So be it.
Many spots of light glide together to form the image of a young girl.
Long ago in a distant land there lived a girl who was prophesized by the village fortuneteller to be the cause of the village's death.
More stars move. An old woman wrapped in cloth, holding a babe in arms; she can scarcely believe what she saw in that one's face.
And so as was custom in that culture, the babe was cast out into the nearby wood, to become food for one of the many beasts that roamed the forest.
A cluster of arms hold the baby up from a stylized representation of a village and toss her into a sinister-looking forest, all brambles and spike.
The babe would have died, if not for a passing vulfenkine that happened to notice her.
An intimidating beast resembling a wolf, all hard bone and taut skin and sharp angles, paces around the child. He throws his head back and howls a sonorous tune, and known only to Silica, his eyes gleam with a shine she has seen before.
More vulfenkine race out of the forest into an impromptu clearing made by the first. It paces around the child as it speaks.
I know you, but you not know I. But I am known to your dead, and prolonged them while they were still alive. I would recall my favor to you.
Something in the vulfen's voice makes the others cower.
Take the human child in. Raise her as one of your own, teach her to be a vulfenkine and bring her back to this clearing when she is on her third moon. Until then, never come here.
A vulfine female trots over and picks up the baby by her swaddling, and retreats back into the brush with the rest of her pack. The original vulfen slinks off with a smirk on his face as Trickster continues narrating.
And as the outcast babe grew with the vulfine she displayed signs of the stranger's favor. Her limbs were stronger than those of other men, her nails sharp and tough. Her teeth served her well in the hunt.
The starpictures show the babe transitioning from a lying pose to a crawling pose, and then walking and running on four legs. She grows up as she does this, and her shadow shows her to be a little more inhuman with each transition. By the time she's an adult, she's neither quite vulfine nor human.
The pack grew to value her, for she was clever in ways that they were not. But eventually her moonblood came, though only once in every three years. When she was nineteen, the pack brought her back to where her life had been extended.
The girl and her pack at the clearing again. Nothing else is there, yet the other vulfine leave with fright showing on their muzzles. The original vulfine is shown striding out of the forest edge toward her, each step silent and intentful.
The POV shifts away, but from the sounds it's quite clear what was happening.
The Stranger had her in that clearing, on the night her moon blood flowed for the third and last time. By the morn, her belly was swollen and distended with kit.
The girl is shown with a massively swollen belly dragging herself across the forest floor into a nook in the bottom of a tree. She's clearly in pain as she vanishes into the shadows.
The girl never did emerge from beneath that tree, but what did succeeded her ten times over.
A sudden flood of dark bestial shapes almost explode out from beneath the tree.
Neither vulfine nor human, the new creatures tore the wolves away from their home, the children of the on they raised now giving rise to their exile.
The town is shown demolished and bloodsoaked.
In the following months the newly formed werewolfs destroyed the nearby town for their folly, for while they were normally content to remain within the bounds of the forest, on the night of the full moon they were empowered by a trace of their mother's sacrifice and grew to monstrous size, strength, and fury.
No human dares go into those woods and comea out alive. And the Stranger?
The smirking wolf pads off to an unknown destination as the town burns behind him.
He was never seen again in those parts; he had taught the village of Tabernoth what it meant to refuse hospitality to a guest.
After a short period of darkness, the giant octopus shrinks down into a tiny bat that flutters into the hotel just as the roof floats down, impossibly gently.
I hope you were enlightened by my story, and learned an important lesson: you are an inn. Never refuse your roof to those who pay; you never might know who you've offended.
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Topic: Everything: Gaiden (Read 520666 times)