April Patreon Supporter Reward Now Live!

Patreon supporters take note: April’s supporter reward is now live. If you’ve donated the minimum amount of a dollar during the month of April, you can now take a look at this month’s nifty, behind the scenes look at one of the creatures from the in-progress Shadow of an Empire: the pack hunter creatures known as chort.

Here’s an excerpt from the reward:

This one does tie into last month’s. Last month, you guys got a look at a chase from one of my current projects, a Fantasy-Western named Shadow of an Empire. Basically, a quick recap for those who didn’t get to look at it, it was a sequence in which the two primary characters of the novel, Sali and Meelo, ran afoul of a dangerous pack of predators in the deserts of the outlands known as chort.

While the scene was a pretty fun one, for some it probably did run into the issue that chort had already been discussed and explained in the story, so the sequence most of you looked at, while cool, didn’t tell much about what they were—aside from angry, smart, and really dangerous predators.

So this month, I’m going to give you guys a rundown on one of the most common predators across the empire of Indrim: the chort.

Chort
Chort is the name given to a pack predator/scavenger creature found all across Indrim. Like wolves or similar predators we find today, chort fill a similar ecological role in their environment, hunting prey from rabbits to bovals—or even people—and working as a pack to bring them down.

Each chort is fairly large. Though size varies based upon subspecies and location, even the smallest of chort (the desert variety) usually averages 4-5 feet in length and weighs in excess of 125 pounds. A large part of this weight comes from their muscle and bone density—though chort may appear fairly limber and lithe, they’re quite strong and built to take an surprising amount of punishment, likely owing to both the dangers of their ideal prey (bovals) and their tendency to infight.

You can read the rest of it by visiting my Patreon page.