'Tis true my form is something odd,
But blaming me is blaming God;
Could I create myself anew
I would not fail in pleasing you.
If I could reach from pole to pole
Or grasp the ocean with a span,
I would be measured by the soul;
The mind's the standard of the man.
—poem used by Joseph Merrick (aka: the Elephant Man) to end his letters, adapted from "False Greatness" by Isaac Watts.
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Prelude
Blessed are those that bestow the miraculous wonder of life to the world, but damned are those that slander it by attempting to reverse the irreversible—the undiscovered realm that is death.
One such damned soul was none other than the legendary young alchemist...Ah, no, I cannot reveal too much. Such a thing may ruin any nasty surprises I have in store.
Moving onwards...
He brought life not to a once living body, but to an entirely different entity altogether. On the night the full moon glowed a red like a putrid bloody eyeball, another species of being took its first haggard breath in the confines of a darkened shack encompassed by black mountains and the heavens.
But only a few months later, both creature and creator vanished from the face of the earth, and neither has been seen since.
Now, dear reader, we must leave the past in its uncertain misty cosmos, and look to the future at hand. For, while the abhorred alchemist ceased to raise his shameful sinner's head from the dirt into which he had so seemingly buried himself into, his wretched creature was brought back into the eyes of the world that it at once prayed to be taken out of, but with no escape.
And so begins our merry tale, although I have to admit it's far from such. Oh, the joys of sarcasm.
Here and now you shall hear the story of the alchemist's creature, the being never meant to exist yet did so regardless, and the boy who gave such an empty living hell wholesome meaning that encapsulated and transformed everything the creature could have ever once dreamed of in those desolate nights alone from ghoulish nightmares to a very real, wonderful life.
But others would not lie down and allow the creature this happiness. People with plans, ambitions, objectives. They wanted something from the creature. Something precious—so much so that the very borders of life and death became marred and uncertain with its unprecedented powers.
Something the creature possessed.
Ah, I should probably stop calling him that. Yes, you heard me—'him'. The being Hohenheim created had a name. That name I shall not reveal as yet, but he certainly had an identity. A species title that for centuries he alone carried.
That wonderful, mystical being...
Homunculus.