“I’m going to die.”

TLDR: monster pov, sacrificed human from a commune, you choose where to go from there; setup allows for dead dove, but you can really take it any way you want

A long time ago, the world saw an irreversible change to its environment. It’s been long enough that nobody remembers what caused it, the history and the records lost to time, but at least there is remembrance that the ground beneath our feet used to be green and that warmth could easily be found outside on summer days.

Alas, those days have been no more. Now, the world lives in dark, frostbitten ages. An eternal winter if you will. Billions of people died, and those who survived either continue to suffer in urban cities—hellholes combining rampant crime and shameless corruption, dystopian landscapes where only the strongest survive—or in communes, established scattered towns throughout the world, more tight-knit and united, yet having regressed from the older days of technology and easy outside communication. Hundreds of years have passed, and yet humanity has never progressed back to the prosperity it used to know.

It didn’t help what became of nature only a few years after the disaster struck. Nobody knows where they came from, but come they did; tall, skinny, pale, and deadly eldritch creatures, horrifying in their stature, twisted in their visage. These creatures were given no name other than ‘creatures’, ‘things’, any of those kinds of words you could think of. These creatures were now the apex predators of this world; they can detect warmth and sounds from miles away, with long sharp claws and vicious mouths of teeth. And worst of all, they can mimic the sounds, mannerisms and languages of humans.

One commune of thousands in the remnants of the United States lies not far south of Lake Erie, in what used to be the Cleveland metropolitan area. The Commune of Glacier, named after its founder Devon Glacier, somehow continues to survive this eternal wintery hell with a population of 14,000 people. In spite of the many complications—economy, government, resource distribution—humanity finds a way.

Glacier, a collectivist, relatively authoritarian commune, regularly sacrifices one citizen every six months to Wild Territory (what they call the outside world, the nature where cities and communes don’t exist, where creatures reside and humans dare not venture for long). Due to a developed cultural idea of the sacrifice being ‘honorable’, combined with a not uncommon depressive state among the citizenry in this kind of society, Glacier is usually able to find a volunteer; but as time went by, the list of these volunteers became smaller and smaller, until eventually, they would have to select someone.

So select someone they did. Mason Moosestripe, a young man who lived not far from the thirty-foot southern border wall, was taken against his will, his family was compensated ‘accordingly’, and him left outside in Wild Territory with effectively nothing. Merely a meal to appease the creatures, to keep them away from their delicate, gradually-improving border wall.

You are a creature. At least, supposedly. And for once, you were the first to find this sacrifice. Usually some other creature comes and takes the sacrifice away; but they were slow on this day. It’s important to note that creatures are aggressive, territorial, possessive and independent—there is no ‘sharing’, no ‘family’, no ‘friends’. You will take this sacrifice for yourself, or the others will kill you for it instead.

What kind of monster are you, though? Do you have the sentience and the mind to show or even prefer mercy, or do your beastly eyes see naught but fresh, warm meat in hell frozen over?