Monster's warning

Lone

Dancing flames flickered above thatched roofs. The blaze swept further, consuming the blacksmith's den. Among the screaming and the fleeting feet, I stared at the anvil; it was glowing like the weapon-destined billets it condemned to the forge. Once upon a time those weapons were used to hunt me.

The circumstances of my birth have always been a most curious mystery. I don't look like a human. I can't speak like a human. But from all the nights gazing longingly at soup kitchens and orphanages, I believe I think like one. My only other points of reference will always be woodland creatures, so in any case I've come to accept that humans are the closest I'll ever get to a 'kind'. But that acceptance wasn't mutual. On sight, a mob was rallied, and a monster nearly slain. That word they slung at me was what I came to know myself as: monster. But that's enough for pity. My hulking appearance and lengthy claws weren't my only dissimilarity to the humans. I had an ability. And a heart made for good.

The dark air swirled and pieces of the sky itself descended as burning embers of a slumbering giant. The screams had quietened now, the vitality of the fires populating the village. I moved from my stone. I still had time left where I could endure the heat. A falling beam nearly finished me for good though- the remains of the Kivici household almost doing job its patriarch could not. I peered into that burning living room and saw the family huddled together. Little eight-year-old Susie was in the middle. They'd long passed.

My first attempts failed the most miserably. Running into the village screaming and knocking things over was a bad idea. It was worse in execution the first time, and worse still by the fifth. Killing livestock yielded better results; two farming families moved away. But of my early spree what worked the best was what I did with the blood. I still pride myself with that work, draining and bottling the blood of all those pigs and cows. I would kidnap small children. Not for long, of course, and no harm would come to them. But when a parent walks into their child's empty room and sees literal gallons of blood, I don't fault them for assuming the worst. Usually four days was the sweet spot for families moving away after a kidnapping, at which point the child would wander back, terrified but unscathed.

I couldn't take it anymore. I'd seen enough of my birthplace, and my home. It was brighter than ever but I just wanted to fall into the darkness of any normal night. I wanted to see small lights in the distance, smell the cooking's of the village and hear some cheerful, tearful, drunk man singing in the distance. At that moment, though, sense was my enemy. Madness has a way of flipping your own cards over on you. I trudged over to the treeline on the other side of town, and looked back onto the village I'd called mine. It was frozen in time, never to be experienced again.

My last ditch effort to save the most stubborn villagers was the 'lake'. I'd discovered I could breath underwater, and coupled with my precognition I could tell where the hot springs would arise. When the humans inevitably settled further up the mountain, I was waiting. When they swam in the lake, I was watching and I made them know it. But I could never bring myself to kill a single one of them. Even if it meant saving them all. My claws remained clean and as such the blood of the the entire village soils my hands.

I loved them. But in the end, I was the only survivor born of Mt. Ho.

The volcano.