The Ferals

The Invader occupation, and the war that followed, were cruel years for the Beast World. The officers ordered families to be displaced from their homes and separated. Dissidents and prisoners of war were sent to work camps, where they slept in cramped quarters while forced to make machines of war for their captors to wield against their kin. Abuse was common, and worsened as the Invaders lost their grip on the war. 

The Ferals remember these years. Unlike the rest of their people, they offer no forgiveness. 

Infected Wound 

The Ferals are an ugly, regressive “social movement” that lurks in small towns and spreads through rumors and hearsay. They are instigators of hatred who feed the people of the Beast World xenophobia made palatable with lies. They hide behind the mask of anonymity or in the safety of a crowd of similarly diseased minds. 

Insidious Message 

The central tenet of the Ferals is simple: humans are parasites. Ferals believe the Invaders are still among the beasts, now wearing the friendlier guise of brethren while draining the resources of honest people who belong. They preach a message of whispers, that beasts bled and died to win the war only to give their victory to the enemy, offering for nothing what the Invaders sent murderers to steal. Their plan of action hides within a maze of insidious leading questions and twisted, false intuition. To prevent the Beast World from unraveling like the Broken World, the Ferals believe there is only one valid act: the forced repatriation of humanity. 

Faceless Cowardice 

The Ferals slither into the gaps formed by villages divided by strife or feuding. They start on barstools and at kitchen tables after a day’s work, wondering aloud the hypothetical questions to which their lies can give simple answers. A lone Feral carefully targets residents who are lonely and vulnerable to misanthropy, either from wartime loss or simple antisocial tendency. They offer friendly company to those who lack it, along with the flattery of supremacy. When enough beasts are receptive, meetings organize. 

Ferals congregate wearing iron masks with their species’ likeness. They proudly proclaim their belief in animalistic power, some core of intrinsic worth from their identity as uplifted beasts. The spiritualistic window dressing is embracing the “alpha instinct” hidden inside oneself. The Ferals stand together, but support and fraternity is only when the mask is on. This hollow celebration of mindless ferocity stitches each individual weakness into misbegotten, collective strength. 

Their message can only take root by willfully ignoring them—the Ferals are easily scared out of any town willing to confront them. It takes sustained inaction and a lack of mutual support to build enough consensus to allow the mob to do anything other than shout sermons behind a soundproof basement wall. 

The faceless Ferals don’t attract any lasting leaders. Clusters of their members form localized hierarchies and leaders, usually in regions with almost no brethren. These prideful mouthpieces usually grant themselves exaggerated titles like “Magnificent Master” or “Razor-Fanged Archferal.” Their authority never stretches farther than the edge of town. Their power grants no benefit outside of their tiny sphere of influence. 

Perilous Gathering 

Once they spread fully under a community’s foundation, the Ferals take action on the perverse sermons of their antisocial club. Ferals ensure that a community will tolerate their presence, then they test what else is allowed. 

Careful, escalating crime begins against their human neighbors. The first concrete evidence of Ferals in a town is almost always vandalism against a brethren’s home. A human child is left alone in their tiny community after parents pull their own children in, making excuses to keep their kids away from brethren friends and those who associate with them. At first, the Ferals test the waters with defensive snapping about “personal choices” and exaggerating minor crimes. Everything is shrouded in plausible deniability, and kids who repeat what they hear behind closed doors are easily dismissed as “pups playing around.” 

Unfortunately, by this point, escalation usually worsens, unless a courageous individual risks reprisal by stepping forward to raise action against it. Brethren find it harder to find help with their field work. It stops mattering when the vandalism becomes destructive; farmland is tainted or burned and tools are destroyed. Eventually, the Ferals become bold enough in their “alpha instinct” to confront brethren with verbal abuse and demands to leave town, so long as they outnumber them and no neutral authority is around. 

Finally, unchecked Ferals determine if their kin will tolerate violence. Humans are called to meet under false pretenses and then physically beaten. Collective anonymity and the craze of a mob disconnect the people behind the masks from any feelings of accountability. 

No magic drives an innocent mind into the clutches of this cult; there’s no amulet to ensorcell a helpless victim and coerce them to violence. With time and tolerance, evil feasts on pain and excretes the capacity to abandon everything that makes a person decent. 

Lingering Curse

The trophy case of Feral victories is sparse and caked with dust. Their organization curses brethren families with sleepless nights and hopelessness that lingers for years, but one could count the number of towns “freed” from humanity by the Ferals on one hand. A failing ideology can thrash dangerously, but bringing heartache to an enemy isn’t the same as defeating them. 

There is one exception, one lasting effect of the Ferals’ presence in the Beast World. 

Several years ago, the hatred preached in his hometown motivated a Beylik researcher to begin working. He discovered a Veronetian ritual that he could modify to create the effect he sought. Taking obsessive precautions to prevent the Spiteful Sister’s meddling, the researcher concocted a vile thesis. The result of his experiments was a single alembic, containing what he saw as the solution to the Ferals’ struggle to win public support: Lycanthropy. 

The experiment was an immediate success, followed by cascading, continuous failure. 

Once unleashed, the disease forced irregular nighttime transformations from a group of exposed humans. The magic warped their minds and forced their bodies into gigantic, monstrous approximations of several other species. Their rampage terrorized the researcher’s town. Several livestock met grisly deaths, and the next day people sought answers. 

When the townspeople captured a lycanthrope and discovered that it was a shapeshifted brethren, the researcher hoped it would raise questions. “Who else carries the disease?” he imagined them asking. “Can we trust humans at all?” 

Instead, the town’s response was sympathy. The disease had an effect the researcher hadn’t foreseen: the transformation was permanent. He was victorious in reducing the human population, but only by cruel technicality. The victim was no longer human at all. 

Others inflicted with the curse fled the town for fear of what they might do to their families and neighbors. A side effect that was intended was the disease’s contagiousness. Lycanthropy soon traveled the Causeway to become a scourge in all of Arneria, and today the first cases are appearing in other homelands. 

The cruelest irony is that lycanthropes bite humans to spread the plague, but kill the immune beasts outright. The researcher’s invention brought sorrow to his enemies, but death to his kin.