Since Forever

Chapter 0.5

Time was unimportant to me. My first memory was at the beginning of the era of humans. When humans were animals in all forms and shapes. They hunted and lived in filth. They had no common sense other than survival. Death was common among all of them.  They died in many ways. Most of disease, others of hunger. 

Being an animal in the wilderness was no different than what a wildcat or dog would do in what you count as the present. We hunted, we moved, we slept. Parental figures were almost non-existent. What I counted as love back then, was abuse. What I counted as teaching, was parental abandonment. My mother loved me, I knew that. My father died young, he loved me, I knew that. Now, what they did was not love.

The minds of the early humans were blank of all thought. The voices you would hear as you talked to yourself did not exist. Concepts as emotion, basic sciences, civilized life and basically everything was foreign.  You would think that with almost everything gone that they were hardly described human, but they were humans. Humans before the human race even started. Before the human race was the dominant species. They got angry before they knew what anger was. They got hungry before they even knew what hunger was. They knew some basic knowledge before a language could define them. 

This is where I was born and this is where I had lived. 

I was six when my first memory starts. My mom was decrepit. Time was not good for her as her posture died down to the floor and her body turned old and rusty. She was 30 at the time, but age and a calendar wasn't something that existed, so I can't confirm. I was cradled on her back, too long to be a normal child, but still a child in their eyes. We were alone in the forest as she moved forward without much grace. She moved slow, tripped over her own step multiple times, and losing balance with every inch passed. It was clear that disease was crawling her down to the lowest step. 

My eyes were not looking forward with the usual childish excitement that came with being a human child. My eyes were glued to the forest surrounding us.  Something was giving me chills. Intuition and instincts that normally flowed into my system seemed to recognize something in this forest. In this vast forest. 

This memory seemed to hold no significance. I was a child and I was moving through the world like any other. But I did see something in that forest. Something I was curious about. Now you must know, curiosity was a foreign thing. Something for the outcasts of the human groups. Something that was only given to 1% of our small population. 

I saw our competition. The other creatures that moved through the earth like a crawling worm infecting ever place that existed. They took our food, killed our people, and destroyed our makeshift homes. Of course, hate was normal, but I didn't find any hate in this one. 

The eyes that followed me seemed to find no interest in hurting us. In stealing our food. In destroying our path. He just followed and stared and growled a few times. My mother never noticed him as we continued through the world. He always appeared as he followed us on our trek. The world seemed to be only trees.

That day was the first time when I finally noticed him. His long towering figure like he was more powerful than us and the eyes that seemed to not want to hurt a creature below him. He growled, I'm sure, but mom never noticed.  I noticed and we did some staring competition sometimes when I knew he was there. I was curious. What was this creature doing? 

He disappeared soon afterward.  Not a very significant memory, but one of my first. 

It has been almost 23 centuries since then.