When I was young, my mother taught me things; things that no other mother had to teach her child.
My mother taught me to run. To race into the woods until my lungs burned and my legs felt like falling - to keep running even then. She taught me to sneak silently like the dead of night even when dried leaves were pressed onto the ground and crunched as I passed, to hide in plain sight, invisible to the merciless eyes of my hunters. She taught me swimming against currents and disappearing in tunnels of stone. She showed me how someone like myself could survive.
My mother taught me many things.
The greatest lesson was one she hadn't realized I had learned at all.
Amidst all that she had taught me - between her countless, tireless lessons - this one stuck out. Without ever meaning to, my mother taught me to fear what I was. She had wanted me to be ordinary, would've given anything for it if it meant that I would be safe. There was a time I wished that too. I had powers no one could dream of, do things that were impossible. I always could. No one would ever compare, and the knowledge that whatever they did could not affect me frightened them. I learned to fear myself before others could be afraid of me. I had to keep myself in control, and fear was the only way that they had ever shown me.
It wasn't the lesson she wanted me to learn.
All the same, it was the lesson that was ingrained into my very soul.