A/U Notes: This is maybe my third revision of the Prologue, as I felt like it needed to be shorter...more like a preview. The larger half of it has been cut into its own chapter.
Prologue
"Ten years..."
A man stood on the edge of a precipice with his arms crossed. The dusk was warm but overcast, and he could feel perspiration beading on the back of his neck. He remained there for several minutes and observed the forest, which fanned out around his cliff for several miles. There was a town that slept at the very edge of its borders, and beyond that, only ocean.
His ears twitched. The tip of his tail curled.
"Ten years have passed, and the story is playing out again," he mused to himself, half-smiling. He closed his eyes and inhaled, taking in the sweet smell of an after-rain. "This is such an interesting place, though...quiet, undisturbed. Why here?"
The man's skin rippled with shivers, seemingly from the inside out. In one swift movement, he jumped into the air and somersaulted down into the woods. He landed with a great thud, with his knees bent and one of his fists buried into the dirt. His bright red eyes blinked. Without as much as a backward glance, he stood up and walked away with his hands in his pockets and humming a song like nothing had happened.
"New Bark Town..." he said. "Looks like I will not be travelling very far, after all."
He had received his orders from the overlord three nights before, and they were clear as rain:
1) To not say anything about this to any of the legendaries, and...
2) To let the Reawakening happen naturally.
The man huffed. That basically meant that there was nothing that could do for the meantime; he could wait around for something to happen. The Rewakening (as termed by the overlord himself) could happen that night, or it could happen two weeks from then. And whatever he felt like calling it...a rebirth, a renewal, it was all the same thing...
Someone was going to die.
And then they were going to wake up again.
The man smiled.
What a lucky individual, he thought.
End of Prologue