world,
To make men beasts again.
Verse 11
Days he wandered, half-alive,
On roots and blood and snow,
Till peace, that thing he’d begged life for,
Was all he’d never know,
The hunger bent him, grief remade him,
Wrath taught bone to grow wrong,
And what began as one boy’s cry
Turned beastly, deep, and strong.
Verse 12
His shoulders widened like a curse,
His hands grew hard as yew,
His back bowed strange, his teeth set sharp,
His nails like black frost grew,
Then came the horns—small nubs at first,
Like sins just breaking skin,
And every wound the world had dealt
Seemed carved back out through him.
Chorus
So drink, my friends, and whisper low,
For snow remembers what men don’t know,
And not all devils are born that way,
Some are built by the debts men pay.
Yet somewhere deep where the lost things sleep,
Where old grief gnaws and the drifts lie deep,
There still beats faint through the ice and pain
The boy who longed for peace again.
Verse 13
By spring he was no child at all,
By summer, scarcely man,
By autumn, mothers crossed themselves
Whenever tracks were found,
Cloven deep in muddy roads,
Too large for goat or stag,
And here and there through broken brush
A torn and rusted rag.
Verse 14
They named him demon, named him curse,
Named him judgment, plague, and blight,
As though the ones who made him thus
Had no hand in his night,
For men do love to birth a thing
Then act as if surprised
When all their cruelty stands upright
With fury in its eyes.
Verse 15
He took to chains, they say, because
Their sound made cowards shake,
A switch of birch, an iron hook,
Whatever wrath could make,
He came for brutes who beat their wives,
For men who starved the weak,
For those whose pious daylight smiles
Turned wicked by the week.
Verse 16
He did not strike the hungry poor,
Nor mothers thin with grief,
Nor children hiding under stairs
With nowhere safe beneath,
No, it was always crueler game
That stirred his hooves to run—
The kind of evil dressed up neat
And done when day was done.
Verse 17
So tale by tale, and cup by cup,
The name spread far and wide:
Krampus, born of winter’s hate,
With hell itself inside,
A devil crowned in horn and ash,
A beast no prayer could stop,
With chains that sang behind him loud
And sparks where hoofbeats struck.
Verse 18
But listen well—here’s where old songs
Grow stranger than they seem,
For not all monsters kill what’s near,
And not all nightmares scream,
Some carry in their ruined ribs
A memory small and mild,
A faded warmth, a broken vow,
The ghost of once-a-child.
Bridge
And maybe that is worst of all—
Not that he changed so far,
But that beneath the horn and hide
You glimpse the buried scar,
The shape of what he might have been
If peace had found him first,
Before the world mistook his need
And answered it with hurt.
Verse 19
There came a night of butcher-wind,
When sleet skinned bark from pine,
And every soul in that small vale
Stayed huddled in by firelight,
The storm was thick as burial cloth,
The moon a smothered bone,
And out beyond the shuttered glass
The dark made sounds unknown.
Verse 20
Then through the white there came a noise
That stilled all breath inside—
Not wolf, not horse, not creaking cart,
But chains that scraped and cried,
A dragging iron, a demon’s march,
A warning through the gale,
As though some beast from hell itself
Had found the mountain trail.
Verse 21
The mothers clutched their children close,
The men all barred the door,
The old folk muttered broken prayers
They half-believed no more,
And from the storm he stepped at last,
Tall as a hanging pine,
With horns like roots of the underworld
And eyes like furnace-shine.
Verse 22
Snow hissed black against his hide,
His breath rolled out like smoke,
His chains drove trenches through the drift
Each time one heavy link broke,
He looked like wrath made flesh and bone,
Like ruin given will,
The sort of sight that turns strong men
Stone-quiet, pale, and still.
Verse 23
But there among them by the hearth
A little girl stood near,
Too young to know the proper shape
Of inherited fear,
She saw the horns, the hooves, the claws,
The red light in his gaze—
And not a tremble touched her voice,
Not once in all her days.
Verse 24
She stepped beside the splintered door,
Looked up through wind and white,
At that great shape from blizzard born,
That terror of the night,
And innocent as dawn itself,
As if he were no threat,
She asked, “Have you come to protect us?”
I swear folk hear it yet.
Chorus
So drink, my friends, and whisper low,
For snow remembers what men don’t know,
And not all devils are born that way,
Some are built by the debts men pay.
Yet somewhere deep where the lost things sleep,
Where old grief gnaws and the drifts lie deep,
There still beats faint through the ice and pain
The boy who longed for peace again.
Verse 25
Now some men say the whole world hushed,
Even the storm held still,
That something old behind his eyes
Went softer against its will,
The chain in his fist hung slack and mute,
The birch rod touched the snow,
And for one long breath the beast just stood
Like he did not know where to go.
Verse 26
Then slow—so slow it near broke hearts—
He knelt there in the drift,
Until his monstrous shadow bent
And gave the child a gift:
Not gold, nor toy, nor sugared sweet,
But something rarer still—
His bulk between her and the night,
His wrath against its will.
Verse 27
For behind him stalked through sleet and dark
Three men from farther south,
The kind who smile with rotten eyes
And winter in their mouths,
Raiders lean from hunger’s law,
Cruel hands and uglier grin,
The kind of wolves that wear a face
And let their evil in.
Verse 28
Krampus rose like judgment then,
No longer still or torn,
And all the mountain learned at once
Why monsters too are mourned,
He met them there in the screaming snow
With hoof and chain and hand,
And wrath fell hard as avalanche
Across that frozen land.
Verse 29
No man there saw the whole of it,
The blizzard drank the scene,
But they heard the cries, the snapping wood,
The sounds of something keen,
And by first light the storm had passed,
The drifts lay red and torn,
While by the door the child still slept
Wrapped in a shadow warm.
Verse 30
He was gone by dawn, as stories say,
No track but trenches deep,
No sign but one great broken chain
Half-buried by the eaves,
And on the post above the latch,
Cut rough in frost and grain,
A mark no scholar ever named,
But folk all knew its meaning.
Verse 31
Since then the singers tell it thus
When winter nights grow long:
Fear the beast, yes—fear him well—
But know fear’s not the song,
The song is of a broken boy
Who begged the world for peace,
And when the world refused him that,
It made him winter’s teeth.
Verse 32
Yet still some ember in him lives,
Buried deep and sore,
Enough to hear a small child’s voice
And not become no more,
Enough to turn from wrath to shield,
Enough to stand and stay,
Enough that when the innocent call,
Some part of him obeys.
Final Chorus
So drink, my friends, and whisper low,
For snow remembers what men don’t know,
And not all devils are born that way,
Some are built by the debts men pay.
And if through storm you hear chains groan
Like hell has dragged itself from stone,
Pray your heart is clean when the black winds sweep—
But trust him near where children sleep.
Outro
For under horn and ash and scar,
Past rage no hymn can calm,
There lingers like a buried coal
One wish beneath the storm:
A fire, a bed, a gentler hand,
A night without alarm—
And so the monster guards in part
What once he could not keep warm.

Tavern ballad, medieval, folk