Welcome://

Your breath was harsh and ragged as you approached the top of the hill. What had been a gentle slope at the bottom had steadily increased in grade, and the last steps had sent flashes of agony through your calves. But you had made it.

And the dusk was glorious. Deep orange and fuchsia light flooded the country-side, making the grass in the distance almost look afire. The clouds were low, fluffy and bathed in colour. It was muggy but not uncomfortable, and the height of the hill let you see far beyond the field to the nearby forests - and - perhaps that was a tinge of the ocean rippling at the horizon.

You squint and are concentrating so strongly that the sudden voice behind you nearly shocks you out of your skin.

Hello there!

The voice was masculine and cheerful - but a little distant sounding, as if the individual speaking wasn't quite paying attention. What are you doing up here..? His voice faded off quietly, still sounding almost a little confused.

You glance around you, and then notice the tall grass swishing and bending a couple of feet to your right. There, nearly hidden, was the tan body of a zafara sprawled lazily in the grass. Despite his almost confused speech, his eyes were shockingly green and sharp as he stared at you inquisitively.

Who?://

Family://

There are two others who I am around enough to call "family." They're very different from one another, but both are very unique and worthy of my - or your - time.

Snaiha the questionably Maraquan draik

Snaiha is a bit strange, to say the least. She's half my size, slimy, and I can never really tell if she's looking at me or not because of those... tentacle eyes. I see her anytime I decide to go to the beach and she shows me some pretty interesting things around her rainforest.

I think that I'm one of few that she enjoys the company of, though. She has quite the attitude sometimes - I've seen her tell others people off quite strongly!

Cialse the mentally chained krawk

Lia is also interesting. As soon as I met her I got the strange feeling that she was compensating for something. She is so supremely alert, so questioning, and so headstrong and stubborn that there has to be a reason.

She also always wears thick metal bracelets with strings dangling from them. They're very impractical and unlike her - but she won't tell anyone why, just claiming they're nostalgic bits from her childhood. She's lying.

Background://

In some ways my tale is just like all the others, the stereotypical ones. It begins with a simple sentence;

I would have been a king.

Typical, no?

But, you see, I was not betrayed, my kingdom was not taken from me, I did not die. The truth is that I was never born. Well, in a sense, that is.

I see you are confused, and that is fine. Let me explain.

Most people believe the world we live in is absolute. That it is the only of it's kind.

They're wrong.

Others exist that are near-exact replicas of this one, just with... a few differences. A rock in a different place, a patch of grass where there is none in the other... and of course, the inhabitants are different. I don't know how many other worlds there are out there, or what they are called (I had a person I met describe them as 'planes') but I know they exist. But only two are important to this story.

There is one world, the world of the young. The ones without consciousness, without intelligence. It is the world of the children in their mothers, the world of the bird still in it's egg. Everyone begins in this world before they are born, and at one single point, a miniscule amount of time, we change over to the 'real' one.

But that didn't happen to me.

Call it a miscarriage, call it what you will, the Queen (my mother) never had me. I died in just that vital second, that instance when I should have come to true life.

And so I was caught. I am half in that other world; I am half in yours. I see in both, but I only feel in one; the land of the living.

People shy from me, call me mad, insane, crazy, so I make my own friends. I.. don't remember when I learned how, but the fact of the matter is, I create these animals. They appear like small dragons to me, pure white, beautiful... but apparently they look dirty, putrid and old to others.

They call me a necromancer, though I do not raise the dead.
They call me insane when, in truth, I see more than they.

Is this right? I don't think so, but there is nothing I can do, I suppose.

So I wander. There are no people who accept me at any place, and I do not blame them. Sometimes I even wonder if what I know is true, or if I am just truly... insane.

It's an interesting way to live.