#creasia

[ikrutt]

Hunters Unlucky, 2023

New cover for Abigail Hilton's Hunters Unlucky.

Buy the ebook directly from the author here and the audiobook here. If you are new to the universe, check out the 4.5 hour sample of the first novel here. You will need the Bookfunnel app to read and listen.

Hunters Unlucky is a series of xenofiction novels about intelligent animals on a fantasy island. The universe has rich and layered worldbuilding. I recommend them to anyone who likes action, adventure and political intrigue.

[alhilton]

Legacy Hardbacks are now in my signed bookstore

Cover art by @ikrutt Design, maps, logos and interior silhouettes by Jeff McDowall Size chart, species illos, and some other interior elements by Sarah Cloutier Available in ebook, audiobook, paperback, and hardback :) The hardbacks are so pretty with some extra silhouette art. Iben's covers are spectacular. There's another novella sitting on my Patreon in draft.

[peculiurperennial]

A real scene that actually happened in Arcove's Bright Side.

Trust me.

[ailaghast]

Made a 3D bust sculpt of Arcove from @alhilton's amazing Hunters Unlucky series.

Thought it would be fun if he had a graying muzzle!

[lycanthroprince]

caraca my darling my beloved

i tend to picture creasia with bobcat-like faces, especially the females.

[alhilton]

❤️❤️❤️ Look at him all alive and talking! Look at those bright green eye! 😃😃😃

Arcove Lip Sync Animation

Ideally this is Part 1, I’d like to finish the line and include Roup in the scene, (I have it very loosely blocked out in my mind) but realistically I have too many projects going on at once right now (also working full time) so this might be it for the year. As always Arcove is from the book Hunters Unlucky by Abigail Hilton and the voice is Rish Outfield, narrator of the audiobooks.

[alhilton]

Is calico a possible Creasia coat color?

Ah, such a simple question, but so complicated to answer! Is it possible? Maybe. Likely to be expressed? No. You probably know how calicos are produced and anyone who doesn't can google that. Short review: you need at least one of the color alleles (in the case of the domestic cat, the black/red) located on the X chromosome. So males are always homozygous, but females can be heterozygous. Then you need the thing where neither color is dominant. Instead, females express both colors. This event alone will produce a tortie, not a calico. To get calico, you need one more thing: the piebald gene, which is present in many animals. It produces random colorless white patches, interspersed with the underlying color(s). Finally, in order to get a classic calico, you need the female zygote to have discarded her extra Xs (turned them into bar bodies) early enough to produce solid patches instead of a more blended coat. NOW you have a classic mi-ke calico. She will almost always be female, but can be male XXY or male chimera (having absorbed his twin!) or possibly an even rarer genetic event. On the flip side, solid red or black cats are male something like 75% of the time. Female solids would be homozygous for the trait, which is rarer. There are other genes that effect cat coat color and pattern, and of course there can always be new mutations, but those are the basics. Question: is color a sex-linked gene in other species of cats? Big cats have many things in common with domestic cats. Is this one of them? I could not find an answer to this. Probably no. But... I did have Caraca say at one point when she and Halvery were trying to reproduce Roup's color, "Solids are more likely to be male." This strongly suggests that some aspect of creasia color is on the X. So even if this is unlikely for big cats in our world, I have sort of committed to it on Lidian. But... Is the piebald gene present in other cats besides domestic cats? Again, no answer. The closest I could find was the white band gene that produces golden tabby tigers. It is not actually piebald, though. It's a completely different gene. If you read the wikipedia article about golden tabby tigers, you will notice a lot of inbreeding. This is how most usual colors in domestic (and semi-domestic) animals get a foothold. People notice a single unique mutation, decide they love it, and do some aggressive inbreeding to produce homozygous individuals. Many domestic animals have very shallow gene pools. Obviously, most of them handle it just fine. Wild animals avoid inbreeding. Nature tends towards outbreeding. Maximizing genetic diversity is a survival strategy, so animals evolve various barriers to inbreeding. There ARE more color variations in big cats that live in jungles/forests vs open plains. Tigers and leopards have more color variations than African lions. It doesn't seem to affect their odds of survival as much. Creasia live in dense forest, so it makes sense that they have some color variation. Rare mutations would pop up, but they would quickly disappear unless the creasia started selecting for them. So if they decided that piebald was fabulously beautiful and everyone wanted to have babies with those cats, they might quickly develop a piebald trait that is regularly expressed. But they tend to like colors that are "good for hunting," and those are browns/grays/black. They are starting to value other traits and expand their tastes, though. Anyway - the potential for something like a calico is probably in there somewhere. To specifically get calico, I think you'd see piebald popping up first.

[flashbic]

just thinking about post book 1 ferryshaft, who went through multiple generations of being forced to live in unnatural ways and saw so many of their foals die, finally being in a place where they feel at peace again. The ferryshaft society we see through Storm’s eyes feels deeply unforgiving, even heartless at times, but hopefully it becomes a kinder one eventually.

i like the idea that howling and singing would normally be something little foals are surrounded with almost from birth, and that because the younger generations we see in the book had little to no exposure to any of it growing up, they have to slowly relearn all of it, at least the parts that don’t rely on instinct. There are a few elders who would help, but for the most part they come up with new songs and stories to tell.

[bookshelfpassageway]

I've been reading the Hunters Unlucky books in an absolute ferver over this past week and I'm not gonna be ok when I run out of them

[alhilton]

Look at these amazing creatures moving like living things! 😍

A late-night self indulgent bit of doodling-!

I’ve wanted to do Hunters Unlucky fanart since like… god I think I read the books first in May?

So here we have the start of something I’m hoping to finish.

This was meant to be Storm and Halvery but I think it’s more Charder and Roup, proportions wise. Of course, digital art, easily fixed etc etc…

I discovered that I should have checked the height chart sooner, also. Ferryshaft are taller than I thought, and creasia hold their heads far more upright. So there’s a lot of anatomical fussing to be donw because I destroyed that poor creasia’s chest fixing the head position.

Id assumed the creasia were very heavy around. The shoulders and sort of ‘downhill’ with slightly shorter hind legs (which I will draw some time), it was pretty interesting to see how my interpretation had veered off into a funny direction.

Happy with my Ferryshaft though, and with the relative paces they’re both at. Two steps for the Ferryshaft for every single creasia step- initially I was going to try and make it like… ⅔ of the creasia walk cycle to the two Ferryshaft steps but… I’m not going to think that hard about it this late at night.

Hoping to at minimum clean this up, might even assign it proper characters and colour it, hopefully soon!

[peculiurperennial]

A Sheep-Thief Problem

I recently had the spontaneous urge to write a short story about my Sheep-herder curb, Mousara. It's not very long, and I may or may not continue writing it sometime in the future.

But I thought I might as well share it so that it doesn't sit around in my notes gathering dust.

If you're interested, you can read it by clicking the Keep Reading.

------------------

Mousara ela-Curb had a sheep thief problem. As one of the renowned Sheep-herders of the Lowland curbs living among the southern mountains, it was her duty to ensure that no harm came to the sheep under her watch, until her pack leader deemed it appropriate for the pack to take a portion of the number of livestock available, while leaving just enough sheep left so that they could replenish their numbers.

It was very important for a Sheep-herder to monitor the number of sheep that were culled; too few sheep meant fewer lambs, which meant fewer sheep to feed the pack. If a Sheep-herder lost too much of their flock, there would be severe consequences. Negligence was not tolerated by Mousara’s pack leader.

And so, Mousara did not tolerate sheep-thieves.

At the beginning of the Fall season, Mousara had boasted a flock of twenty-five sheep among the cliff trails. Due to the fact that sheep required ample feeding grounds to graze and forage, Sheep-herders often had to travel quite a distance outside of their pack’s territory in order to maintain their flock.

This was normally not an issue, at least, amongst other Lowland curbs. The multitude of packs living in the southern plains had an overarching rule regarding sheep, and that was that: a Sheep-herder’s right to shepherd her flock where ever the grass grew was sacrosanct. A pack who pillaged another pack’s livestock was shunned and harassed by the mass majority, as sheep-thieves were looked down upon and labelled as barbarians. Less-than-kin. No better than primitive Highland curbs.

So, either Highland ghosts are haunting my flock, Mousara thought bitterly as she counted her sheep for the dozenth time. Or some other sneaky animal has been spiriting away my lambs while I am not looking.

She counted twenty sheep. Fifteen ewes and five rams. She did not factor in the newborn lambs as what she deemed the “Official Headcount” when she told her leader about the number of livestock the pack had. It was a given fact that nearly half of the lambs born this season would not make it to adulthood. And the mothering ewes always put up so much of a fuss if the curbs took away their lambs too soon after they were born.

Mousara had managed to convince her leader that it was better to wait until the lambs were weened before plucking them from their mothers, since the ewes’ paternal instincts only lasted about as long as they were producing milk. After that, they hardly batted an eye at the curbs dragging off one of their own.

Twelve lambs had been born at the beginning of the season. Three of which died of natural causes. However, three more had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared within the same day, without a single trace.

Mousara had tried to track the missing lambs down, expecting their trails to end at a cliff edge, since lambs were clumsy and lethal falls were all too common a fate for the uncoordinated. But instead she found the trail disappearing off in a muddle of other scents that she could not properly identify.

It could have been a rogue creasia who might have been clever enough to conceal their trail, she admitted, but that seemed unlikely. The last group of creasia that tried to scrape out a living in the southern plains had failed miserably, and either all died or went crawling back to Leeshwood. Since then, no creasia had been spotted within the southern plains for the past two years.

It was always possible that an Ely-Ary was poaching her lambs, but lambs were such a meager mouthful to the gigantic birds that Mousara was disinclined to pin one of them as the culprit. Even a small Ely-Ary would find a newborn lamb to be nothing worth eating. Besides, the southern packs and the Ely-Ary living at the peak of the southern mountains had a… Well, it would be rather presumptuous to call it a "treaty", Mousara reckoned. It was more like a “mutual-understanding”. As long as the Lowland curbs avoided venturing too high up into the mountains, the Ely-Ary generally didn’t bother with them.

Mousara had speculated, (mostly to herself since none of her fellow pack mates cared), that Ely-Ary primarily fed on the great fish from the sea. She had seen a skeleton of one such great fish being discarded by an Ely-Ary— the cursed thing had nearly fell on Mousara herself! And Mousara suspected that the overgrown bird had done it on purpose too!

Even now, she could remember the bird’s weird, screeching guffaw as it flew away while Mousara had been busy fussing over her frightened flock.

Anyway, what had she been thinking about again?

“Oh, right, the sheep-thief!” She spoke aloud, to the bemused baa’ing of her flock. It was not unusual for Mousara to speak her thoughts aloud with a sudden abruptness that many of her peers found strange. Usually such instances happened with no regard for the immediate topic being discussed, which resulted in Mousara being subtly excluded from conversational circles, as the parties involved found her spontaneous outbursts to be disruptive and confounding.

Mousara was, admittedly, more than happy to be engrossed within the contents of her own mind. As a Sheep-herder, whose job naturally required one to venture out with their flock away from the pack, this suited her just fine.

“Maybe a ferryshaft…” She murmured as she moved through the throng of wooly bodies.

A ferryshaft sheep-thief was more likely than any of the other potential candidates. Their dispersed herds traveled a lot and some traveled quite far abroad. But a traveling ferryshaft herd produced quite a lot of noise…

“A lone ferryshaft, then.” She decided with a flick of her ragged ear. “Sneaky, sneaky, rogue ferryshaft stealing my lambs!”

But stealing three lambs at once? One ferryshaft meant only one set of jaws to carry away a lamb. Maybe if the ferryshaft took one lamb, then hid the body, before taking more lambs? But why take more than what one ferryshaft needed and risk detection?

Mousara was snapped out of her speculation by a signalling yip from atop a cliff, causing her to pause and look sharply in that direction.

Oh right, she technically had two subordinates. Sheep-herders were hardly expected to tend a flock all alone, after all. However, herding sheep took long and arduous training under a mentor, and most curbs found the task of watching over sheep unbearably dull. So, most of the time, Mousara’s subordinates were comprised of the pack’s younger members who were still transitioning from adolescence to fully mature adults. They had no skill in the art of sheep herding, but they made for good look-outs.

The youngster on watch nearest to Mousara was a scrawny runt of a thing who had a most unfortunate name. Flea.

How he got such a demeaning moniker wasn’t too hard to guess. Flea was a small, ugly dark brown thing with wiry hair and a crooked tail, with a patch of missing fur on the end that never seemed to grow back properly. He also had a propensity for whining and complaining at every and any opportunity.

Nobody liked him, which was most likely why he was conscripted as one of Mousara’s look-outs.

And now here he was, yipping and howling like crazy. The noise was making the sheep anxious, much to Mousara’s annoyance.

“Shut up! Your wailing is upsetting the flock!” She barked sharply as she stormed up the side of the cliff and landed neatly beside the young watcher, much to the latter’s surprise.

“But- I saw-“ The adolescent began before being harshly cut off with a swift cuff to the ear from Mousara’s forepaw.

“And your noise likely alerted the thief and allowed it to escape! Have you no sense?!” She snarled while the other whined piteously. “You should have come down and alerted me quietly about the thief’s presence! We do not posses the support of the entire pack to call upon with your incessant yowling. Use your brain next time, pup! Understand?”

“Y-yes, Sheep-herder Mousara…”

“Good! Now what did you see?”

“I-I saw one of the lambs wandering towards the tall grass. I thought nothing of it at first, it wasn’t that far from the rest of the herd, but then s-something snatched it away.”

“‘Something’?” Mousara prompted. “Be more specific, pup! What snatched it away? Did a ferryshaft poke its head out of the grass and grab it—“

“A ferryshaft? N-no it—“

“Was it a creasia, then? If so, we ought to return to the pack and-“

“It wasn’t a creasia. It-“

“A rogue curb? Ancestor’s bones, when I get my teeth on whatever sniffling coward thought they could steal from my flock-“

“It wasn’t any animal!”

That made Mousara pause, and she narrowed her eyes quizzically at the other curb. “What do you mean?”

Flea licked his lips, clearly overwhelmed and trying to compose himself after having realized he had just shouted at his superior. “It wasn’t- It wasn’t any animal that I had ever seen. It was strange, Sheep-herder Mousara, it was like…a snake, almost. Or maybe- it might have been a large pheasant? It had a small head, I think, and it grabbed the lamb by the neck and pulled it into the tall grass!”

Mousara considered Flea’s words with clear skepticism. “You say that you saw a snake-pheasant…”

Flea had enough awareness to look ashamed at his inability to properly articulate what he meant. “Well, I thought it was a snake… but it could have been a pheasant, though I’ve never seen a pheasant take a lamb before. It didn’t look like it had eyes, though. But then again- I only saw it for a brief moment! So, I don’t know…”

Mousara had half-a-mind to just start boxing the incompetent runt over the ears until he started making sense, when she heard the sound of another curb approaching and turned around to growl at her other subordinate.

“What are you doing away from your post?!”

Varris, a sleek specimen just on the cusp of reaching adulthood, was a much more dependable individual when compared to the likes of Flea. His only fault was that he was unabashedly naive, almost to the point of obstinate ignorance. So, it had been decided by the pack that sending him to do watcher duty with the Sheep-herders would be the surest way to wisen him up, at least before he could get himself killed. He was otherwise expected to be a promising addition to the pack.

However, Mousara disliked him about as much as she disliked most of the rotation of watchers she received to aid in guarding her flock.

“Sheep-herder Mousara, sir!” Varris spoke in a rush, winded from running but obviously excited by the way he practically bounced on his paws. “The flock is running away!”

“What?!” Mousara squawked in alarm, whirling around and ogling in open mouthed astonishment as she watched the last of her sheep disappearing into the tall grass of the valley beyond.

Never in Mousara’s many years of herding sheep had she ever witnessed a flock dive headlong into the tall grass. The docile creatures practically treated any significant amount of thick foliage like it was a solid wall, instinctively aware that their wool made it all too easy to become tangled and thus easy prey to creatures who stalked the underbrush. It was why sheep preferred roaming the cliffs rather than the woods or plains.

“We should go tell the pack!” Varris suggested. “I think this is one of those times where we run away and get more curbs.”

Flea made an unconvinced sound, squinting reproachfully at Varris. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. If our leader finds out you let the flock run away…”

“I didn’t let them run away! If we go now, we might make it back in time with reinforcements before whomever is taking the flock can go very far.”

“I don’t know… Maybe we shouldn’t—“

“MY SHEEP!” Mousara shrieked, diving down the side of the cliff at such speed that her hindquarters nearly pitched over her head. She hit the ground in a shower of loose dirt and ran after her flock without so much as a backwards glance.

Varris and Flea watched as the Sheep-herder went, before looking at one another. A mutual understanding seemed to pass wordlessly between them, before they scrambled to catch up with their superior.

[bbcviral]

CreAsia Studio’s Jessica Kam-Engle On Producing Content For Southeast Asia: “If You Don’t Cook Dinner, You Go Out And Buy It” http://dlvr.it/T3v07J

[alhilton]

Worldbuilding-ish question! Since this is a popular topic in xenofiction fanbases, I figured I'd ask what colors and patterns you'd think of first when someone considers making an "edgy" or "special-looking" fan character for any of the Hunters Unlucky species. Coden and Storm's pale gray and Roup and Teek's gold have already been noted in the books and you've touched on piebaldism in creasia before, but I'm wondering if there might be more, maybe especially among the species that seem to be more popularly-read as less visually diverse, e.g. telshees and curbs. If I wanted to make a fan character that looked really wild and unique without being utterly impossible, what sorts of looks would you highlight for that?

(Note: I'm not actually making any fan characters based on this question, but it's a consideration I really enjoy chewing on in a more general sense with both what I read and what I write in my own time... I definitely do think it would be cool to see some flashy-looking fan characters with rare traits around in the tags, though!)

Oh, let's see... Ferryshaft could probably come in most colors that foxes or dogs come in. Farmed foxes (sadly) come in an immense array of improbable colors. Creasia could probably come in most colors and patterns cats come in. In both cases, the variety of colors that already occur reveal that there isn't heavy selection pressure for color currently acting on the population. There was in the past, but creasia have gotten so much smarter than their prey, and ferryshaft have become so good at *not* being prey, that there isn't as much selection pressure for color as there once was. For curbs, the ones living on the plain would come under a lot of pressure to have colors that blend with grasslands. However, I've already mentioned that some of those living in the mountains look different. Dazzle's curb frienemies, Eclipse and Abyss are melanistic. Eclipse might even be chimeric. I describe them as "unusually dark in color, black in places, with white streaks and brindling. One had a completely black face and the other had a striking two-toned face, half black and half white." There's also one in Thrive (not yet published) called "Brokenstripe" because her stripe pattern is broken and might, in fact, look like spots. The mountains have more varied terrain, and I would think you'd get different colors. As for telshees, hmmm... I think of them as being mostly devoid of pigment. They frequently travel to great depths and dark places. But perhaps a pigmented one might pop up now and then. Or maybe they shape-shifted and got some color leftover, lol. They are magical animals, so less bound by the laws of biology.

[focshi]

Oh how this little cat has stolen my heart, and his situation broke it into a million pieces! The scene of Storm descovering what happens when he grabs Teek by the scruff was a little too funny for me, might be one of my favorite parts so far.

And here another doodle of our dear Teek:

I know he was described as malnourished in the book, but I couldn’t help myself...