Disclaimer: I own nothing, well certainly nothing substantial---
I. Hope
From the moment I awoke, from the very moment I began, I knew that something was wrong. It wasn't something I could find within my own form. Pale skin was near flawless and silken dark hair that lay unfettered over my face, shadow-less, never concealing my painfully green eyes. It wasn't logical, really it wasn't, even as I stared in wonder at my stainless hands, there was nothing to validate my claim. Still, this feeling it wasn't something brought on by the environment, though cruel, as it would later become. It was a prison, but somehow I had known. It was me that was wrong. Despite my newfound strength, and near imperceptible speed, it did little to reassure me. Life was simple in those days, far too simple. It gave a person; well it gave me, far too much time to think.
Day in, day out, the routine was the same. Fight. Learn. Fight again, throwing in the occasional feed when they wished. The reprieve from battle training was small however, just out of apparent necessity more than any real desire for education. I was taught to speak, read, and write in basic terms---useless as it was at the time. They never taught us what was important. Instead, what I learned was far simpler… to kill. I would kill, and I would survive, or so I was told. This was the only way. Wrong or not, survival was all that mattered. I did as commanded… I didn't really know any better.
It couldn't have been long, not in the scope of things, in my time there, before I became aware of them, all around me, breathing, existing beside me. Separate, but so identical. My kind, my kin, eyes the same as mine, but kept from each other. I didn't know their names, and I couldn't possibly imagine their faces, but always I felt them. I wonder now if our creators were afraid even then, that they kept us apart so diligently, or was that just a more effective training method? We never knew. Cold walls separated us from each other, how many of us there were at the time… I don't even know. My brothers and sisters---the Sif, as we were later called--- we were all alike, ideal killers, each of us. Obedient. Deadly. Perfected. Or so we thought. Even our creators were fooled…
The Thorn began. I never bore witness to it, not at the time, but the shock and horror it so rapidly rendered was no different than the plague it brings upon us now. We didn't have to see it to know. The whispered word of the guarded men in lab coats and the armored men in the training facility, all of it was enough. The cries that echoed into our own individual cells were enough. Flawed. Imperfect. We were dying, and one at a time this bizarre sickness began to kill. Never once did they seem to try and stop it. Never for a lesser creature as ourselves. Never once for their dolls. All the while each death poisoned my system. We feel it you know, when one of us falls… a sudden coldness within our blood. As time slipped by in its painful consistency, something inside of me changed---
As I sat alone in my tiny cell, something exploded, tearing me, screaming for some unknown salvation. This couldn't be all there was. We couldn't be something so disposable. How was it that we were used so? Everyday. Never ending. No questions and no truth. Why was it that we were shown no fate greater than this apparent death? The fight began than, just within me, infected every cell of my body with its desperate cry. Hope? What was it? What stopped us from seizing it before? My brothers, my sisters, my only kin…we had to fight. If it was only for a simple chance we had to try. Could things be any worse away from here than in this facility? We had to escape those steel cages, what we only knew as a doomed life. It seemed I was the first to speak up, but it shouldn't have meant anything. Not really.
I wasn't any kind of leader. But for some reason--- they listened to me…