Backstory

The Cultist Chicken joined the flock’s most exclusive society the way everyone does: it was approached by a hen holding a pamphlet, listened politely for twenty seconds, and then spent the rest of its life drawing circles in the dirt. The circles are important. The circles are everything. Every chant begins with the circles, and every circle is aimed, with terrible precision, at the farm.

It believes the chicken god is real. This would be easy to dismiss as a harmless delusion — the kind of thing you read about in the poultry section of the newspaper — except for one regrettable detail: the chicken god is, regrettably, real. The cult’s literature does not mention this. The cult’s literature mentions snacks. The members find out about the god’s reality at roughly the same moment everyone else does, which is to say, too late.

Three Cultist Chickens gathered in one place is not a meeting. It is a countdown. The chant gets louder, the circles get wider, and somewhere behind the treeline something enormous shifts in its sleep. The farm’s standing order is simple and absolute: never let three of them gather. Two cultists are a nuisance. Three are a summoning.