“First, you’re not what you think you are. You are a person, but not the person you think.
As a child, I could never have guessed that these things were real. I had always thought they were stories, superstitions people humored instead of ones that came truthfully. That they weren’t real. Bad People weren’t real. The people of Dwindle were all the same to me – the only ones different were Cartographers. Outsiders. People like you, sweetheart, and like your cousin Skate. People who were special.
All the other stories were just fables to me. I learned later that they actually had special names. Deviants. Great Deviants. Aios. Everything like that was something to keep people guessing about who your neighbors were. I thought it was just another lie for we of Dwindle to justify natural selection a little bit more. It made sense that way – for these legends to be stories.
But they weren’t stories. When I came of age, my mother told me who we were. How special we were. How the ‘Bad People’ weren’t really all that bad. I had thought it impossible at first. The Bad People were simply malevolent beings, the spawn of the magic of science, stories my mom had made up. I never knew they were real. I never thought that I could be one of them.
And it wasn’t just me. It was all of us. I, and all of my parents before me, was one of these beings. And I was also the last. I was the last in a very long line of attempt and failure at getting one of us successfully over that wall.
There were no more children, and she was too old to make more babies. She said the process of reproducing with humans also often resulted in complications for the mother, complications that sometimes resulted in an early inability to reproduce.
This was why I was an only child, she said. She’d had me, and that was it. I was the last chance. My father had gone, the previous Aio, but he’d perished at the mouths of the Horde. She’d been pregnant at the time, and had me without him. She was a human, nothing special, she said, but I was a half-breed. Special, like my father.
And so, it fell to me. So, like I was called to do, I grew old enough to marry, was lucky enough to fall in love, and went about immediately trying to produce an heir to this great and terrible legacy. My husband, also a human, found my mark on the night of our joining, and at first he hesitated.
When I went to explain everything to him, he just smiled at me and told me that it didn’t matter. He said, “Okay, let’s do this thing.”
And so, we did.”