(A/N): Sorry for this being a few days late! I've been so busy, as I had to do this project for a class, and then I had to finish another project, and I have to edit this video, and then... the list goes on.

And on top of that, I had a draft for the first chapter written AND typed, but, of course WordPad couldn't save the thing! Of course not!

Fuck it. Moving on.

Once again, I'm not a biology major. I don't want to be, either. No offense, biology majors, but if I did that, I would be expected to follow my dad's path and go to medical school for general medecine, and so I want to stay as far away from that as I can. I couldn't stand being a doctor (no matter how much money I would make).

So, after that long rant: I picked a suitable species (modern, but assuming the lifetime of the subspecies I've chosen is around 10 million years or so (Wikipedia can be handy, but its reliabilty is crap) it... could be accurate. Assuming Wikipedia is right about that, and that Lake Toba formed around 77,000 years ago in a giant, extremely deadly explosion, Sumatran [redacted] (Such a simple term... I love it) should have been around then.

Read now. Okay?

CHAPTER ONE: SUNDOWN

Lake Toba.

It's such a fun name.

Lay-uk Toe-bah.

It was the place where I would finally kill him.

He had been my enemy for a long time. Millions of years.

Ever since I first found the first lair of the first one I ever saw.

He had killed me once.

But I am a resilient soul.

He would come to kill me soon.

It was a new lake. Only a few hundred years old.

This body does not remember its creation.

My new body is better prepared for this battle.

More intelligent. Bigger. Stronger. Fiercer. Faster.

More dangerous.

I would kill him here.

I would.

His blood would taste good.

I look back at what I had assembled.

Their teeth gnashing, their claws shining in the little remaining sunlight there was in the cover of the jungle.

One hundred tigers, all like me.

I growl in triumph.

I sneak up on a snake slithering through the jungle vines. I rip its head off for fun, swatting the head away from me with my paw. I eat the body, slurping it down my throat.

I have alerted them.

I bear my teeth, anticipating the battle ahead.

I roar to the sky.

The enemy is here.

So is he.

As the sun sets, the bloodshed begins.

I bite the face of a kimatine and watch the blood flow.

I drink it and move on to a new victim.

I have brainwashed my underlings. They do what I say.

They bite to kill and drink their fill.

Rhymes are fun.

Many casualties have been counted on both sides.

There's not as many on our side as I would have thought – about twenty percent of our force can still fight.

They fight hard, the psychephages, but they do not fight hard enough. They fight to injure and not to kill; they need to make sure that enough of us are still alive so that they can feed forever.

I can't let that happen.

Sunrise.

The fight disappates, waiting for the night to begin.

Each side waits in the darkness of the jungle. An occasional unlucky thing may be injured, but otherwise the jungle is silent.

The birds do not call, the rivers run quieter than they are supposed to. The whole jungle is reduced to a silent, unmoving, dead landform, a twitch of leaves or the pitter-patter of small feet on the forest floor being the only movement.

I wait for more blood.

I wait for battle.

In the jungle, the head of a snake begins to decompose.

First the small insects come along, taking a look at and eating tiny bits off of the snake head. Its glittering scales slowly begin to lose their luster as it becomes a black, writhing mass, covered with black flies and mosquitoes and other evils that begin to eat its eyes.

They get in its mouth and burrow through the roof, filling its nose with the congestion and heat that can only come off of hundreds of small, moving bodies, mammilian or not.

Eventually, a bird, one of the many currently silent creatures in the jungle, comes along and takes the head up in its mouth, insects and all, and swallows it, where the head will begin a slow digestive process.

The snake is gone.

(A/N): Once again, sorry that this thing is extremely late.

I hope you enjoyed all the same. There will be at minimum one more chapter for this installment, and then the real fun begins, where I get to go inside the Stormcrow and take a look at its insanity and how it influenced the characters without them knowing it was there.

Two books from now I will have some fun.

Four books from now... well, the ending of the final one is, depending on who you are, predictable. Marquis Carabas knows more than anyone about it, and he still probably doesn't know what's going to happen.

Yes, it's going to be a fuckload of fun, but if I didn't have a reputation that would state the ending before I begin... then it would be more fun XP