And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.” So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” And there was evening and there was morning – the fifth day.

And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

Those are the first verses in the Holy Bible and, though I was born centuries after those first days, they are also the beginning of my story.

In the twenty-first century, those creatures that people consider magical are all but extinct on earth. But in the first days of creation, magical creatures were just as abundant as the mundane animals. In those days, most wild animals possessed some kind of ‘magic’. But some had greater intelligence than others and it was those who later became creatures of legend.

I am among the offspring of those creatures. Back when wolves could still change their shapes at a thought, they were highly involved with the eastern dragons, who were the first dragons to use their intelligence to gain wisdom. Wolves and dragons had not only politcal relations, but also intimate relations. The result of those unions were the Canis Draconis. My clan.

We looked like wolves, except for the wings that sprouted from our backs, and we kept to ourselves. The other animals of the wild mocked us and said that we were unholy... an affront not just to God, but to nature as well. So we hid away, and were quickly forgotten.

As children of magic, we gained both our wolf-ancestors shape-changing abilities and our dragon-ancestors wisdom. In addition, we gained the gift of second sight. We could see the future, to a limited degree. The future we saw was dark.

A time of war came. A time when humans came to think dragons evil. When Angels walked the earth granting power to help eliminate the threat. Why God allowed this to happen is a question we have often asked of ourselves. But what we do know is that God did not sanction the attack. The Angels – jealous, perhaps – sought to destroy the mythical races.

They granted certain humans power, and those chosen ones hunted the dragons nearly to extinction. But they didn’t stop there. They went beyond dragons… began hunting unicorns, griffins, and all the other intelligent animals. It was a dark time and all of our voices raised up to God, asking for protection. We don’t know why He allowed the attacks, but we don’t hate Him for it. Only He knew what would definitely happen. And He did answer our prayers.

He created a second world. Just for us. Doorways opened all over the earth and the Great Migration began. We all went to the doors, and some humans with us. Humans who knew how to use magic. Humans who were being hunted.

The Hunters tried to follow, so a few of us remained behind. To protect the others. We led the Hunters away from the door. We kept them busy. And then the doors were closed. And only we had the power to open them.

The doors closed on us, and though we had a way to get through, those mythical creatures who stayed behind originally chose to stay behind indefinitely. We did not want to abandon our homes. Our lives here.

We opted to stay and continue to fight the Hunters. To protect those who couldn’t protect themselves. To lead those who had been left behind to the doors.

I was one of those who stayed behind. The last of my kind on earth, for all others left. I stayed, not for the protection of the Great Races. Not out of an unpaid debt. I stayed for the love of a human. For that love, I forsook my clan and took on the bipedal form more often than my true form.

For Love.

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