Chapter 0 – Prologue

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Everything was burning. A little girl crawled along the floor, trying to find her way out the house that had so suddenly caught ablaze. It was getting harder and harder to breathe; the smoke in the room filled her lungs and stung her eyes. Squinting though the fire, she could make out the faint outline of the doorframe. After inching her way closer, she saw that the rustic door had been blown off its hinges from the outside and lay splintered on the floor of what used to be the small sitting room. She looked back behind her in time to see one of the wooden support beams crash down in front of the cookery in a shower of hot cinders. There could be no going back the way she had come.

A loud cracking sound came from right above her, signaling that what was left of the roof was about to give way. Understanding that the door in front of her was the only means of escape, she took a quick breath, staggered upright, and then stumbled forward, over the door’s remains and out of the heat and fire and smoke. The roof came down behind her, causing bits of metal and wood to go flying in different directions and land in the wet grass outside.

There were dark clouds above, and it was raining hard as if the sky was trying to quench the thirst of the inferno surrounding her. A disrupting hissing sound was all around her, but what was rain and what was weariness all seemed the same.

And there were bodies.

She tried to shuffle forward; more houses were on fire. Another one exploded. Everything burned. Even the bodies. Bodies of people she knew and loved…

A sudden and overwhelming sense of despair washed over her, and her knees gave out. She fell forward into the grass, the water stinging her burns.

She could no longer stand it; she began sobbing uncontrollably in between coughing fits. It was still very hard to breathe, even after making it out of the smoke and into the clean air. The horrible images of her village burning around her, her father burning alive, her mother burning… Already dead.

Everyone was dead. Mother, Father, Brother…

Brother.

Brother and that horrid dragon. They were the cause of all this… But why? Had they made it out alive, or were they in there somewhere still, smoldering away like everything else?

She tried to raise herself up, to keep going, but she no longer had the strength to stand. The most she managed was to sit on her knees, supported by her shaking arms. The stayed like that until she could see rain dripping off the ends of her shoulder-length hair and into the grass. She just couldn’t move. Would she just stay there until time or death consumed her? Would this be how it ended?

“Pitiful.”

A voice, cold and sharp, cut through the surrounding noise with an all-too-familiar tone. She snapped her head up in surprise, and looked through her teary eyes at a man standing not three feet in front of her.

He stood at about six feet tall, and was dressed all in black. His hair was such a dark brown that it was almost the same color as his clothes, and his skin was pale; made a ghostly white by the comparison to the rest of him. He carried no weapon. He was looking off behind the girl and at the burning house, yet she him too well to think he was talking about anyone other than her. Life rushed back into her, in the form of adrenaline.

“M-Mael!?” she stammered his name, “Brother, why have you—“

She almost choked then on her own tears, trying to get a grasp of why everything was happening. She never got the time to finish her sentence; he finished it for her.

“Why did I eliminate the opposition?” her brother asked the question for her, his voice still icy, yet disturbingly calm. He took a step forward, his gaze now fixed on the child in front of him, “Because, my dear sister, they were in my way. I’m afraid I couldn’t allow them to continue…”

His sentence trailed off, but he took another step forward. The little girl tried to crawl away backwards, not daring to take her eyes off him. His eyes, however, soon left her again, as he seemed distracted by something. Gathering up her courage, she spoke again.

“Where is that dragon? Why isn’t—“

Mael suddenly lunged forward and grabbed the front of her tunic, pulling her off the ground with much more ease than he should have. He brought his face uncomfortably close to hers and began to speak in almost a whisper.

“He was too much of a coward. He ran away; was afraid of what I had discovered. This power… Soon. Very soon…”

She looked directly into his eyes. They were familiar, brilliant emerald in color. They even seemed to be glowing; they were so colorful compared to his clothes and hair. However, she was looking for something beyond them, anything beyond them, to give her some measure of affirmation that her brother was even there at all. But all she found was power. There was so much of it; it made her sick to focus on it. She was about to break contact, but she brushed against something to the sides… It was a cruel and twisted sense of happiness… So this is how he felt? No anger, no sadness, no fear?

“Your eyes… You’re… You’re…”

“Insane?” he let go of her as suddenly as he had grabbed on, “A monster?”

She tried to scramble away from him, but he merely had to take a step forward to fill in the gap.

“Yes… A monster… Maybe…?” he said, half to himself, “I suppose that’s what you’d get out of your little reading trick, isn’t it? But insane… No. If anything, I am enlightened. I have come to see… I know the truth of myself… and everything… For I have turned. I am the Turned.”

The little girl’s heart beat faster at the mention of those horrible people. Had her brother really become one? Was he really that far gone? He turned his back to her slowly and began talking, but this time she truly couldn’t tell if he was talking to her or himself.

“Monsters. We’re all monsters, really. Pathetic little demons all trying to scrape at each other for a higher sense of self-worth. No matter how knowledgeable, man is nothing but a machine, bent on destroying itself.”

She once again backed away, slowly, paying attention to nothing but the man in front of her. She froze as her hand brushed against something cool… Something metal.

A sword.

“That is why I know. I must carry out the order of the machine and destroy the imperfection that, even now, taints humanity. Only then can we return to serenity.”

He wasn’t going to stop here, she realized, he wasn’t going to stop until everyone was gone…

Her grip tightened around the sword hilt. She couldn’t let what happened here happened to others. She wouldn’t let others suffer as she was. Not while she could still fight.

“You, of all people, should understand this best, my dear sister…” his back was still turned, and he was looking up at the darkened sky.

The little girl paused for a moment.

“…you’re not my brother anymore.”

She lunged forward and swung the blade at him.