Welcome to Gaia! ::

He had been there.
He had been resting along the edge of the lake with his peers when he'd heard the whispers in the trees.
At first, he had shaken them off as nothing.
But the whispers were deep, sinister sounds that spoke of the death of everything.
He leaped to his feet and glanced around, searching wildly for the source within the branches.
Instead, he found nothing but his own breathing in his ears.
That had been the first encounter.
He had spoken of the voices to his brothers and sisters of the wild, but they had only shook their heads. None had heard the sounds, but were fearful all the more as any threat should be taken seriously.
They had learned that with his previous mate, who tried to warn them of the very thing she ended up dying to protect them from.
The thing that now whispered in the night... every night.
He had tossed and turned, unable to find a moment's rest when the voices came. And they were growing louder and louder, feeding on his sadness whenever he should think of his beloved.

Then, it happened.
One especially loud night of whispers, and he had enough.
He had run into the trees, searching for this malevolent force, when screams had erupted from behind.
He had turned to run back to them, but everything wasn't fast enough.
His legs weren't fast enough to get him there in time before he had seen the horror that had been his family.
Not only did many lay dead, but they seemed like corpses, like the brown earth and shallow hole that had been the greenest of grass and bubbling lake water.
He mourned the losses, of course.
But it was then that he made it his mission to seek out the monster.

Far and wide he would travel, and it seemed to him that he was hot on the shadows' trail, for every morning when he awoke, the very ground he would lay upon was dead, and his destination would be the same; deserted, and dead. More often then he would like, there would be both wild and tame pixiu alike lying at his feet, and he only grew more and more angry, and more and more did he mourn the loss of his beloved mate who had warned them and died for nothing.

The shadow, it seemed, got stronger too.

Within months, he had all but lost hope.
Until he met an ally, a stunning woman who could brighten the very skies with her smile.

He would come to travel with her when, stubbornly, she refused to leave his side, despite his best efforts. They moved by day, and slept by night, and even she was amazed that he had not been touched by the shadow, yet everything else always was deceased by morning.
Even she, slowly but surely, started to look like those who had passed away overnight, though her death seemed stretched out, taunting him with the fact that she too would die.

It would be one horrific night that everything would become clear, and doomed at once.

She had become too ill to move, and she eyed him with a look that he could not understand.

"I get it now..." She had whispered, and he had barely a moment to turn in her direction before she offered him a very weak, yet very bright smile, just as she always had.
"You won't win..." She coughed, and in that moment, he growled, "Don't say that! I won't give up and let the shadows destroy everything I love!"

Her smile wavered, and finally he saw the gaze in her eyes: sorrow.
"They already have. And that's why you're still alive."

Her pause was the longest he had ever had to endure, and she was within her last breath when she spoke, "You are the shadow."

And with that, her movement had ceased, and something in him snapped.

He laughed. A dark, menacing laugh that would echo through the hollow ground as he approached a tiny pool of water, staring into the gaze of a madman who had finally lost control of his common sense.
And he could remember it all now, oh yes.
The screams of his family when they had died, the feel of the grass dying at his feet and the water evaporating before his very eyes.
He had despised it all. Including his mate, who had seen it within him and was hoping to cure him of it.
He could see how that had went now, and it wouldn't happen again.
The world had to suffer just a little longer, and he could relish in the death with such... pride.

Pixiu who would side with disgusting creatures such as humans didn't deserve their precious harmony and peace... he would see to change it all.
Even if it meant wiping out all of existence first.