this story is fun by the way do you want the basic rundown here's the basic rundown
there's this freaking Thing called The Leviathan. huge semi-aquatic animal. like, 100 feet at least. inside of its body is kind of just like a cave system you can walk straight into because its mouth is perpetually wide open, like a basking shark. it settles by the shore, unmoving, partway submerged in the water. also it's surrounded by these weird vaguely humanoid creatures who are sort of territorial and tend to attack anyone who comes too close. anyway, nobody knows what the hell this thing is or where it came from .
two groups form around The Leviathan: Worshipers who revere it as a god, and Hunters who see it as a threat and want to kill it.
anyway, enough setup. our story follows Torin, the child of Edda. Edda was previously a hunter, but then she adopted Torin, and decided to retire so she could focus on raising them. Some of her old hunter tendencies show through, though, so she spends a lot of time trying to train them as they grow up. training is just what she knows how to do so it's what she does with Torin.
Torin doesn't pick up on any of it very fast, which Edda tries to be gentle about, but they feel a bit like a failure. They think of themself as the inferior child of an ex-hunter, even though Edda doesn't even talk about her past as a hunter very much. She doesn't talk about The Leviathan much, either. The topic kind of just looms over them but remains unaddressed.
When Torin is 12, The Leviathan does something strange. it stands up and relocates. Nobody knew that it was going to do this, so nobody had any time to prepare -- it is huge, and it has many legs, and no particular regard for human life, and its trailed by those strange aggressive creatures mentioned previously, so its relocation causes a lot of chaos and destruction. Torin is separated from Edda in this chaos, ending up alone in some unfamiliar place.
They spend some time wandering the streets, until they happen upon some strange small priory for worshipers of The Leviathan, run by a prioress named Ilse. When she sees Torin she feels bad for them, taking them under her wing and letting them live at the priory.
When Ilse learns that Torin's mom used to be a hunter, she recounts that her own mom, Meria, also used to be a hunter! In fact, her mom was the captain of the very first expedition into the creature. It was nearly 30 years ago now, the first and only expedition done with the purpose of venturing into the creature to study it and find some way to kill it from the inside. Why the only expedition? It Went Badly! A bunch of the expedition crew died or were changed into those strange inhuman creatures. Two of the few survivors were Meria and her co-captain.
Something bizarre happened to Meria, though. She was also changed by The Leviathan, but while most of the others were turned into mindless, aggressive, creatures who lost human form -- Meria seemed to retain most of her mind and self and just became bizarrely protective of The Leviathan instead, to the point of fighting the rest of her crew to protect it. Her co-captain pulled her out of there, and after a while the aggressive defending of The Leviathan subsided, but she never quite returned to her old self. This obviously made Meria unfit to be a hunter. She instead became a figure of interest for the worshipers, lauded as a sort of "prophet" whose soul was touched by The Leviathan, etc. etc., she eventually ends up in a sort-of relationship with a fickle worshiper named Jan. He isn't super dedicated to the religious thing and doesn't really view her as a prophet, he just likes her normal style. They have a daughter, and that daughter is Ilse.
Anyway, Ilse has a weird complex about all of this. Ex-hunter-blasphemer-turned-prophet mother? Fickle worshiper father? She feels inadequate, like something is fundamentally wrong with her, and is dealing with this by dedicating herself fully and entirely to worship.
Ahem. back to her and Torin. Torin still spends a lot of time training, growing hateful towards The Leviathan. They aim to kill it themself, both as revenge for the way it separated them from their mom and also to prove themself as strong. Over the years, seeing Torin dedicate themself to training, Ilse starts to recognize that Torin is doing the same thing she's doing where they deal with their feelings of inadequacy by throwing themself into a fixed purpose to make up for it and she's like "oh god no why does this child have the same coping mechanisms as me. is that unhealthy? am i unhealthy? oh god"
anyway some character growth happens there where ilse starts trying to help torin but they refuse to change and etc etc
Anyway this is getting too long let me get to the point.
About a decade later, Torin is now 22. The Leviathan does its relocating thing again! Torin takes a chance and enacts their plan -- they scale up one of its legs as it's walking and climb into its mouth, aiming to do what the first expedition could not and find a way to kill it from the inside. Their decade of training has paid off, they actually get pretty far . But, Bizarrely, There Are Other People Inside? It Looks Like They're Members Of Another Expedition? A Recent One?
And Then They Run Into None Other Thaaaaan Edda Who, Similarly To Meria From The First Expedition, Has Been Changed And Is Now Violently Protective of The Leviathan.
Turns out Edda was not just "an" ex-hunter, she was the co-captain of that first expedition, who witnessed the deaths and transformations of all her crew (one of which was her apprentice, Sera, who she had known since the girl was 12 and helped to raise). Once Meria was unfit to be a captain she was promoted to take her place, and she started planning a second expedition right away, driven sort of mad and vengeful from experiencing the first expedition. She organized this obsessively for a while but thennnn this little orphan baby named Torin was put into her care, and it struck her with clarity and she decided to give up hunting to raise them and not repeat the mistakes she made that led to Sera's death.
except after being separated from Torin a decade ago, the only thing holding her back was gone and her grief was amplified and brought back all of her obsessive desire for vengeance and she set that second expedition back into motion. and then it went about as poorly as you would expect and here we are now with Edda having been Leviathanpawned™️.
Torin realizes that the obsessive desire for vengeance destroyed her and that they can't let themself go down the same path, which is a bit late to make that realization because they are already stuck fighting her. But after a while of fighting for their life, they find a way to disarm her without Killing Her and then they just tie her up while they wait for The Leviathan to settle back down and they can bring her back out.
Anyway, she's alive. Same thing as with Meria in the past, after a while of being away from The Leviathan she becomes less aggressive -- she has a more proper reunion with Torin once her head is a bit clearer. She's still not quite herself but she's alive.
That's the basic idea. Ilse and Torin's arcs need more work obviously (especially Ilse I love her and wanna put her through the horrors and she should probably be involved in the climax of the story somewhat. Probably some fucked up stuff where her original life goal was to also venture into the leviathan and be changed into one of those mindless inhuman creatures as the ultimate form of worship but she starts questioning whether that's what she really wants and comes to the conclusion that she wants to live. etc etc . i think she probably also makes a suit from some weird shed membrane she harvested from The Leviathan that Torin wears later as a disguise to make the creatures less aggressive toward them...Fun stuff like that. Anyway that's all. It's quite a fun story idea I'm quite fond of it even if I don't post about it much)
