Prologue
A flutter brushes against the edges of my consciousness. I pause at the once familiar sensation, the bone I had been gnawing on freezing between my jaws, then, a moment later, touches me once more, reaching, probing.
No. No no no... They are coming.
After so long, I had hoped... I sigh and rise to a sitting position, my head hanging as I do so. Of course, it was too much to hope. Too much to hope that the Abbrakor had caught up to them, too much to hope that this dirt ball I called home had simply been forgotten. Almost six thousand years, I had safeguarded this place, but finally, my sentinel was at an end.
I can sense them, my bond with them alerting me to the edges of their presence, a seething mass of millions of minds, each scrambling and screaming over one another, eager for blood, for yet another planet to devour. And as I could sense them, they too, could sense me.
My name floats across the void. "Where are your brethren? What have you done?”
I shudder as my queen, my mother, attempts to pry my mind open. I resist, screaming in defiance and focusing on severing the connection. ”I have prepared them for you!” My defiance lashes out against her intrusion, followed by a gut-wrenching scream as I writhe in pain, my connection burning away. Then, like the calm after the storm... silence.
I rise and pad to the edge of my sanctuary, my claws clicking against the floor and echoing through the dark caverns I’d spent millennia hollowing out as my home among the majestic mountains of this world, and sit softly.
There they lay - the gleaming jewel of humanity - at the foot of my perch. Blissfully unaware of the impending doom that looms over their heads; ignorant about their guardian watching over them from afar. My tail wags gently as I etch this final day into my memories. The pinnacle of all they would become.
I had watched them grow from simple savages to the enormous, complicated, kind, gentle, caring civilization they had become. Flawed, to be sure, but I was in no place to speak on such things.
I had wanted to show them, reveal myself to them, but they weren’t ready. I had hoped that one day soon, they might have been. Ready to accept me for what I was, and to prepare for the coming of my people. To fight. To survive. That day had seemed so close...
But as the edges of my consciousness tingle, as they search for me, their prodigal son, I know that time has run out.
As it was, all I had done was sown their myths and legends with the stories of my people, the horrors that awaited them. Met with the infirm, the insane, and the open-minded in the midst of the night to lay the grounds for their survival. Whispered secrets of war and innovation into the ears of the ones that showed promise, projected grand plans for destruction and defense into the dreams of those that might use them well.
I could only pray that they might remember. But to whom does a god pray?
I have done all I can to save you. I know it will not be enough to save all of you, but perhaps... Some may survive... My children... I am so sorry, for what I have done.
