(Dec 2)
Hearth and Home
Shepherd’s End
Spring 11, Night
The swarm of puddings overpowers the lighthouse, and the survivors break and run, carrying the babies and regrouping in a grain barn on the eastern edge of town. They rebuild the barricades, and Ava heads to the apothecary to restock on supplies. Seyfried realizes the blue puddings are all heading toward the Hearth.
The train from Myrwood shows up 6-8 hours early and ends up derailing spectacularly on the tracks where the dynamite blew up, sending cars flying and the witnesses diving to the side. Salinger is knocked out cold and Xalati gets a spike through her shoulder. They miraculously find a Verdict on the train bleeding out from a bubbly hole, and Xalati, drawing on every scrap of knowledge she’s picked up from Ava, gets Kibeth to bind and plug his holes in a way to keep him alive for a little bit longer. He says the city of Myrwood was overrun by a great beast from the west, and they were trying to get to the ships in Shepherd’s End as their last hope.
Ava, on her way back, detours to check out the Hearth and sees the giant blue chicken pudding sitting over the supplies there and absorbing the blue puddings streaming in. Seyfried finds only hiding red puddings and purposeful blue puddings, despite searching all over town. She comes across the train squad, who had arrived at the northern edge of town and seen the flaming, empty lighthouse; Kaisi tells her to focus, that running around panicked isn’t going to help. Ava joins them and triages the wounded. They all agree to return to the grain silo.
Ava tells them of the blue laurel chicken pudding and that she thinks it’s brooding, waiting for the lightning storm, and they need to kill it (perhaps with dynamite). They discuss how to go about it, and eventually settle on Aureya invisibly walking a backpack of dynamite and lighting it under the chicken, while Esmund distracts it with a shield that Ava and Esmund work on together to channel the chicken’s lightning away from the bearer.
Miraculously, the plan works almost perfectly. It doesn’t 100% kill the chicken, but a combination of a few more hand-thrown sticks of dynamite and a shot from the rifle gets the last of it—just in time, as the first bolt of lightning from the storm strikes the metal plate of the Hearth.
Stinger: A black pudding wobbles into being, buttressed by blue puddings absorbing into it. It speaks in the voices and words borrowed from the people the blue laurel pudding ate, including Mulgwud and Miranda and Cheralie.
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