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It's Tilli's wedding night, the most joyous night of her life... or it would have been. If something hadn't shown up. If it hadn't eaten all her fellow villagers. If she wasn't busy running for her life...
I don't usually like writing feral preds but I was glancing down my unused ideas list for things I could make into quick stories while I'm in the mood for that, and this one caught my eye. A nice short little piece following a girl fleeing desperately from a monster, and the inevitable conclusion that follows...
I tried to make a good "dark" thumbnail for this but apparently darkness just isn't something my thumbnail making AI can handle making -_-
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Posted by IddlerItaler 1 month ago Report
I would have guessed it was a werewolf at first, probably because of the feral term, but a one-headed hydra is a pretty nice surprise (nice for the readers, not for the villagers). I guess the lack of fires mentioned early on could've been a hint.
If only the adventurers had eaten the hydra, this wouldn't have happened. c:
Posted by PaperWriter 1 month ago Report
Funny enough, the original idea for this story was with a werewolf... a werewolf and a princess, I think. But I guess that felt a little cliche when I started, I wanted to go with something bigger, that could eat the whole village. A dragon was an obvious idea, but again, cliche... and as much as the long necked scaley pred appealed, it seemed impossible to describe a hydra attack without just letting the reader know what the pred was, and I wanted to keep the reader as in the dark as Tilli... I think I basically had all of Tilli's part written before I finally decided what the pred actually was
Posted by nornboy 1 month ago Report
This is a very good story, both in terms of being hot and in showcasing how much living in a typical fantasy setting would suck for non-adventurers and how high the stakes are for adventurers. That a whoever village’s population died horribly because a party of heroes got overconfident.
Great framing device, pitting a bunch of hapless commoners who have no idea what they’re dealing with or chance at beating it against foes actual proper adventurers could survive.
Makes me wonder about some woman who’d temporarily left the village and survived swearing vengeance while still outmatched and being devoured. Or a murder mystery-type plot as a Mimic picks off unsuspecting peasant wenches, with the searchers ignoring the ordinary crate or barrel while the victims are still alive and trying to be heard. And so forth and so on.
Posted by PaperWriter 1 month ago Report
Thank you! I hadn't thought about it too much in that context, but yeah, it's easy to forget as you level up in a fantasy setting that the little things that become non-threats to you over time are still very much threats to a common person... there's plenty of low level things that you can practically forget about later on in your adventures that could still annihilate a whole village with ease...
Oh, the classic swearing vengeance but ending up eaten too... always great~
The mimic idea has a ton of potential, honestly. Just imagine a group of adventurers coming to town and being begged to investigate, one of them going to rest for a bit and just being swallowed up by the mimic posing as her bed, the party having no idea where she went...
Posted by nornboy 1 month ago Report
Agreed. Works best with lots of varied prey, ranging from hapless helpless maids, the survivors of whom fear working at the supposedly-haunted mansion where their friends and coworkers keep disappearing, to a tough-as-nails adventuress called in to find out what’s happening. All discovering the dissolved-clean and crushed bones of their predecessors when they too reach the stomach.