Edge Of Oblivion

Once, we were gods. Ages ago, idyllic, uncounted centuries before man or his sly, sprawling civilizations had even been dreamed, we ruled sovereign over all other creatures in the deepest, virgin heart of equatorial Africa. Divine and resplendent, reveling in the bounty and glory of our many Gifts, we took the name Ikati—Zulu for “cat warrior”—because it most closely described our stealthy perfection, our feline, sinuous grace, our cunning and lethal prowess. We lived and loved and raised our children there, beside the pristine, glimmering waters of the Congo, beneath the nourishing sun and the endless blue sky and the lush, dappled shade of the baobab trees. We wore crowns of gold and garnet and tanzanite; we walked naked among nature and one another and knew no shame. We honored our dead and hunted our food and slept in the fat, crooked arms of acacias and marulas; we passed the stories of our illustrious history to the next generation. We celebrated our Mother Earth and her great magic, and all was well. All was perfect. But Time is a merciless thief, even for creatures so blessed as we, and slowly things began to change. Invaders came. Clumsy, ugly, two-legged beasts with spears to stab hearts and arrows to pierce flesh and fire to burn homes. They stole through our forests and poached in our grasslands; they poisoned our rivers and captured our children, our old and weak. We fought our enemies back; we had no choice. Year after year we fought, decades of struggle, war, blood, death. Battles were won, only to begin anew with the next generation. There were so many of our enemy, and so few of us. In time, our numbers dwindled. In time, our enemies gained the advantage. So, like all creatures must, we adapted to survive. We learned the human ways. We spoke the human tongue. We wore human clothing and raised human crops and built homes of mud and grass, then wood, then brick, as they did. We learned to hide our true nature. And in this way, we began once more to thrive. In secrecy. In silence. With seething hatred in our hearts. Then one day came a different sort of man, a man with no spear or sword, a man with open arms and a gentle voice who claimed to be our friend. He offered a truce and the return of what was already rightfully ours, the rivers and the mountains and the verdant, untouched forests. Trust me, the man said, and, tired of so much war and bloodshed, we did. For a long, long while, the arrangement suited us both and we prospered. Our children grew up together. Our clans lived side by side. Because we were so beautiful and Gifted, unfixed as they were in a single aspect of flesh and bone but mutable, pliable, evanescent, the two-legged invaders began to worship us as the gods we truly were. Offerings were made, statues of gold and ebony and oiled stone were carved, temples were built—the Sphinx, most famously—all in our name. We even mated with our former enemies, bearing half-Blood children, offspring that might one day be as Gifted and blessed as the pure-Blooded were. Or might not. A Queen arose from one of these unions. Cleopatra, she was called, meaning “the glory of her father,” because he was Ikati, one of our own Blood. More beautiful and cunning and sensual than us all, she ruled empires and seduced hearts and convinced a human man to turn against his king. And with that, she sealed all our fates. The coup failed. The Queen and her lover died. And the Ikati were hunted once again. We were hated. We were driven out of our homeland, nearly extinct. The few that remained remembered how they had survived before the human pestilence came, before clever deceptions blinded their eyes and stole their glory, and made a pact to return to the old ways of pretending and lying, of keeping to themselves. They fled their beloved Africa and found other places in the world to call their own, small, wooded places, cloaked in silence, far away from prying eyes. Untold eons have passed, and still we live in secrecy and silence, bound together by honor and betrayal and a tradition of ironclad rules to protect us from the greatest threat of all: forgetting. Our kingdom of peace and perfection was stolen from us by you, covetous, ambitious, treacherous Man. And though we have learned to live alongside you, though we have learned to survive, though we may smile and nod as we pass you in the street, we are always, always ready to eat out your hearts. Beware. Nathaniel quickly descended the narrow, twisting wood stairs to the underground holding cells, a large flashlight gripped in one hand, an electric cattle prod in the other. It was cold and dank, the pitch black unbroken except for the narrow wedge of his flashlight’s yellow beam. The stairs had been built long ago—nearly two dozen generations of the Alpha’s ancestors had inhabited the manor since—and they creaked in loud protest underfoot. His steps disturbed a choking cloud of dust and small, unseen creatures that went scurrying away to disappear into cracks in the rough stone walls, slick with moss and moisture. A cobweb drifted by, ghostly pale strands that lifted to brush his face. Somewhere far off—below?—he heard the muffled sound of flowing water.