The sky, blacker than night, looming overhead like a tirade of storm clouds, foretold our imminent destruction. The very air tightened around us, the eerie calm a silent warning. The locked shutters of windows and bolts on the solid doors of our lofty dwellings gave the false pretense of protection. I know now that nothing we could have done would have made the smallest hint of a difference to the Shadows.
I was a hatchling of five, just learning to fly. My memories of the siege are snatches of time, vague and indistinct. Something time couldn’t erase was the screams, the chorus of terrified shrieks that was forever etched into my mind. No matter how I tried to forget, they would still wake me up in a cold sweat, eleven years later. I would never be rid of the defeated shrieks of my family and friends as the Shadows consumed them. Other than that, even my mother’s face was fading, a ghost of a smile the last token of her I have left. My father had been forgotten, and any other family member I had completely effaced from my mind. Of that day, I just remember the fear that permeated the air and the stinging loss of being the only one taken alive.
That is the only memory I have of before the Shadows. They raised me to be like them. They raised me to come past that, to know that I was destined to be the last of my people, the last of the Eagle-Men, that what they did was a favor, not a work of malice. I can’t deny that what they did was cruel, but the simple repetition by everyone that it was kind of them to do such a thing absurdly made me doubt my loyalties. Eventually all my connection to any of my kind I might have known disappeared. I couldn’t be one of them.
It was my own hate of the pitiless world that drove me to embrace the Shadows. They were strict but they were all I had. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Frankly, I didn’t have a choice, but I have turned. Nothing of my actual self is left; it has all been burned away, beaten out of me by the Shadows. It will never come back; forever will I be strong, powerful, heartless, and cruel.
All should fear me; I am Shadow now.