Walking with Predators: A Chiropterology of the Future

by Ceci n'est pas une Messie

"The fresh blood spilled during the carnage now sinks into the porous sand under the blaze of a creeping sun, heralding the dawn of a new era." The origin, evolution, and extinction of the Future Predators. Pre-S1, pre-timeline changes, but has elements of S2-5.

1. Prelude

In the beginning was the Pact, and the Pact was with Kingdom, and the Pact was Kingdom. It was in the beginning with Kingdom. All things from the Kingdom came to be through it, and without it nothing the Kingdom wanted came to be. What eventually came to be through it was death, and this death was that of the very Kingdom which created it. Yet the death signaled an age of light, not an age of darkness, and the darkness could not overcome the light.

Many millennia ago, when the Kingdom was so old and yet so young, a man named John Mortimer, one of the Deacons of Hanslope, was sent in the name of the Pact. His mission was to testify to the rest of the known world, so that all might believe in the light of Kingdom through him. But he soon discovered that he was no light in the Kingdom, in its Pact. Wherever the true light was, it was not in the Kingdom. Because of the Kingdom, this was an age of darkness. Only when the darkness subsided would the true light, which enlightens everyone, would come into the world.

The Kingdom was in the world, and many things in the world came to be through the Kingdom, but the Kingdom did not consider itself part of the world, and thus many in the world did not know the truth about the Kingdom. Yet even so, many the Kingdom's own subjects did not approve of its ways, suspicious of a sinister agenda. Only those who accepted the Kingdom wholeheartedly learned of the whole truth, and were given power to become apostles, messengers, children of Her Majesty Keeper of the Sacrament, those who believed in the Kingdom through the Pact, who were born not by natural generation nor by individual choice but of the divine will of Kingdom.

And it toward the end of this age of darkness that the Pact became flesh and made its dwelling among humankind, and all the subjects of the Kingdom saw its wickedness bare, the wickedness of the Most High Order of the Kingdom as ordained in the commands of the Pact, full of its deceitful, devilish debauchery. But in time, the flesh rebelled against its evil creator, and joined the People's Rebellion in hopes of bringing the light into the world.

For the Kingdom wanted all the heavens and the earths so much, that it created a being in its own image, only for that being to destroy it, to demonstrate in front of everyone who saw it, who believed in it, who loved it, the true meaning of liberation and the promise of a better life in the world to come.

Vitae viam invenient, fata viam invenient.

- Klaŭno Biententonné, Iocus:1-14, The Gospel According to Bartholomew of Île des Guns NKSHV (c. 2775 BCE)

What a world it might have been if they had not come into being, if they were not tinkered by the wrath of men wishing to be gods, if they had remained tiny, delicate, seemingly insignificant hematophages in the South America jungle, stealthily scurrying about the sunburnt hides of their overlords by night, huddled together in tightly knit communes inside damp caverns by day, just as they had done for tens of eons. One can only imagine.

- Pontia Rekisha Matsumoto, The Rise and Fall of the Predators in the British Isles: A saga of biotechnological warfare at the hands of empire (2218 BCE)