At the dawn of each new age, the destined one is born. A single child called to greatness as lone protector of the world. Only they possess the skill to defend against the Rogues; the superhuman, the mutant, and the wild. With drive and strength they will stop the spread of their destruction and render humankind safe once again.
This child is the Hunter.
PREFACE
Before she was a teenage juvenile; before she became the Girl from the Outside – the Fall of the Wild and One Lone Protector, the Hope, the Hunter, and the Hero, born as the hundredth and dying a little more each day – she was just a little girl from Alaska. A girl named normal.
But it was she, in the end, who said the thing most wrong with little girls is that they're far too afraid to die. For when war is your life – battle, your passion – death becomes hardly more than an unfortunate outcome. And fear, nothing but a memory. She'd known that since she was sixteen, of course. But it had taken until today for her to realise what it all really meant.
So when "the end" finally came about on that frozen summer evening, she was ready. Death, after all, was her freedom.
In her final moments, all she could think about were two things. The first was stupid and funny and the perfect picture of her life in a nutshell: her mother saying she was forbidden to kill in the house, and how that made everything so much more difficult when she did and got blood stains in the expensive sheepskin rug. The second was much simpler:
It's me or you.
She had often wondered over these past weeks whether that was life's whole purpose; one question, one answer; living in the fallout of a choice: yourself, or someone else? One, or two. Reliable, or reliance. Knowing, or trusting. Destiny, or love.
And as she bled out, looking into his eyes; the eyes of hope – the eyes of the boy who'd spent half his life loving her more than he could say, and the other cursing the day she was born – she didn't regret her own choice for even a second. But she couldn't help wishing there hadn't been a choice in the first place.
She knew that if she hadn't let herself succumb to Auke Bay, she wouldn't be lying there at the end of the road. She knew that if she'd never come across the Rogues, she'd be a normal teenage girl. But what she knew most of all, is that if she'd never found out about those unexplainable champions, she'd never have found him. She couldn't, even for a second, be sorry about that. Now, there was her heart, beating in his hand, exposed and slowing for the world to see, crimson seeping through the Summer Ball dress she'd been so annoyed to wear.
You see, the lines between good and bad, us and them, the hunter and the hunted are so often unclear. But it's always sad when a hero fades away. That is, she thought, if she ever really was a hero in the first place.