THE chilling back story of one World of Warcraft player

In 1974, Prince Chandra Bartholomew of India fell in love with a servant girl named Lita. The pair embarked upon an intense and passionate love affair away from the public eye, but after just three months Lita fell pregnant. Anxious to protect his family from scandal, the prince ordered his beloved into exile. She fled into the mountains, her only possessions the clothes on her back and her only solace a broken heart and the promise of a child.

For seven months Lita subsisted on scavenged meat and determination, until, on Christmas Day, the baby came. Frail and wizened, her body traumatised, she gave birth then finally conceded defeat to the cold, clutching tightly to the infant in her arms as her breath began to fail. And she wept as she died - for the boy was a monster.

Three weeks passed. Lita had begun to decompose and her nameless son lay dead beside her. But something lived. What the weak servant girl had believed to be deformity was something more unsettling still. It was the child’s twin, fused to the side of its head, a mass of scabbed flesh with one solitary eye and a mouth like a gaping wound. It blinked and it wheezed and, in the darkness, it fed on its brother.

It was almost Spring when Professor Faizal Singh discovered the bodies. An expert in robotics, his controversial experiments on criminals had forced him to conduct his strange science in secret. When he set out that morning for a trek across the mountains, he could never have expected the sight that would greet him.

The eye met his gaze and blinked. Professor Singh shivered, a deep jolt of revulsion coursing down his spine before he picked up the young corpse and placed it into his knapsack.

Back at his laboratory, the scientist separated the mutant from the rotting cadaver of its twin. His work had anaesthetised his mind to human pain, but as this thing contorted its misshapen mouth in agony, he felt nothing but dread. And all the while it watched him, its lone eye blinking.

It was another five months before the creature could survive without life support, and six months again before he considered it strong enough to carry out his plan. For, crafting day and night in his workshop, Professor Singh had been creating a torso and limbs of pure steel. Towering at three metres tall, this robotic behemoth would give an incredible gift to the fierce little monster which had so far known only suffering. It would give him a body, make him almost human.

The Professor carefully placed the mutant within its metal cradle. He tried to ignore the eye gazing into his as he stitched wires underneath its skin, linking whatever kind of brain it had with the CPU of the robot.

Blink. Blink. Blink. It was finished. He stepped back to the wall, threw the switch, and up it rose. A huge metal hand encased the Professor’s skull. The eye fixed his and the ugly mouth curled into an approximation of a smile, then the hand closed with a sickening pop and Singh dropped, decapitated, to the floor.

The deafening roar of steel on stone filled the laboratory as it was torn to pieces. Decades of work smashed by fearsome metallic hands then silence, followed by slow, crunching footsteps and the sound of a wooden wall shattering as the monster stepped at long last into the daylight and looked towards the valley below.

He would have his revenge. He would claim his throne. Milkman blinked his eye and lurched forward.