Hey there,

Fought off a Duck Overlord at Sapphire today (not kidding). Mayor’s safe, the town’s in awe, and I’m still your top Goldendoodle heroine. Promise to tell you everything over a bone at Bark Buffet. Dogs and ducks, who would’ve thought?

Tail wags and face licks,
Truly 🐾✨

Listen to the story here

I had awakened that foreboding morning in Pawsburgh to the scent not of the usual delectable roast chicken, but to something amiss in the air. As the town’s most eye-catching Goldendoodle, I knew the currents of our hidden realm like the back of my paw, yet nothing had prepared me for what would unfurl that sable day.

The day commenced relatively normalish. I sauntered down the cobbled streets past Canine Couture Clothing, where mannequins dressed in the latest hound haute couture stood guard. “Dreadful fashion sense,” I muttered to a sphinx-like Siamese cat perched on the windowsill. But cats being cats—and possibly the worst listeners in any species—she blinked dismissively as I trotted on.

At the edge of Topaz Terrier Town, I encountered Barnabas, my dapper Dachshund compatriot, wagging his tail with a touch of hysteria. “Truly, it’s mad—the ducks—they’re… they’re holding the mayor hostage at Sapphire Lake!” he barked between gasps.

“Not the ducks,” I scoffed, dubious. The web-footed creatures were known to be quarrelsome in council but hardly capable of an aquatic coup.

I loped towards Setter Shore with Barnabas trailing, through a gauze of fog that seemed to suffocate the sun itself. Bloodhound Bluffs loomed in the distance, shrouded in an even more sinister mist.

The lake was indeed the scene of discord; ducks aligning in an ominous flotilla around the beleaguered mayor—a Shih Tzu with asthmatic tendencies—and the residents of Pawsburgh glued to the spots, horror-stricken.

“When they said ‘fowl play,’ I hardly imagined this,” I quipped, though the terror rippled through me. There’s humor in even the darkest of times, I supposed, or atleast that’s how Douglas Adams would see it.

I had to act. A canine conclave convened at Dog’s Delicacies, where crepes and crises were the specials du jour. Hushed mutterings, then a chorus of yelps; we set forth a band of brave, if not entirely strategic, souls towards the shoreline skirmish.

Our charge was a gallant spectacle, if you squinted hard enough and ignored the tripping and barking. At my side dashed a terrier whose heart was Trottingham but whose legs were purely ornamental.

“Fear not, my furry constituents!” I emboldened, though privately, I was already drafting a mental will, bequeathing my beloved, saliva-stained tennis ball to posterity.

But as ritual dictates, before one dashes into a dire duck dispute, one must ensure their fur is in impeccable order. And so, in the face of terror, I stopped, unrushed, and gave my curls a cursory lick—a display of the Goldendoodle calm under pressure.

The scene was quacking chaos. A spectral Duck Overlord loomed above, its monstrous silhouette outlined against the dimming light. So much for unassuming waterfowl, I thought, now a tiny detail I’d have to correct with Barnabas, theoretical survival pending.

“Release our dignified Dogfather!” I howled with all the valor one could muster when confronting paranormal poultry.

With a flap that stirred tempests, the Overlord shifted its focus to me. Oh, bones and biscuits, it was dreadfully fond of Goldendoodles, it seemed. The lake rippled, the townsfolk barked, and I, Truly—truly terrified—challenged the celestial bird.

It was a battle of wits and woofs amid a spiraling storm summoned by the Duck Overlord’s terrible, quackerous powers, thrashing with the stuff of canine nightmares. Each thunderous boom made me wince, my one unfailing fear. But I bore it, for Pawsburgh, and for every hound and houndette hiding beneath looms and dining room tables.

The how and the why as to our triumph (or rescue by the return of the human overlords at their revolted uproar to unusually behaved ducks) remains a story still discussed over dinners at Bark Buffet. In the aftermath, feathers of the fallen (or rather retreating) fowl drifted from the sky like a sinister snowfall.

As for myself, I found solitude in simple pleasures, reveling once more in the sunlit spectacle of butterflies over meadows, gossiping with wise old hounds—and, naturally, keeping clear of overly ambitious ducks at dawn. For in Pawsburgh, the line between the mundane and the magical was, as always, as finely drawn as my own sumptuous silhouette.

The End.