Ok, before we begin, I'd like to clear a little something up. See, I've been getting a lotta calls and
the voice mails and e-mails have just been piling up and clogging up the cable lines, and I think the
mail man's gonna use the next sack of mistaken fan mail he has to truck to my house to brain me,
so let's get one thing straight for all the terribly confused people out there: I am not, repeat, NOT
Brian Jacques. I have never been Brian Jacques, nor will I ever become Brian Jacques. As such a
person other than Brian Jacques, I do not own the Redwall series, "Seven Strange and Ghostly
Tales", or the town of Liverpool (altho I soon will own that, and o so much more of the
world....). Hell, I'm not even British; I'm a high school student of German descent who thinks
she's a Japanese cat-girl, among other things....
So, now that that matter's been clarified, or at least I desperately hope, read what you will &
praise or bitch about it how you will.
(Sorry, only the prologue's done as of yet, & I have no idea how many chapters I'm gonna write,
but not to fear - they will definitely get longer & presumably get better; we'll just see where the
twisted pathways of my mind lead us. "Us" being Me, Myself, and the invisible moose that lives
underneath my window named Herve)

"No one could recall the Time of Awakening, the Dawning of a new age and evolution of
animal kind. The ancient records had either been lost or destroyed; even the Memories had been
forgotten over the thousands of years since the humans had instilled them in the first of their
successes.
Ages in the past, before the time of intelligent beasts, before the time science and religion
recognized as the beginning of their development, human kind was coming to the end of its reign
as the top, most intelligent species on the face of the planet. Humans, the creatures of fantasy and
long-forgotten folklore, the antagonists of long-banned fairy tales, the monsters that still keep a
few children whose parents dare to speak of them awake and shivering at night. They had walked
the Earth, discovered fire, music, language, and technology. They had had families, and had
known what it was to love. They had traded on a worldly scale. They had kept their system of
dating, which they termed Before Common Era and Common Era, or B.C.E. and C.E., on a
highly scientific basis, and yet based the years they had on the birth of one of their most highly
regarded religious figures. Despite all of their good and reasonable qualities, they also fought
amongst their own kind, terrible wars, and created weapons of mass destruction, which a few
foresaw would ultimately lead to their downfall.
A secret network of human scientists began experimenting on animals, which at that time were
underdeveloped and unintelligent. The humans began tampering with nature, stimulating genes
and areas of the brain, making the animals more like them, in the hopes that when their nuclear
weapons brought on the apocalypse, they could leave a legacy of intelligent beings to start over
again, heal the scarred planet, and live in harmony with nature, their mother. The project soon
spread throughout all the human nations, under the very noses of their corrupted totalitarian
governments. The primates were of course the first, being the closest relatives to the humans.
However, too much genetic manipulation produced horrible monsters the humans themselves
never dreamed they could have evolved into. All experiments declared unfit for release were
disposed of, decimating the numbers of the chimpanzees and gorillas, and nearly wiping out the
last of the endangered orangutans. By the time the humans' techniques were perfected, they had
all but exterminated their cousin primates. Before they had brought their new order of animals up
to their level of intelligence and physical development, they had exterminated themselves. The
underground laboratories were abandoned for the service of the war-crazed governments; the last
human battle was fought; their civilization brought itself crashing down.
Animal kind arose from the ashes, altered only slightly in shape and intelligence, but armed
with the Memories of their human aids, stored in their brains and nearly incorporated with their
Instinct. The first fruit of these Memories was language, from which came organized society.
Animals developed rapidly from then on, far more rapidly than their human predecessors. Stories
of their true origins were soon disregarded for the teachings of religions and culture, the first
known examples of which were ironically of human origin, drawn from the Memories. After
technology and scientific thinking were discovered, animal kind began to resent and fear its
history with humans, believing that the Memories were a threat, giving the terrible knowledge of
nuclear destruction to any power-hungry individual with a sharp mind and a cruel will. Rulers and
governments quickly erased any traces of human existence they could find. Science and religion
worked together to alter records and impose teachings of faith that accounted for the history of
animal kind. A special minority who still retained the Memories were systematically rooted out
and eliminated. Yet for all their hard work, there were things and creatures looked over and
missed, voices of truth left unsilenced.


Chronicles:
The Legacy of Redwall