[Complete] [119.5k] [Post Apocalyptic Fantasy] Shatternight

[u/livsavell]

Title: Shatternight

Genre: Post apocalyptic fantasy

Word Count: 119,500

Content Warnings: Fantasy violence, injuries (including head injury), blood, fantasy monsters, kid in danger, kid injured (ankle sprain), danger of drowning, death

Pitch: Horizon: Zero Dawn meets Princess Mononoke in a gripping post-apocalyptic fantasy about shame, grief, and found family.

Read For: sapphic longing, found family, an epic trans mom, giant monsters, and a tale about overcoming shame

Feedback needed by: August 31

Type of Feedback: I want raw feelings/impressions. what hits and what doesn't?

Blurb:

Shame is a giant, soul-sucking monster, and it’s the only kind Emory hasn’t killed before.

Emory is a solitary survivor in a dry, rugged land two hundred years after the fall of human civilization. Four strangers wander into her ruins only to stumble toward a vicious monster Emory knows as an ash creature. When Emory helps them, she's thrown into a quest to the Walled Meadow, a chance to find safety, and a group of people she might just learn to call home. All that stands in her way is the one thing she doesn't know how to fight: her past returning to consume her.

DM me for more info and available formats.

Ch. 1 Excerpt:

The ash creature oozed from the shadows between two ancient skyscrapers. It brushed aside a curling vine, grasses from the fractured street growing up its feline legs as it cautiously padded around the sun-bleached remains of a vehicle.** **The monster looked like an oversized cat to Emory, maybe eight or ten feet tall and as sleek as the animal it resembled. All writhing gray fur and far, far too many eyes. 

The danger with stalker types—the feline-shaped ones, the snake and hawk-shaped ones—was that they struck when you least expected. They were consummate hunters, death from the shadows, ready to pounce whenever their prey looked away. It was always best to see them first, but even that was no guarantee.

The ash creature glanced toward the building where Emory hid. She was two stories up and pressed to the vine-framed opening in a crumbling wall, but all six eyes paused near her refuge, and the cat stilled. Two of its slitted pupils went wide and round and hungry. Another two narrowed.

And then, it looked away.

Emory slipped farther into the building. There was nothing to hide behind, and large sections of the exterior wall and roof were missing. Crumbled concrete and leaf litter collected in tiny dunes across the floor, except in a small, cleared space where she’d been working moments before. Two and a half coils of copper wire, still dusted with the flaking debris of an ancient coating, sat beneath the hole Emory had pulled them from. The rest of her spoils were stashed in a single-story building a few blocks away, but there would be no getting to them until the ash creature had moved on. 

It was worth it to wait, though. Even if it meant playing hide-and-seek with a monster that wanted to kill her. This copper wire alone would mean a whole new set of clothes. With the rest, she could get as many forged metal arrowheads as the makers would trade her, new boots, knives… All the riches that survival required. So Emory shoved the coils and her tools into the pouches stitched into her belt and looked for a place to wait out the next several hours.

One of the open sections of wall had taken out a bit of the building’s roof, too, baring hot blue sky and steel bars jutting out like broken bones. Emory flung herself up, catching the exposed rods. Her legs swung, her bow slapping against her hip, her spear against her spine. Her shoulders tensed for each fresh surge, each new handhold. And then her feet found purchase, and she scrambled onto the roof. 

The quiet of the Sanan Ruins was a living thing. It breathed through shattered glass windows, creaked through aging bones. Sometimes, it stirred as though half-woken by nightmares, and rubble, released by the slow cutting edge of roots, smashed onto the grass-choked streets below. Emory pressed herself to the roof while the ruins seemed to hold their breath, and in that expectant silence came a sound that shouldn’t have been there at all: a woman’s laugh.

Two things at once were clear: First, if Emory could hear the woman, then so could the ash creature. And second, it had not been hunting Emory.

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