Prologue; I stepped out, holding tightly onto the entranceway of my small hut so the strong winds would not whip me away from shelter, and carry me with them. I squinted my eyes against the blinding white. ...Snow? But how? It wasn't due for another two seasons... I stared into the sky, where fog and clouds masked the usual blue. This was wrong, so very wrong. Snow was everywhere, covering everything. The cold season was here, early. The Change was upon us.
1~ I stared up at this creature. She held me, and tears streamed from her eyes. A smile fought it's way onto her exhausted face, and her eyes glowed. I continued staring. After a moment or two, her smile faded and confusion crossed her face. I only watched, faint curiosity alight in my undeveloped mind. My mother looked at me for the longest of time, and began to weep. Her quiet crying developed into heart wrenching sobs, and soon a nurse had rushed over. She babbled in a familiar language, one I had heard when I was in the dark place. My mother answered, still crying. The nurse looked down at me in my mother's limp arms, then picked me up. She put her fingers to my neck, and frowned. She said something, and tried to hand me back. My mother refused to take me, and began screaming something, and it the stream of nonsense I heard a word I would come to know very well. Death.
No one would speak to me, but I wasn't bothered. I had the voices inside me, who were just like people without bodies. I answered then in my mind, and they heard my responses because that's where they hid. They told me they didn't want to reveal themselves, and when I insisted that they did they went silent for periods of time. A punishment for prying, I suppose. The Loneliness got to me after 17 summers of living in a village where I was ignored and regarded as a danger. They were afraid, and so they isolated me. I lived in a cot I had built myself on the very outskirts of the tribe. I came out during the night, and disappeared into my home during the day. Not that I was hiding from anyone, not that they were looking.
One day, as I was sitting and eating the food I had collected the night before, a loud knocking on my door interuppted me. I stood, startled. No one had ever visited me, no one had ever even spoken to me! I opened the small door, with too much eagerness and too much force, and yanked it right off the frame. A boy about my age stood, looking in suprise at the door in my hand. "You are...strong." he said looking at me. He was the boy who had stared from afar throughout our entire childhood, and now he had spoken. It was the first time I had heard his voice, and it was deep and soft, rumbling through me like music. The door is weak... I thought to him, but said nothing. I had never spoken a word in my life, and therefore didn't know how to. The boy looked at me, unsure. "Um, well, the Master would like to see you." I, again, said nothing. The Master, the king, the chief of the tribe. What did he want with me, a mere outcast? I nodded, slowly, and followed the boy away from my cot and towards the more populated part of the tribe.