Hounds are useful tools, certainly. Devastating weapons turned against their former comrades. But what happens when, inevitably, even the finest sword breaks?
Abandoned by her Handler and cast to the side by the empire that broke her, rebel hero-turned-Hound-turned-stray Alida Chondax finds herself far away from the war that once ruled her life. In a quiet, rural region of her homeworld, where neither rebel nor Imperial bothers to go, she is taken in by the kindness of strangers, and a once-loyal Hound is left to finally heal. But can a dog of war so broken ever truly recover?
Meanwhile, her old friend Jaxie Thornth, finds herself in the place Alida once held, the new prize possession of her Handler. But war is a cruel mistress, and Death looms fickly around every corner. Nobody - neither stern veteran nor most ironclad officer - is immune to its vagaries.
eggs will be like "i got like, one good year left in me" and then its the single worst year anyones ever seen
eggs will be like "i need to become good at masculinity" and then their best attempt is to look even sadder and grow the scraggliest beard man has ever witnessed
eggs will be like "of course most of my friends are women, it's because i'm a feminist" and then actually have a superbly unfeminist worldview where every woman is on a pedestal and no man has interiority or agency at all
eggs will be like "actually i think maybe there is something to this 'male loneliness epidemic', i can feel lonely even in a room full of friends" and then its just bc all their peers see them as a boy
eggs will pick up the phone and be like "hello, it's [NAME]" and have the person on the other end ask 3 times to confirm they didnt mishear because they pitched their voice up to high heaven. you know, as boys do
eggs will be like "actually this is my comfort zone" while being the least comfortable anyone has ever been
eggs will watch a movie and see a thin man in his twenties and go "wow if i looked like that id transition for sure, id pass so well" and not interrogate that for even a second
eggs will maintain a soft distance to their family and go like "okay sure mum keeps saying she loves me unconditionally but what if she knew about [THE THING]" and then themselves not even know what [THE THING] is
eggs will watch Canadian Variety Streamer Northernlion
eggs will be, like, both vaguely and intensely jealous of the ability women have to compliment other women on their looks without coming across as creepy, and intentionally act in ways associated with homosexuality to get away with it
eggs will pick a completely arbitrary age past which they cannot imagine themselves existing and then go "well i guess i gotta die at [ARBITRARY AGE MINUS ONE] shits fucked lol whats to be done about it"
eggs will feel a weird urge to shave or wax their body hair but not actually do it out of some vague fear that that is a point of no return for SOMETHING, despite the fact that cisgender men also sometimes get rid of body hair
eggs will see femboys online and feel intensely jealous but also a bit sad for them because they will eventually age out of being able to embody that aesthetic, and then think to themselves "i wish there was a way to be like that but without an expiry date"
eggs will join a TTRPG campaign
eggs will subconsciously think about sleeping with men who are more masc than them, not out of any actual attraction to them but just so they can feel small soft and feminine in comparison
eggs will shower often and far too hot because it always feels like there is a thin sheen of sweat or oil over their skin that they can only get rid of temporarily
Autistic people will be like "hm I think I need to give my brain a break this morning" and then play a game about meticulously manually sorting and cataloguing ancient books in a long-abandoned occult library
