Butcher Bird

SIXTEEN The Birth of Monsters

When the world began, there were no such things as monsters. Demons were just fallen angels who, booted out of Heaven and bored with Hell, wandered the Earth sticking little girls’ pigtails in inkwells and sinking the occasional continent.

The word monster didn’t really exist until the Spheres separated and the humans and beasts in the First Sphere forgot about their brethren in the other Earth realms.

In fact, most of what people call monsters are at least partly human. Many are the offspring of Romeo and Juliet encounters between mortals and races from the other Spheres. The first monster was the offspring of a man, Chrysaor, and Nyx, the snake queen. Their daughter, Lilith, was the first of the Lamia race. When she fell in love with another human, Umashi, and created the long-nosed Tengus. It wasn’t just humans coupling with the older races. Earth was a romantic free-fire zone before the Spheres split. Old races mated with the new ones, which created still newer races, new cultures, new myths and new possibilities. Later, when mortals only saw the other races of the Earth in their dreams, they called these long-forgotten siblings monsters.

Of course, mortals weren’t always tops on the invitation list for parties, either. A number of animal races, especially the ones in the oceans and air, didn’t regard humans as truly sentient beings and considered mating with them to be the grossest kind of bestiality. This generally low opinion of humanity was widespread in the outer Spheres and didn’t change for thousands of years, until certain mortal stories trickled out to the hinterlands. Gilgamesh, for instance, was quite a hit with the swamp kings and lords of the air. Other stories of reluctant heroes and reborn champions, characters such as Prometheus and the trickster Painted Man, elevated humanity in the eyes of the other races because in all those stories the heroes die or give up some core part of their being for their people. That humans could grasp the idea of self-sacrifice was big news in the outer Spheres. Humanity was cut some sorely needed slack from races that previously regarded them as a kind of chatty land krill.

Of course, while the creatures of the outer Spheres no longer thought of humans as vermin, they didn’t really want to live next door to one, either.