Hunted (War of the Covens 1)

Prologue

War

The war had been raging for centuries, a war that breathed beneath human reality, lost in the labyrinth of their legends and folklore. It was a silent war of soundless screaming and invisible bloodshed.

And like many wars, it had been built upon a mindless prejudice.

The ancient Greeks had it right. They were not naive enough to believe they had any control over their fate. They knew the gods controlled all. They didn’t believe a good crop that year had anything to do with luck in a poorly cultivated land—no, it was Demeter who’d blessed their farm. They didn’t believe that one man was far superior in battle than another, thus tipping the scales of a battle in their favor—no, Athena had taken a liking to him, and so aided the warrior.

Yes, the gods were capricious, unmerciful, loving, and selfish; there was nothing that contented them more than making the human world their chessboard and humans their own personal chess pieces.

They gloried in their supremacy.

But one day the gods of ancient felt a pierce in each of their hearts. It was the day humans, who had once been under their thrall, who had loved them, and feared them, and prayed to them, turned their backs upon the gods and their hearts to a new one.

As the centuries passed, the gods were no longer worshipped by any human, no longer feared, or loved, or prayed to. The barrier of space that had allowed them to come down from their mountain and interfere in the lives of humans strengthened as time forgot them. Indeed, their very existence would have been expunged from Earth if not for their legacy: their children, the supernaturals of their own creation who still looked to the heavens and believed in them. They are the children of Gaia, mother of all the gods.

Her children perpetrated the silent war waging beneath the humans’ very noses.

On one side of the war were the true instigators, those who called themselves the Midnight Coven: a community of magiks who believed above all in their own superiority. Gaia, perhaps in her infinite wisdom, had long ago blessed a number of humans by allowing them a taste of her blood, so that as the years passed, a generation of magiks arose—witches and warlocks with elemental power, a race of children who would forever pray to her, and through them time would never forget her.

They believed, however, that those lesser supernatural beings were abominations not fit to live side by side with humans, much less themselves. Their distaste for lykans (like me) and vampyres not only enraged those they sought to exterminate but also their own kind: magiks who believed in the equality of the races. We call ourselves the Daylight Coven.

You see, to our mind, Midnights hunted not abominations but their own people, humans transformed and blessed by the gods, creatures descended from Gaia herself. This gaping split in beliefs between the dark and light covens was shared by their contemporaries, the faeries of Hemera. As a primordial deity, the Goddess of Daylight and Sun, her children were almost equal to Gaia’s. They were descendants of a young queen who had sold her soul to her favorite goddess for the opportunity to take on the form of any living thing she wished, so that she would always know her enemies, and they would never know her.

From her, to Hemera’s delight, sprang a race of shapeshifters who held the power to take on the appearance of anything born of nature. They’re mischievous and tiring but useful, serving as spies on either side of the war.

Hades, God of the Underworld (and grandson to Gaia), created a race of children familiar to humans within their folklore: vampyres. His children were the souls who passed through the River Styx without toll and whom Hades returned to Earth to extort, in blood, payment from those who dared to leave them to travel into the Underworld without coin.

And the youngest of the children of the gods are the lykans: we are fierce, strong wolves consecrated with the power of regeneration. In the dying years of the ancient gods, Artemis, Goddess of the Moon, the Hunt, and of Beasts, was called down to Earth by the last human who prayed to her. His son was dying from his battle wounds, and Artemis, in gratitude for his loyalty, replaced his son’s wasted heart with that of a wolf’s. To her supreme pleasure—for she had always been a competitive goddess—her own race of children was born, and she, too, was remembered by us.

In the early years of our existence, we children of the gods, cousins, wandered the world of humans at peace with one another. But the ages passed, and our forms changed—lykans produced lykans by humans, diluting the werewolf blood, and eventually becoming a nonviolent breed of our original selves.