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Author: Sparkle Itamashii

Title: Saving Grace

Warnings: Respect the rating.

Claimer: Storyline and Skadden are mine.

Disclaimer: Lockjaw species and world and everything are TM & © Allison Theus (penname: beastofoblivion). DO NOT under ANY circumstances use them without her express written permission.

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Prologue

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Everything was darkness. Always darkness. The shadows layered upon the shadows until there was nothing left. I could hardly remember a time when there was anything better. Of course, there was always worse. When the creatures came, I knew I would miss the darkness. I would miss the way there way there was nothing else; I would miss the absence of burning pain.

Whenever the creatures came they would grab me by the scruff of the neck so that I wouldn’t hurt them. I wouldn’t have hurt them anyhow. I would never hurt anyone. But they wanted to hurt me. They stuck me with something and it burned under my skin. I could feel it, whatever it was, coursing through my veins. My blood boils and all I could do was scream. I couldn’t even do that after a while; my throat was too raw and it only caused more pain to make noise. Even talking.

I think I used to talk to myself in the darkness, but if I did I stopped a long time ago. It was no use; no one could hear me anyhow. Sometimes I thought I could hear someone speaking, but it couldn’t have been anything alive. I would have been able to understand. The creatures that handled me never spoke. I didn’t know if they understood me, though I suspected that they did not. No one is cruel enough to do what they’d done if they could understand my pleading. I didn’t know their language and if they never spoke, I never had a chance at learning it.

That’s what I’d thought I was there for, when they’d first caught and caged me; my language ability. Larcets aren’t very big- we come to the knees of Delta humans. We’re mostly blue, with white tips on all our extremities and in three stripes on our bodies. We’ve got big eyes and mellow demeanors but that isn’t why we’re liked. No, lots of people around the planet come just to talk to my kind; to get translations for things. Larcets, like our cousins the javets, can pick up a garbled form of any language after hearing it spoken for only a few minutes. Of course, we get better the more we speak it. Most people are fascinated by that; my mother told me that we made very useful pets for anyone that traveled. I was told our language ability was an extraordinary skill, but I have to say I didn’t think quite as much of it when I thought it had lost me my freedom.

Of course, that wasn’t the reason at all. As near as I can tell those people just needed an experiment and I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I felt sick thinking that I was just the next random passerby and that there was something I could have done differently to avoid this. I wouldn’t have; I wouldn’t want to put anyone else through what I’d experienced in that little cage.

Sometimes I missed the sunlight. I began to think that the sun had only been a wondrous dream. For a while I thought that all of the meadows I’d played in, all the forests I’d chased my kin through were just a part of my imagination. Surely there was nothing outside of this cage. There was no world beyond the darkness. There couldn’t be. The darkness was everything and everything was darkness.

But in the end, it was the Darkness that saved me.

/End Prologue, Saving Grace/

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