Dust

PROLOGUE

"There are monsters out there."

It's a sentence I'm used to hearing. It's a sentence that the lot of us live by. Its words are passed down from generation to generation and so forth, so that our children know it and our children's children know it. It's said so much, even, that the fear we derive from it is only a large familiarity now.

The thought of these "monsters" lurk over our lives, lumbering shadows that seep into our brains and sometimes make us forget anything else. We may walk the streets with eyes that flash different colors, with catlike grace, with the air of studied fearlessness, but apprehension never leaves us. I didn't know it was all a lie. I didn't.

Of course I had heard that out there, somewhere, there was a people that were different from us. Maybe they spoke a different language. Maybe they looked different. Maybe they didn't act the same as us here. And, for some reason, this was enough to inspire that sentence, to inspire that fear that lived in each of our chests, whether vacant or not.

I thought it was myth. I told my mother she was crazy when she told me stories about the monsters, about how they were ruthless and didn't care about anyone but themselves. It was a fairy tale to me.

That is, until that summer night. I don't know when I realized it, exactly. I don't know when the moment came that I had to stop and catch my breath, that I had to think: Oh wow. Wow.

There was a moment that I realized that everything I had ever known was skewed. What originally was reality turned to falsity, and original falsity turned to truth, in too short of a second.

That was the night I met one of the monsters, and the ground shook and fell from underneath my feet.