They called him Noble, born a prodigy, with flawless genes; he was the strongest hue of melanin imaginable. He had thick dark wool covering his skull and deep rigid honey colored eyes. This man was the apex of human genealogy, the last black sheep of Ethiopia. A Golden God. A wonder to modern science, but the perfect anomaly to sacred geometry. He was endangered and fiercely hunted. His very existence was in doubt and he was so impossible to locate that there are those who whole heartedly believe that he is nothing more than a rumor. His name gone from your tongue as swiftly as it came, like a leaf in the wind, with nothing more than distant memories of faceless people whispering it, as validation. He gave a feeling, and one could always remember the feeling, even if they didn’t remember his name…
1
This is my third consecutive day of being chased by Krags on this continent. Still can’t get the stench off me. Krags were deformed humans, even though technically in these times everything was deformed. Gene normality is now an abnormality, the class human is all but extinct. Of all the mutations, I despise Krags the most; they eat everything, even each other. Their stench is putrid and unbearable, wretched life forms. They are human beings that mutated into a crab-like state, the scavengers of the mutant world. Having two legs like a man, a head like a crab and horrid looking claws. They had no problem eating their own family much less whoever they worked for, which made them very risky mercenaries. Not many investors were willing to dabble with Krags. Too risky. But here was someone, going through extra trouble to track me.
I was used to running, but I’d been on the run for an entire century. Ending up the last pure bred human meant that you had to like privacy more than is humanly expected. Humans are social creatures; they’re not built to be alone. Maybe that is why they think us inhuman. It is my fate, one I accepted. But something still wasn’t right. These people weren’t running after me, they were chasing me off. I dodged into a nearby cave and paused to listen whether I was still being followed. Not a sound, they had gone back, an experience I was familiar with. It had been happening a lot these past three days whenever I entered certain lands. Sometimes I fought (when I was bored), sometimes I ran, and when I run I am never caught, the whole world knows it. I hear they call me a creature of myth.
There was something inside that parameter that they didn’t want me to get to, and that made me smile. They had been tracking me ever since I arrived back onto this continent. Ethiopia, my home. I had come back to reclaim my power, my people’s hidden knowledge. Five thousand Krags assaulted my tree cabin the day I got back. I wondered if that could have been anymore excessive. I put the fear of God in them,there was Krag everywhere. Now at least they know, I will smite if I must. Whatever they didn’t want me to find, I was determined to find it, but there was no end to the hoard. I decided to retreat to the outskirts, regroup. They had given me a lot to think about, five thousand things to be exact, all dead. This long night made me miss the sunlight, made me yearn for the beautiful golden rays filling my pupils. But the sun is going, burning out they say. Now the closest thing this planet experiences to a sunrise is every 120 hours. No one actually knows what happened. All we knew is that night time gradually became longer and longer each day, until one day it didn't come at all, for five days. The panic was biblical. Some people thought it was the apocalypse, some said it was Ragnarok; some said it was the unfolding of revelations. I think they all missed the point. That’s how this whole disaster started, it was like an infested train crashed into the vehicle of human evolution. Everything went haywire. It was hard to watch and harder to survive. Especially after the discovery of my kind; where they once called us Gods, we were now mutations of the human genome to them. Ironic.
Our powers far beyond their technology still, they fancied themselves deserving of the knowledge we possessed. The governments of the world initiated a long arduous questioning of us all, a trial, with the agenda of getting us to deny our identities as deities by renouncing the idea completely. I suppose it might have been a relevant phase in their development, but what they didn't think through was the premise that to be a God one had to acknowledge a God, a grand architect, a first creator. To deny this was to deny your own existence. Most of my kind sold out, said it was to keep the peace, and announced to the world that they were merely an advanced manifestation of an Apex gene. This spurred a rat race of the world powers, billions invested in DNA research. But those of us, like me, who refused to bend to the lower thought form, soon had to make ourselves inaccessible to humankind.
I was suddenly called back to my present space as a strange scent fluttered across my nostrils. Whipping my head around to investigate, I came face to face with a beast, ominous and shrouded in darkness. Only its red eyes protruded the black. Its silhouette was bear-like, husky and powerful, its fangs gleamed in the dim moonlight. A low earthy growl began to ascend from the depths of what sounded like an endless pit, this creature’s stomach. I could identify a snarl creep into its features as the growl became louder and more prominent, rattling ever more surely the contents of the cave. The sound soon began to rattle the very earth itself. That is when I realized that if I did not initiate some form of communication with this creature, who had found a home here before me, I would soon be nothing more than the myth they already considered me, in pieces. Staring the beast stark into its blood red eyes, I could see nothing but killer intentions.
“Look, you could eat me right now; easily rip me to pieces even, but then what?”
He got on two feet, raging and roaring furiously. It perhaps understood my mock, and was even more furious now. It was about to maul me when I froze it in place, staring deep into its soul, speaking directly into it, using a universal language. The language of life. Its anger and wrath all but vanished into thin air. I had seen inside it. It was not evil, it was merely cautious. It hated being hunted. I could relate and I could tell I had gained a friend. I smiled, patting its head. It stepped forward into the moonlight half-wolf half-bear, a rare and lethal mix. It was a beast of fury and wrath, indifferent to existential philosophy and the questions of right and wrong long pursued by the human society. Suddenly this dimension didn't feel so lonely.
