Dawn of Flight

Before the Cleansing

          Some say they brought it upon themselves.
           David Moore contemplated that now. Could it have been prevented? Could he have prevented it?He shook himself out of his stupor. He could not have been to blame. It was not his fault the sponsors were becoming greedy.
          He thought back now, to when things were just becoming started. When all the bosses expected were plants. It started with crops. With Earth's population at ten billion and rising, everything came back to food. Drought resistant wheat, locust proof soybeans, tomatoes that required less water... Back then, that was all that was asked of them. When David created a strain of apple that could grow without light, the sponsors were satisfied for a week.
      After that, when hunger was still a problem despite the new crops, they turned to the other side of the problem. If there were not enough crops to support the population, why not reduce it? They turned to a new pursuit. No longer were the plants they created beneficial or harmless. He shivered now, remember in the things they created. Mushrooms poisonous enough to kill elephants, Venus flytraps with mouths large enough to eat a monkey, stinging nettles that pricked the victim with five thousand needles instead of five... David remembered what happened to the last man who took a walk through the poison dome without a suit. The gardeners has pulled his body out, mutilated, skin peeling off, face a bloody mess. It took a DNA test to determine the victim. After that, three of the gardeners had promptly quit.
          The plants still had not satisfied the patrons. They unleashed a disease, a pandemic that had the world in a panic. The disease was twice a deadly as the black death and as infectious as a cold. Within a year, the population of the earth was down to ten million.
         David had thought about quiting, but he needed the pay. The unemployment rate was high, and there was no guarantee that he could find another job before he starved. So, he stayed. Perhaps the bosses would be satisfied, would go back to studying wheat and barley. He smiled now, or perhaps it was a grimace, as he remembered his naïveity. No, the bosses did not want to destroy mankind, they wanted to rule it.
          That is when the animal experimentation started. The laboratory, so crisp, clean, and quiet before, became a menagerie. Their first test subjects has been monkeys, baboons to be precise. They had howled and grunted, annoying the scientists till moral was short and moods shorter. Then, one day, the monkeys stopped howling. That was not to say they were silent. Far from it, in fact. After that day, they screamed, an unearthly sound that was a mix of grief and longing, a Wolf's howl and a baby's cry.
          The baboons were just the beginning. One day, they brought in a tiger, the next day, an eagle. He remembered sneaking in to see the eagle, fully expecting it to be dead. What he saw was much worse. The eagle, such a golden creature before, now looked like it had crawled out of a grave. Its feathers were hardened, shiny, looking more like scales than anything else. When it saw David, it beats it's wings. Where before, it's wings were a mix of copper and bronze, now they were a hazy color, like smoke. Two smaller sets of wings beat the air in time to the larger pair, one above, one below. It dove at him, and he saw with horror that it has umpteenth claws, each tipped with a razor talon. He had squeezed his eyes shut, fully expecting to be dead. When  no pain came, he hesitantly cracked open one of his eyelids.  The eagle had been secured on a chain, attached to its neck. It flew is an arc, secured to a stoat iron pole. It flew at him again, this time stretching so far that it's feathers brushed against his cheek. He had expected the feathers to feel like scales, or the slimy skin of an amphibian. They felt... different. There was no other word for the feathers. They were soft as silk, yet  felt as sharp as knives. He had hurried out, vowing to never again return after dark. He still had to help with the procedures though, and every time he walked past the room, the eagle glared balefully at David. He always walked faster each time, imagining the talons grabbing his neck, snapping it like a branch snaps in a gale. For there was no other way to describe it. They were mere saplings, thinking themselves mighty oaks, playing with a force none of they understood. They were creating a hurricane, creatures as powerful as gods. The scientists may think of themselves as the Masters, but how far can they push their luck before the animals turn, biting the hand that feeds them?
          One day, five years after they started bringing in animals, they brought in a human. The man was tall, with dark hair and a long nose. Later, he had heard the man's screams.
          Ten years after they brought in the man, David overheard some men talking of two successful projects, soon to be released. For the first time, he had objected against one of the boss's decisions. No matter how he pleaded though, the creatures were still sentenced to be trained.
          In the end, they had escaped. He rememberes hearing the news, expected to feel victorious. He expected to boast of his precognition. He didn't. He had curled into a ball and cried.
          Now, crouched behind a crate, he remembered that. How exactly he became the last human to survive he  did not know. What to do now? Should he worry about weapons or food first? Oh, why him?
          He was shaken out of his self-pity by the crate being tossed aside. A face filled his vision. He supposed it could be considered humanoid, but something about it told him otherwise. The eyes were a bit too large, too slanted. The face was more delicate than anyone he knew. There was a sense of otherworldlyness surrounding it. Together, those cues told him that this was one of the missing experiments. That, and the large wings that stuck out of its back.
          They stared at each other for a second more, then the creature shook its head and geastured behind him. What? He started to turn, but before he could finish, a blast of fire engulfed him. There was a second's pause in which he could do nothing but marvel at the beauty of the flames. Marvel at the swirls of color, wonder at the nebula that swirled around him. "They were wrong," he realized " They said that fire was orange." Around him, a whole rainbow swirled. Rust red, sunset orange, a type of yellow that humans could never name, that was the color of the sun itself. He could even see sparkles of purple and silver. He smiled. When was the last time he smiled, truly smiled? It had to be before the apocalypse, before becoming a scientist. Did he smile when he had worked at a gas station? No, the last time he had smiled was when he was a child, still ignorant. Wasn't his life supposed to flash before his eyes? All he could feel was was contentment, though there probably should have been pain.  The last thing he saw were a pair of eyes, looking distinctly reptilian.
          David Moore crumbled into ash. "Come, Kulkuran."  Kieran said, and with that, both took off into the sky, without sparing a single glance at the pile of ash that was all that remained of the last human.

Hello people who are reading this story. If you have read this far, I commend you. How do people write stories tens of thousands of words long? As of now, y'all are probably wondering how this chapter is related to the story. FYI, this is the prologue.