"I've… never imagined I'd have to live without her. And now that I do… I don't know… I don't know where to go from here… I miss her… so much..."
- — Johanna
Requiem For An Adventurer
is a Hilda Alternate Universe Fic by authors jdubbam and Newgame+LD, exploring one simple question: What if, in Hilda's rush to free the captive baby Weather Spirit, things went wrong? Horribly, horribly wrong?
Their lives forever uprooted, Hilda's friends and family struggle to get by as circumstances wind up pulling them into a plot greater than any of them could have imagined — one that could very well spell doom for all of Trolberg.
Requiem For An Adventurer provides examples of:
- Back from the Dead: Over the course of the story, Hilda comes back no more than two times: once in Chapter 7 when the House in the Woods grants Johanna's wish to revive her, and definitively in the climax, in the form of a ghost.
- Bloodier and Gorier: The story goes above and beyond any of the violence we've seen in both the show and the graphic novels. Characters are impaled, battered, burned, among other such things, with extensive detail going into their injuries at times.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: How Hilda goes out. First, she plummets from who knows how many feet from the mountain the weather station was on, being crushed by rubble on the way down. Then, once she wakes up, her entire body is in agony, her legs are trapped and pulverized by some of the debris, and a pipe has been lodged into her chest, with the removal of the latter causing her to pass out from critical blood loss. And she's still just barely alive afterwards, having only moments to spare to say goodbye to Johanna before dying from her injuries.
- Cry into Chest: When Frida apologizes to Hilda, after she is resurrected, Hilda just hugs Frida tightly, with David joining in for a group hug. Frida tears up as she hugs back and buries her face in Hilda's shoulder.
- Dark Fic: Hilda's death in the prologue almost immediately cements this, and it doesn't let up from there.
- Despair Event Horizon: Everyone in the aftermath of Hilda's death. Johanna, Frida, and Raven get it the worst out of everyone.
- Downer Beginning: The prologue involves Hilda dying quite horribly, and it doesn't get better from there. At first.
- Died in Your Arms Tonight: Hilda succumbs to her injuries in Johanna's arms.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Hilda is impaled in the chest with a metal pipe in the prologue.
- It's All My Fault: Frida sees Hilda's death as this because of how she lashed out on her in "The Ghost".
- Raven blames himself as well, as he had assumed that Hilda had already died when the weather station collapsed when she was in fact alive (albeit critically injured).
- Lighter and Softer: Compared to the rest of the story, the epilogue is a retelling of The Black Hound.
- Mistaken for Murderer: Johanna, in her grief, erroneously deduces that Victoria meant to leave Hilda to die. Later, when confronting Victoria in the House in the Woods, Johanna is seconds away from killing her until she realizes that, as much as she wants to do it, it's not what Hilda would want.
- Outliving One's Offspring: Johanna, to say the least, is not at all happy to deal with this.
- Parting-Words Regret: Upon learning of Hilda's death, Frida regretted the hurtful words she said to her during their falling out in "The Ghost". In a later chapter, she got the chance to apologize to Hilda when she was briefly resurrected by The House in the Woods, bringing closure between them.
- Sequel Hook: The epilogue ends with Alfur and another Elf beginning a discussion about the identity of Hilda's dad.
- Shout-Out: Towards the end, one of the Marra tries to make a remark on Twintail's bad sense of humor. Only to be met with a Death Glare, resulting in the former Marra shutting up.
- Yank the Dog's Chain: Hilda is revived by the House in The Woods at the story's halfway point, only to die once more when the House takes back everything the gang wished for.
