After a zealot purges her city, a newly orphaned mantid girl must carry its last clutch of fourteen eggs across a dying world, hunted by her own kind and a sentient rot that feeds on death, wielding mercy as her only weapon.

SYNOPSIS:

Among the mantid peoples, the mating rite kills the male. Fatherhood is therefore a debt with a settlement date. A man who has fathered a clutch wears a three-strand cord in public, and is expected to pay.

Three generations ago, one small city stopped paying.

The Hollow Swarm does not call Haven heretical. It calls it in arrears. When the Reckoner finally arrives, she carries a scroll instead of a weapon, reads a number aloud — sixty-two acknowledged fathers, living beyond their rites — and lets the number stand. What follows is not a massacre. It is an inventory. Clerks move down the kneeling line with wax and seals. Two ledgers, different stamps, same red wax.

VALKYRITH, sixteen, is a foundling raised in Haven's nursery. On the night of the purge her keeper straps fourteen uncounted eggs to her back, tells her the moment they are counted they belong to the Swarm, and stays behind to hold the door. From inside a smoke flue, Valkyrith watches her closest friend VEDRAN step out of safety and kneel to the invaders. She reads it as betrayal. It will take a year and his death for her to learn what he was actually doing.

The eggs have been sealed in resin against the smoke — saved, and stilled. They will wake only beneath the Verdant Rain, which falls one night a year at the Tower of Dust and Memory. Six days' walk, if the Gorge bridge were open. It isn't. She takes the long way, and the long way takes a year.

She does not travel alone for long. BRACCA, a shield-mantis who has stood walls her whole life and wants, once, to walk something to where it needs to be. ZIPRA, a delta guide carrying eleven notches on a spear for eleven soldiers who died on a bad map she sold them. VIRESSA, a noblewoman from a city that lights its festivals by burning the dead — whose mother is scheduled to be tonight's lamp.

Behind them, the Reckoner does not give chase. She goes to the end of the road and sits down.

VEL'ZHERA is the property's strongest asset and the reason the film works.

She never raises her voice. She keeps books. Her army does not loot or shout; it clicks in cadence and files paperwork. She burns a city and calls it closing an account, and she is not lying — within her system, she is correct. She offers to spare the clutch and raise them as her own, and means it: That is how you close an argument. Not with fire. With inheritance.

She is also childless, and the ledger she has kept her whole life has no column for that.

The film's climax is not a duel. It is Vel'Zhera on her knees, throat bared, demanding to be executed as a rite so that her ending will have meant something — and the girl throwing the blade off a cliff into a mile of dark where no one can pick it back up. To refuse a villain her martyrdom turns out to be the most violent thing available.

An animated tragedy for adults and older teenagers. PG-13 at the most permissive.

It contains a ritual mass killing rendered in silhouette, a teenage sentry drowned in reeds by a sympathetic character, and a boy dying in his friend's arms as she learns she has misjudged him for a year. None of it is gratuitous and none of it is removable. There is no family cut of this film and no attempt to find one.

The shelf is Watership Down, Grave of the Fireflies, Princess Mononoke, Wolfwalkers — films that were sold honestly, rated honestly, and are still earning thirty years later.

Nymbari, an orchid city of stained glass that lights its carnivals with crystal lamps made from the dead. The lamps are still talking. Only the protagonist can hear them.

A protagonist who moults mid-film: goes deaf to her own power, soft-shelled and helpless, and has to be lashed to a friend's back and carried by the inch beneath three hundred enemy soldiers.

The film is built on one distinction, stated plainly in its middle and paid off three times in its last twenty minutes: kept is not carried.

Preservation is offered to the protagonist three times — by a city that will keep her friends as lamps, by a god of rot that will keep her dead mother mid-sentence forever, and by an empire that will keep her fourteen children fed, taught, and raised to stamp wax on shoulders. Each offer is more reasonable than the last. She refuses all three, at escalating cost, and the film never pretends the refusals were cheap.

Carried isn't taken. It's given, or it's nothing.

PRAYPREY is a complete, self-contained feature. It resolves. It requires no sequel to make sense.

Books Two and Three are published and available, so the world is proven and the rights position is clean — but the film stands alone, and is presented that way.

— Gary Naccarato, Co-Executive Producer, Watership Down "The core concept is diamond-hard — primal, alien, vast, yet deeply human. Its single greatest asset is the villain — a tragic ideology, not mere evil. The potential is staggering."

— Jean-Pierre Magro, Ph.D., Transmedia Scholar & Producer

Adam J. Spencer · adam@prayprey.com · prayprey.com

PRAYPREY™ and all related marks © 2026 Adam J. Spencer. All rights reserved.

Source novel published (Amazon, B&N, Apple Books; audiobook editions live)

Full script available below:

PRAYPREY