A warrior seeks the blessing of a deity in anticipation of an upcoming battle. A shrine maiden agrees to assist, but says that in order to earn the goddess' favor, she must complete three trials; three unconventional, suspiciously self-serving trials...

Psst, hey! Don't tell anyone, but those tags contain some big spoilers.

Oh my god. It's finally done. I'm free. I swear, detailing exactly what went wrong here would take a good few thousand words on its own, but it's finally ready to go, and only a solid month later than intended. I plan to avoid tackling a single "short" story of similar length for a good while, at least until I feel more confident in my writing skills or find an idea that truly feels worthy of the word count.

Okay, quick disclaimer: This does not take place in the Japan. This is magical fantasy Japan (name still pending). By the same token, the religion portrayed is obviously not Shinto, but rather a vaguely Greco-Roman pantheon draped in general Shinto aesthetics. I say this not to excuse any mistakes I've made (and boy, I'm sure I did. Seriously, please let me know), but rather to explain my general thought process as I approached building this world.

One final note: Given the length of this story, I've broken it into four separate parts, plus a short epilogue. Each one simply takes the place of a normal line break/scene change (except the third). I... still don't know how I feel about this. Do you prefer it, or would you rather the story flow in one, continuous stream? If the former, did you like the titles, or would you rather just see numbers?

You're in for a bit of a long haul here, at least by my standards. This one comes in at a little under 15k words.

Spoilers Below:

Well, this one is a little different from my normal fare. Believe it or not, I'm actually a fan of safe/wholesome vore. I just also tend to like conflict in my stories, and, well...

While I'm glad to finally have this thing out, I have incredibly mixed feelings on the end result. I definitely pushed my comfort zone here, particularly in terms of prose, and I'm fairly certain I overshot the mark in a few places. Even ignoring any potential prose issues, though, there's just something about how this whole thing turned out that has me feeling fundamentally dissatisfied. It's probably one of the primary reasons this thing took so damn long to actually finish. If nothing else, it was a valuable learning experience.

The strangest part is actually how much I cut. Seriously, there are thousands of words that I left out, mainly for pacing purposes. The dinner conversation got a solid third chopped off (I'm still worried it drags a bit), part IV had a ton of material cut to keep things moving, and the epilogue was originally nearly twice as long (the thing I wanted to go for here didn't pan out, but I wound up throwing in the important story beats elsewhere).

Probably the roughest part about this whole thing was tackling the tone. There's a fine line between the more serious stuff in part I and the gradual descent into part III's ridiculousness, only to snap back into slightly more grounded for part IV. I'm not entirely sure I succeeded.

Oh well, definitely let me know what you think.

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