Starving Vermin Come for a Peaceful Woodland Town — Dark Fantasy Animal Epic — Tales of Grimwicke

Episode one of an ongoing dark fantasy series about talking animals, and it is not a children's show. Ninety-one winters ago something came up out of the river country. This winter it comes back. Badger lords, vermin, a hard winter, and a village that is about to become a fortress. The Wicke is a farming village of about two hundred, built in a river bend with no wall and no defences, because in living memory nothing has ever threatened it. There's a forge run by a badger and his son, a mill, a wedding, and a harvest coming in. The chapter runs from the last good harvest to the night twelve farmers walk into the woods carrying whatever they had. The story is told in hindsight by the town's chronicler, sixty years on, from a book that is falling apart.