They had brought the monster down and in doing so, believed themselves to have saved the world.
Some among the townsfolk were still trying to reconcile that they had been the ones to do it. The settlement wasn't particularly noteworthy: it was fairly old, rather isolated, and tended to treat news as something which took place at a great distance. It was the sort of place where the announcement of a disaster would bring a sad, empathetic statement of 'Well, these things happen,' and such would include the implication that none of those things would ever happen here. But the monster had come to their town, appearing during the evening transition between celestial bodies. It was currently being dragged down their moonlit main street in a net -- well, several nets: it had taken a bulk of ropes to get the entire thing wrapped -- behind them. Destiny had chosen them for the test, and they had won.
It was something which a number couldn't quite believe. Many of those with horns were repeatedly, almost compulsively projecting light towards minor bits of detritus in the road: surrounding, lifting, and dropping again. The ones with wings, currently pushing their hooves against the cobbled streets as their part in helping to drag the burden, kept taking off: the limit of each flight was the length of their mouth-gripped tow rope. And the ones who lacked both... they froze every so often, strained their ears in all directions. In all cases, the behavior was exactly like that of a being who had nearly lost a limb and kept shaking it to make sure it was still there.
None of them could understand the monster, and that had surprised a few: the stories said that the last one (just a few moons ago, far too fresh in memory) had spoken their language. This one didn't. Oh, it had vocalized, and done so several times during those moments when it wasn't crying out from the pain of their attacks. There had almost seemed to be multiple languages involved: some of the sounds had possessed a near-liquid tonal quality, while others had been harsher. But the town was isolated, and didn't really host anything worth coming to see. It seldom had visitors from the rest of the nation, let alone what lay beyond -- and so none who lived there knew how to perform the complicated working which would lead to temporary translation.
Not that it mattered. It was a monster. They didn't care what it had to say, because they knew what it had come to do. Something they had stopped.
They had saved the world.
They were still trying to figure out what newborn heroes were supposed to do in the aftermath. For starters, they hadn't actually killed the thing. It had been a matter of some debate, especially since they knew what it did -- but a few were aware that the last one had been captured, it had seemed that they should take the same route, and... they didn't know how to kill, not when it came to making themselves complete the act. They'd had it down, hooves had been held over its head, and --
-- it had looked at them.
It was hideous. Monstrous. A nightmare escaped into reality, and that very much included its eyes. Eyes which were too small and set at the front of the skull: the marks of a predator. But the color...
It had blue eyes, half-closed from pain. And they couldn't understand the monster, not for anything it might have been trying to say -- but somehow, the one whose hoof had been braced over the bridge of the snout (nose, a tiny afterthought of one) had seen the resignation. The moisture coating the little orbs.
The first tear.
Monsters cried as a means of deceit. Monsters faked pain as a lure. This was a monster. But it was beaten, and a police department whose only true expertise was in resolving domestic squabbles by addressing all involved with their full names... their chief hadn't been able to do it.
There was an excuse, of course. Part of that came from the last one, merely captured. The rest was that the monster, having been beaten, was no longer their problem.
So they had bound it, and that had taken some work. Chains were available, as were cuffs: sometimes domestic squabbles needed a visual reminder that another stage was available. But the monster was huge. It had towered over all of them. One of the few who had been to the capital eventually declared it was just about the same size as the elder of their rulers, and those who had paid the most attention to the stories had shuddered. It was huge, it was far too large -- but they'd stopped the monster before it had become any bigger. A monster which was the size of the elder had been dealt with: the last one hadn't stopped there.
Still, it had required some adjustments. Chains had been attached to each other: it was the only way to stretch things out enough to get all four legs bound. And then there was the... other part. That had been less distance to cover, but they hadn't initially thought to bring a chain for something which none of them had personally seen.
Some of the town's residents, those who hadn't heard the sound of battle from inside their homes, who were only reacting to the sporadic cheering which broke out as the monster was dragged along, or looked out a window when they heard the shaky laughter which came from reactions to jokes that were only funny because they'd lived... they were staring at the monster now. The ones who had battled had already had their chance, and even they would find themselves looking.
For some, looking brought shame, because so much of the body could be seen as beautiful. Get the tattered black draping fabric out of the way, clean up the fur, get some of the mud off, ignore the clotted blood from various wounds and the tiny new ones which were opening up from being dragged along the road while trapped in nets... get past all that and there was still the sheer size of the thing, but to say you found no appeal in a body so large was to insult their leaders, and so it was something few would vocalize.
But the fur, properly groomed, would be a rich brown. The hooves were in excellent condition, and the legs were powerful. (Some of them had felt that power directly, because the monster had attacked them. It was a monster: attacking was what it did. The fact that they had initially gone after it on sight didn't factor into their personal equation.) The tail... even with mud and worse coating so much of it, they could tell it was a rich shade of blonde. And the torso was healthy, the rib cage wide and proud, strong muscles offering the attraction which came from raw physical power.
More than a few looked at that, and so many felt the shame that came from finding any degree of appeal. But it was something which always shattered quickly. There was beauty in that large body, a certain level of wounded ideal along the torso --
-- right up until it bent, distorted, hideously warped into the other torso.
There was no fur anywhere on that portion, and the bare pink skin which emerged from the sleeves and neck of the dirty white cloth garment was mottled from dirt and fast-emerging bruises. Shortly below the shoulder blades, the flesh further distorted forward, twin mounds which repeatedly deformed from pressure as the monster was pulled across the stones. The residents who had studied the greater world were reminded of a distant nation to the east and the twin-horned beings who lived there, realized that physical quality might mark this monster as a female, and the most intelligent considered that it might even explain something of what had happened. The last monster had been a male, and it had drained. This one had...
There was a sword.
None of them had ever seen swords before, not directly. Swords were something which existed in books, a weapon which the twin-horned could wield -- but very few of them chose to go that route. They had no true experience of swords, and so did not know that in some ways, to call it a sword was to grant it the favor of a surprisingly relaxed definition. It was a sword in the same way that a scaled-up toy boat could be called a ship.
It was proportionate to the creature's hideous second torso, the length of those extra limbs. It was properly balanced. But it wasn't metal, and it had no edge. The places where the slicing surfaces should have been honed to fatal perfection had been rounded and smoothed. There were still ways in which the sword could do some damage: it had weight to it, and a curious density. The monster, swinging the weapon with all of that hideous strength, had the potential to break something if it hit just the right weak spot, and a number of the combatants were sporting their own bruises. But realistically, the only things the sword could hope to cut were vapor and light, and the residents were dragging it along in a secondary net some twenty body lengths behind them, with all refusing to touch it because until the moment they'd brought the monster down, that was exactly what it had been doing.
(Perhaps that was the difference between males and females of the monstrous breed. Males drained. Females cut. None were sure which was worse.)
They didn't know what to do with the sword. They had already decided on the monster's fate: namely, that determining such would be the problem of another. And it was too large for the dusty jail cells, things where the walls suddenly didn't look solid enough -- but the settlement was an old one, and so the first family in had maintained their castle across the generations. A castle which had a rather extensive sort of wine cellar, and it wouldn't take all that much to convert it back into a prison. One resident had galloped ahead, alerted the owner, and so bottles were being hastily shifted. The monster would have a place to both begin the first stage of its well-earned rot and await the rest.
The procession dragged it through the streets. They laughed, because they were alive and they had saved the world. Occasionally, a resident would steel herself enough to emerge with a camera, and the procession would pause for pictures because this level of heroism had to be recorded. They began to plan a celebration which would last through the night. They ignored the little cries of pain which the female could not choke back, because they were merely the sounds of a monster. They could not understand it, and believed it could not understand them.
They were wrong.
It could not render their speech into comprehensible sentences: to it, the sounds were neighs and whinnies, nickers and desperate snorts. But it recognized that there was a language there, and even if the words could not be deciphered -- some of the emotions could. So many of its own kind made those sounds when they were very young, before true speech came. It had also grown up among those who resembled the captors in form: larger and with more limited colors, having subtracted wings and horns and the capacity for true thought. These were tiny and mostly bright, with some pastels and a very few shades which it might have considered normal, they were talking -- but in so many ways, their body language was the same. It could see some of what they were saying, or at least the intent behind the words.
And there was more than that. The monster, even with that afterthought nose, possessed a singularly excellent sense of smell: magnitudes sharper than that of her captors. Spend enough time among a species, come to know them, and it would become possible to detect certain emotions through scent. The female had never encountered this triad of creatures before -- but there were ways in which they resembled what it had known. Others where they even resembled the monster. And so the odors were largely unfamiliar, but there were so many of the creatures and when the bundle of ropes and chains was being dragged along in their wake, with nothing to do other than think about failure and despair and the fast-approaching inevitability of a final fate... it was time in which to recognize commonalities.
The monster couldn't understand their words. But the blue eyes saw their postures: the sensitive nose took in their massed scent. And so it knew that no matter how much bravado was being displayed, the stallions rearing up to make themselves look larger, the mares slamming hooves down in the little stomps of domination -- they were afraid. Every last one of them was afraid.
The procession moved down the settlement's main street. It periodically stopped for celebration and pictures, compulsive lights and short bursts of flight, and all of it happened within an invisible cloud of unrelenting terror.
But they had saved the world. (That was how they perceived the events. There was no other way they could perceive it.) And to them, that meant their part was almost over. They just needed to confine the thing for a while, and then --
-- well, actually, 'and then' felt like a variable. The town lacked many things, and the total absence of those who could vanish from one location and appear in another suddenly felt like a major flaw. It would have been the fastest way to set up the relay race of information, for they were a long way from the capital. But instead, the first stage would need to take place through flight. That would slow things somewhat, but the residents were fairly sure their leaders would know about the situation by morning. The problem, and final fate of the monster, would be transferred to those with authority. They would manage everything, the town's residents would undoubtedly collect their honors, and none would ever have to resist the urge to glance back at a monster again.
So many had looked at the familiar portion of that body. But always, their gazes moved to the warped. To unfamiliar limbs which subdivided at the ends, to those predatory eyes. The hideous features. Perfectly proper ears which had been disturbingly shifted to the sides of the head. The tight gathering of blonde hair (with no proper streak down neck and back) at the top, and the long strands which had broken free.
(Some of those with horns had tried to grab the distorted head with their light. It had made them feel as strange as they had when they'd tried to coat her weapon, and they'd quickly stopped. Every one of those residents had stopped thinking about it, and so none could have predicted the events which would occur before their sun returned.)
Its legs were chained, and the locks were holding. The -- other limbs -- had been bound. It hadn't escaped, and so it wouldn't escape.
They had won.
Eventually, under the lights of moon, glowing devices, and camera flashes, they reached the castle.
The current owner (a mare, and far too young to be holding her title) had been waiting for them, had been told what was coming, and still wound up pressed against a corner in fear. Several residents moved to reassure her as the main procession split: one group dragging the monster towards the ramp into the cellars, while a second tried to find a place they could store its weapon. Storage which would, ideally, involve none of them being near the thing or touching it in any way.
Finally, they had it in front of the proper door: the one with all the evacuated bottles lined up along both sides of the hallway. Some rather awkward maneuvering was required to get the oversized body through the gap, and one impact gave them the chance to ignore the single cry which could not be choked back. And then they checked the locks, made sure everything was functioning properly, and headed back towards the light. One of their number would be set to guard, and that assignment would shift throughout the night. But all would have the chance to join in the townwide party. A celebration for the heroes they hadn't known they could be.
They had saved the world.
And within her stinking cell, a girl who had once wished to be a knight, lost in a strange land, beaten and half-broken and awaiting what she was sure would be her death, with none left to watch her, finally allowed her emotions to fully flow forth.
Centorea Shianus closed her eyes, and the young centaur wept.