Darkling - Onsen Yasuko

I was born in what you might call the dark ages. Not that they were for all, just for you humans. My kind favor the darkness, the night. We are of the night. The moon is for us what the sun is for your kind. We are the darkness. You see us and feel fear, just as you fear the dark. Whether that darkness is within or without makes no difference.

Then there is our appearance. We don’t exactly look like you, with our pale hides and pointed ears. Not to mention the fangs. They don’t show all the time, but has that ever made a difference to your kind? Of course not. The fact that they are there is all it takes. So you hunt us. Most of us are peaceful, but you don’t care. You never have. The few malicious ones are all it takes to make you fear us. And you hate what you fear. We can hide our fangs and our ears. And we can claim that we work the nights to explain our pallid complexions.

But our eyes. Those will always give us away, once you are close enough to see them. The colors are brilliant. So much so that they almost glow. And not the normal colors of you mortal creatures either. Mostly various shades of yellow, from amber to gold and even true yellow. Purples of every shade and tone. The part that bothers most of you is the fact that our pupils are vertical slits. I guess they remind you of reptiles or something.

So you hate us and fear us. That is why my birth was such an exception. I am of both human and non-human decent. Why my mother fell in love with the darkling that is my sire, I can not say. She didn’t survive long. Your kind murdered her because of it. Though you may have allowed her to live if I had not been born. So I was taken by my sire and raised in the darkness. He is one of the peaceful ones. But peaceful doesn’t mean naïve. Far from it. He knows that there are those that would hunt us all down simply because we are not human. So he taught me to fight. My half-blood breeding allows me to do things that others of my kind can not. I can walk in the light. And I could probably blend in with the social outcasts, the Gothic types, that exist on the fringes of your society. But I don’t. I have no reason to do so. And a very good reason not to.

I am a hunter. Not my own kind, unless ordered to do so. I hunt those who hunt us. Those who take money to slay those of my kind who cannot defend themselves. For there are those among my kind who are helpless, whether by birth or accident. So I hunt the hunters, to protect my kind from the extinction that would follow if individuals like myself do not hunt.

There is no thanks for doing what I do. Nor is thanks needed. None of us advertises the fact that we hunt. We are shunned as anachronisms when others discover what we are. And we are seen as a danger to our own kind. Hunting the hunters has a tendency to draw more hunters to us. Most often, they are after revenge. Some few come after us in a misguided, and suicidal, attempt to make a name for themselves. As if being famous to humans would make them better at what they do. As if it would protect them from our attacks. It won’t do either. It only spawns anger in our own hunters, that those fools would believe they could harm us. They can if there are enough of them, but the fools almost never work in large groups.

The ones who hunted us have been dead for over 10,000 years. We are still alive. I am still alive. And now those who once hated and feared us for no reason other than our differences have reason to hate and fear. For now we hunt them. For nourishment and sometimes for sport, though it is poor sport. But the hunters are returning. Some are like myself. Half-breeds. But rather than hunt those that hunt my kind as I once did, they hunt us. And they are good at it, though there are few of them. For most are raised as I was, by their non-human parent. But for those of us who have lived for so long, the hunters are not much of a threat.