Everything has a place in nature.
Stars, planets, plants, animals and humans all have their place in nature.
It isn't just them however, all things have their place in nature and that includes the monsters, spirits, gods and other entities that inhabit realms existing outside and parallel.
Humans though, humans have always been dissatisfied with our place, humans have always resisted our place. It started the first time a caveman realised he could use fire to stay warm, make clothes from the flesh of their prey, fashion weapons from their bones and the stones.
The moment we realised that humans didn't need to settle simply for what we were born with and our place in nature, we decided to make our own place even if it meant resisting something as unfair as the natural order.
The moment we realised we could have more and be more, we turned our backs on such ideas.
Unfortunately for us, we had no idea what consequences that course of action would earn.
Cavemen kept learning, kept evolving and with every discovery, every inspired idea we removed ourselves more and more from the natural order.
Unbeknownst to us, our actions had been noticed from the start. Those beings inhabiting realms beyond and alongside ours had noticed immediately, but were lucky enough that they were considered to be a curiosity.
Over time however, that good luck began to run out and ever slow slowly over thousands of years, factions began to form in those realms that argued over humanity's fate.
At first it was decided they should nurture and guide the humans.
The most powerful beings of physical form, the Elder-gods and Aspects, the eldest children of the Laws from which all things and nothings stemmed from began to raise the humans like parents teaching children right from wrong.
Humans are stubborn though, rarely heeding lessons or advice that they don't see elevating them above their current station.
Over time, this stubbornness turned to outright defiance.
In the end, those beings beyond our realm abandoned it as a lost cause, but that was only to debate the most fitting punishment for a race that defied beings that stood at the top of the hierarchy.
It took centuries to come to a decision, but in the end enough Gods, Spirits and Aspects agreed that extinction was the best choice that those who didn't couldn't interfere haphazardly.
It came to be known as Incursion day, the day almost half of human society was demolished, the day when demons, monsters and other beings of myth and legend proved their own existence in a horrifying display of supernatural fury that brought thousands of years of evolution and discovery to an instant, bloody end.
The beings weren't entirely unknown, the beings had crossed on occasion when the Aspect who embodied space grew to encompass the ever expanding universe and temporary gaps opened up like muscle fibres tearing and repairing, or when curiosity grew too strong.
Things were witnessed and connections made, which led in turn to stories being written or verbally spread.
The horror of facing it though was unimaginable and yet humans are stubborn.
Every time humans were faced with their place, they rebelled against it and over their thousands of years several had mutated on a level beyond natural evolution and encroached into the realm of the supernatural.
Most such beings had perished in ages where wars spanned continents in feudal savagery or even ascended under blessings of higher beings who had taken a liking to them.
Others had simply blended in and endured.
Thanks to those who had endured, humanity was not defenceless and those lucky enough to be near where they resided found themselves defended unintentionally or otherwise.
This brought time however.
That time was used by those who had other ideas to enact their plans, one such being was an Aspect of insanity, one who had found amusement in the games humans played and the entertainment they offered.
One who, in his madness, thought the best way to end the fighting, might be for everyone to simply play a game together.
When his plan came to fruition, it brought the violence to an almost immediate end, one which proved to merely be the calm before the storm as his game levelled the playing field between man and monster.
The instant the game began, everyone over the age of ten saw the same thing.
[SYSTEM INITIALISING, PLEASE WAIT...]
What followed was humans with powers able to summon and form pacts with otherworldly creatures, some who possessed the strength of dozens, some who were prone to fits of inspiration and catapulted innovation decades beyond what humanity had seen at its peak.
The moment the otherworld entities realised that however, they saw it as an abrupt and absolute abandonment of the natural order.
The Aspect of madness and those working with him had become a boogeymen to even the most powerful gods, so in their rush to see the natural order restored, they initially tried to see their original plan fulfilled.
Unlike the previous time however, some thought it might anger their new boogeymen to end the game so unfairly and those who had been acting to only bring it to a quick end now saw things in a different light.
Fox-spirits in the East, began teaching humans with the capacity to learn, how to utilise magic and supernatural forces.
Others used divine authority to claim territory and simply omitted themselves from the situation altogether, more concerned with preserving the planet or specific groups or locations than getting involved in a war that wouldn't benefit anyone in the end.
Then just as quickly as it had resumed, the fighting came to an almost absolute ceasefire.
There were still incursions, but they seemed limited to where humans had grown too numerous and came to an end almost immediately after the local population had been culled.
To avoid those instances humans took to the stars, no one really knew how they had been made or even who made them, but suddenly people started being evacuated from Earth up to enormous space stations equipped with everything humans needed to survive and gradually repopulate.
Eventually some humans even began breeding with some of the more social otherworldly entities, which in turn led to humans repopulating quickly and growing stronger and stronger with each passing day.
A governmental body was born, named the committee, they dictated the operations and procedures of the new human society.
Despite that, for whatever reason, they refused to take everyone onboard and left the Earth littered with small isolated human settlements that survived by hunting the smaller monsters that had devoured and replaced the Earth's old ecosystem.
They survived in shanty towns, learning bit by bit how to coexist with whatever otherworldly being had laid claim to the land they called home. Some such beings were tyrants who would occasionally smite the residents in fits of rage, but others were agreeable enough if you respected their authority and made the effort to learn the local rules.
A thousand years after incursion day, one such place was home to a small settlement of around fifteen people. There had been more, but a family gave birth to triplets and pushed the settlement over its population cap.
What followed was obliteration, the foreboding orange glow of an incursion gate bathed the structures in foreboding light and the residents in abject despair. Fifty killed in one night by a pair of chimeras straight out of legend. Bearing three head, one a lion, one a goat and one a serpent which grew as its tail.
Burning the settlement to ashes and devouring the fallen, those left were broken and just waiting to follow the others into death by the time the chimera finally retreated into the gate and it shit behind them.
Those left could do nothing but look around at the wreckage of their once comforting home, most were so crushed they simply wished for the chimeras to return and finish what they had started.
Suddenly those wishes turned to regret as the still burning ruins were bathed in blue light, that regret quickly turned to confusion however.
Incursion gates were always an orange colour with red hues, as though the gates were holes punched into a normally imperceptible being and actually a visible wound that had been punched into it.
So the fact this new light was blue left them all wondering what fresh horror was appearing, it wasn't close, shining from some ruins of the lost civilisation about five hundred metres from their location.
It was brief and died away after a few moments, all but a single woman had gathered to discuss it, but as that woman stood separate a sound touched her ears.
It was faint, but she wasn't entirely human and a tone of grief reached her, her eyes widened and she took off at full speed towards it. She had barely made it twenty metres before one of the survivors tackled her to the floor.
"Let me go! I hear it! There's a baby crying over there!"
"Alisha! Stop! It's probably just a creature luring you in!"
The man held her pinned, desperate not to see anyone else die so soon, but she was frantic and even more desperate to save the crying child.
"Let her go! If she still has the strength to hope, then we have no right to stop her."
"But there's creatures in those ruins, she'll never survive, you know that!"
His objections didn't matter as the woman, Alisha, twisted and elbowed him in the face before clambering to her feet and sprinting off to reach the child.
The fourteen other survivors stood silent, already mourning her as she ran into the distance, guided by the piercing cries of the infant.
When she finally drew near she heard soft guttural groans under the crying and took cover in the remnants of a tight alleyway. She wanted to save the child, but acting recklessly would see them both dead, so she slowly poked her head around to take a peek.
She saw a lumbering four-legged creature with no discernable features apart from a large gaping mouth.
"A gluttonous-shifter? I should be able to outrun it..." She pulled her head back and got her breathing under control, then emerged and dashed round the corner before coming to an immediate halt. "...I don't believe it."
Gluttonous-shifters were a creature that could change the composition of their bodies to anything they had consumed, they were social creatures but had as much an appetite for human as every other creature seemed to.
Yet what she saw as she turned the corner was an entire pack of them seemingly adopting a human baby.
She could scarcely believe her eyes, they had changed themselves to have human skin and formed a bed for the child to rest on, whilst others slowly gathered to form a hard wall around them like a protective wall.
Nothing about it made sense and it made Alisha stumble dazed towards them, completely overcome with her own curiosity.
The moment she got too close however, one of the creatures charged and knocked her to the ground, but just as it closed in to finish the job it was halted by the baby's cries and returned to its post.
Alisha picked herself up, wondering why they were so protective of the child. "Please, let me take the child. It seems you want to keep the child safe, but you won't be able to keep them nourished and help them grow..."
She stopped suddenly, not sure why she even thought she could get through to them and thought herself a fool for trying. As she did however, the gluttonous-shifters began making that guttural noise even more as though talking to one another, then those forming the bed stood carefully to keep the baby from falling.
The wall opened up and let them through as they came to a halt next to her as she stared in astonishment, unable to grasp what was happening as they offered her the child like a treasure resting on a cushion.
Carefully, she leaned down and scooped up the babe in her arms, then promised the creatures she'd take good care of the child she now knew was a boy as she bundled him into her own ragged clothes to keep him warm.
She then turned to leave before they remembered their instincts, her heart skipping a beat when one lumbered in front of her at top speed to stop her from leaving.
It seemed to bow before waving one of its feet back to where they had been resting, Alisha turned back to see one of the others carrying something in its mouth towards her.
She knelt down carefully as she warily grabbed the object, but when it released the item and she saw it was a book, the shifters all tuned to stone and charged off in different directions at top speed.
"Are they trying to draw attention away from us? You're a very special child, aren't you my little Reaga?" Alisha looked at the book quickly, then decided to head back while anything else around would be distracted by the shifters.
She made her way back to the still burning settlement like a woman trying to keep a bubble safe in a hurricane, everyone in disbelief when she arrived.
"Alisha!? How!?"
She thought for a second, it was all too incredible. If she told the others what had happened, they might consider him a bargaining chip or worse a threat.
"I got lucky, only a couple of shifters in the area that were all hard and slow. I found this realm gate orphan where the light was coming from."
"A Reaga? It's been a while since the last and you've been wanting to find one since before you arrived here, haven't you?"
Alisha nodded, then turned her attention to her new child, smiling at finally being able to raise a child as she had wanted to for years.
The others were warmed by the smile, a new baby being found in the wake of the tragedy made it seem like a good omen and the other survivors made the child the focus of their renewed hopes, dispersing to recover whatever food and supplies they could for the baby.
"What will you call him?"
"I don't really know, but I want to give him an old world name, I am half-banshee afterall. How about Carl? Carl Reaga doesn't sound too bad does it?"
---Message from the author---
I couldn't stomach the god awful chapter 0 anymore, so around getting the new chapters written, I have been working on this.
I hope it reads a hell of a lot better than the last one, I am well aware it couldn't have been much worse lol.