You called me a monster, a true monster, insane in every sense of the word.  Maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t, but if I’m a monster, then I’m a monster of your own making.  Yes, that’s right, Hawk. You are responsible for what I became. Because if you had never been there, if you had never joined the Guild, Mac wouldn’t have left to train you, wouldn’t have stopped hunting.  And I would never have been left alone to fall.

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What is man but a miserable pile of lies, made up of secrets, desires, emotions…  A fragile, fleshy body housing impulsiveness and selfishness. You think you’re a monster.  You think what you’ve done can in any way compare to me. You may have done terrible things—killed people, destroyed things, let loose that famous temper of yours—but to try and compare your tiny, insignificant failings with my pure insane genius?  That’s the basest self-servitude, and it suits you ill. You’re an amateur, playing at the big leagues. A child, an innocent, who thinks his tiny missteps can allow him to sit with the grown adults. Hawk, you are a fool in many, many ways, but you are nowhere close to the demon I became.

 

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I wasn’t the supreme specimen you saw and destroyed.  I was just a regular Hunter, just trying to do his job and move on, nothing special, nothing unique.  Mac was my partner, and all was right in the world. Revenants were confined, our case closure rate was up, and I had a partner worth a damn.  Then you came along. Stone pulled Mac off active Hunting to babysit you once you were out of entry-level training and I got saddled with an inexperienced, arrogant infant named Frederick Masso.  I called him Fred, and he hated it. We got along about as well as oil and water, and when he died on a case I was well rid of him. Or, I suppose, I would have been if he hadn’t gotten me killed as well.

 

The Revenant we were hunting had turned Lunatic, and was consuming his life energy when I confined it.  Somehow, they were both in the spell, both struggling with me for control. It blew up in my face, of course, and the next thing I knew I was pulling myself up off the floor and they were both piles of ash.  I had an orb in my hand and it had both red and green energy swirling in it. Somehow, I’d confined them both. I knew I couldn’t go back to the Guild Hall. I was dead, and a Revenant. That would have been signing my own termination warrant.  So, I left. Wandered around for a while trying to figure out what happened and how it all had gone so wrong. After a while I gave up on that, and started thinking about what it all meant. I’d never heard of a living person being confined in the same orb as a Revenant before, and I knew that it was significant.

 

You know what I was researching in that warehouse when you and Mac came to confront me.  Imagine what it would have meant if I’d succeeded. The human race would never again need fear death.  The confined could be put into new bodies, ready to go as soon as they woke up. And it’s not like new bodies would be hard to come by, or even to make.  Hunters would have been revered instead of reviled because it would be our skills that would allow the living to transfer themselves and survive. Endless power, wealth, prestige…  Fame and fortune and all of that. The world would be ours for the taking, and if a few homeless, destitute, or drug addicted low-life scum were lost in the process… Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

 

You said I was a monster.  Ha! You haven’t the slightest idea of what a monster truly is.  Yes, I took people and experimented on them. I knew it would never work with animals.  There would be no way for me to test if the consciousness was properly transferred with an animal since they can’t communicate.  I used whoever I could find: homeless bums, drug addicts and their dealers, prostitutes and their pimps, runaways and retards. I chose those who obviously wouldn’t be missed, drained the life from them, confined another and tried to transfer the energy from the orb into the newly deceased body.  No one was safe from the Lunatic Malchior. Men, women, children… Everyone had the potential to be a victim. Everyone had the chance to be my first success.

B

ut then you came along, with your incompetence and inexperience, and you dragged Mac along for the ride.  Yes, I killed him, but only because he got in the way. And he only got in the way because of you.

 

So, if I am a monster, it is because of you.  You, Hawk, the Lunatic Slayer. The youth whose fame was forged in the crucible of my destruction.  No matter what else happens in your life, no matter where you go and what you do, you will always have that hanging over you.  Everything I did, every murder I committed, every experiment I performed, every person I abducted, every pain I inflicted… It was all your doing.  Your fault. I am Malchior, the Dead Stalker, the monster, the Lunatic. I am what I am.

 

Because of you.