Prologue

It happened over two hundred years ago. During the second world war when everything changed. It wasn't the war that made things into the way they were now, it was the aftermath of it. Millions dead, entire countries continued to burn, the whole planet was desecrated, stained by the evil of humankind.

We were like a plague draining the life from our world. Some say that's why they came. Like our own plagues and diseases there were cures, and in their own way the FirstBourne was a remedy sent from the depths of earth itself to set it back on course.

At least that would've been the case if they hadn't started a war of their own against humanity. One we weren't ready for.

It only took a few years before the FirstBourne, Echoes we call them, completely overran humankind and enslaved us as toys, labor, or worse… Food. They were similar to vampires in that way, they only saw humanity as a source. Not an equal.

And for decades that's how we lived. Cattle for these human monstrosities. Living, breathing, and dying into servitude. But humanity is purely itself and we fought back, we started winning in some ways. While they had otherworldly abilities we were like billions of rats gnawing at a pride of lions. Yes they would obliterate a couple thousand, maybe hundreds of thousands, but soon they'd fall to the tide. The overwhelming force of humanity.

They proposed a treaty and we of course took it. Better to live equally then either species go extinct fighting. And so, humans were given freedom albeit to a very limited extent. The earth was barely habitable then, it's not much better now, but they built vast great cities where humans and Echoes could live together peacefully. While the Echoes of course were the nobility and ruled over their individual city states, for the first time in decades people could say they were wholeheartedly free to live and die as they pleased. It was the closest we would ever have to what once was…

But within these pages that I write now, I leave as a memoir. Maybe an epitaph for the person I once was. Maybe so I can remember that life. But I should start from the beginning; that's where all good stories start.