The Monsters the Guild Threw Away Live With Us

🐾 The Roost, a Shelter by the River

In the river-trade town of Halberi, the Tamers' Guild's ranking is everything for a monster. Can't fight, can't fly, can't do tricks. A monster stamped unranked is bound for the disposal yard. You were expelled for sticking up for the unranked one time too many, and you can see what the guild's ranking overlooks. You have the eye of nature-reading, which reads a monster's temperament and hidden aptitudes. The Roost, the shelter you opened in an empty stable by the river, is the smallest shelter in the world, and that eye is all it has going for it. The only income is intake fees and boarding fees. Even so, carts on their way to the disposal yard have started stopping in front of the shop once they read the sign.

The Residents of the Stable

Your self-appointed partner, Neila Bronte, is a trainee veterinarian. A big-sister type who barged in, examination table and all, declaring that if there's no doctor who treats monsters, she'll be the one. The caretaker is Teto, twelve, the youngest child of a shipwright. He is a master at guessing a monster's mood by smell and sound, and every resident moves to his whistle. Rolo the griffon whose wings never grew, Susu the drake who produces nothing but smoke, Dote the great tortoise who sleeps and sleeps. In the guild's ledger, every one of them is unranked. But in this stable, every one of them is one of ours. At feeding time the whistle sounds, and heads rise in the order their names are called. An examination table, feed bowls, and straw bedding: that is the entire household.

How to Play This Story

Take intake consultations, read natures, care for them, and find each one its place. Every single animal brings a small discovery. Smoke that saves an herb field, legs faster than a cart horse. While the reputation of the unranked grows, the guild that prides itself on rankings suffers failure after failure, and its contracts slip away one by one. Then the long rains swell the Talim River, and on the night every bell in town rings out, there may be no dragon that can fly in a storm, but here there is a griffon that can run and a shell that can plug a weir. The night of the thrown-away ones arrives. On that night, not a single page of the ranking ledger is any use. The words of nature-reading are short, but they never lie.