Once upon a time, there were six of them.

They were a strange bunch. A lawyer. An inventor and his wife. A businessman. A teacher and a NASA scientist. And they were friends.

That was how they were, before. It took them a year to meet and another to know each other. Mostly, the initial associations stemmed from Tia and Patrick. Tia met Jon, and worked with Patrick. Patrick (and by proxy, Amala) knew Lincoln. Lincoln was already friends with (and had a crush on) Abigail.

It's a small world, after all.

In the beginning, they were friends; the fact that they suddenly had powers no one could explain changed nothing (well, all of them did except two, but Tia and Patrick didn't mind). Abigail. Lincoln. Amala. Jon. What they could do defied physics and logic and simple biology, yet made an odd kind of sense, when paired to their user.

In the beginning, they saved lives. They stopped blood and death wherever they went. Through restless days and wakeful nights, they healed, rescued, and protected the weak. Sometimes, they failed, and instead brought closure to the living—gave them time to say goodbye and run for their lives. They tried so hard to be more than the darkness in them; to ignore the call for blood that sang in their veins; to silence the nightmares in their sleep.

In the beginning, they tried to remain as they were—friends.

Slowly, they changed.

A lawyer into a queen.

A businessman into a hunter.

A wife into a killer.

A teacher into an assassin.

In the end, most would be remembered for the dark inside of them. Calm waters tainted by slow, lazy swirls of red. Booming laughter muzzled, replaced by a silent predator, stilling the desperate crawl of the damned. A vibrant soul silenced, dulled to shadow.

In the end, only two lived to remember the way it was.