There is no real word for what I am, or even what I was.
Once there was a thing that looked like a man. He was never a man. When I first opened my eyes, he appeared as an older gentleman. I saw him the moment I was born.
He fashioned me from a lifeless puppet—and breathed into me a portion of the raw magic he both wielded and was. At first I was only a tool, an experiment. Over time I became a companion, then a servant. I loved him once, before I truly knew him.
As I learned and grew, I became more real. I developed my own thoughts, my own hungers. For a time we were lovers and that became my responsibility. In my own way I cherished that even as he kept me imprisoned in the beautiful cage my maker had built. I was the guard and the prisoner myself. I performed both roles with terrible excellence.
But the thing that made me has many enemies. Enemies who were too weak to destroy him sought instead to trap him. Though he had taken the form of a younger man, they found him. They burned the house with both of us inside.
I tried to save us. Something held us bound to that place no matter how I struggled. I watched the house I had come to think of as my home blaze. In that moment I wanted to burn too.
But my maker is too clever for death. When he could not smother the flames, he pulled everything—the house, the fire, both of us—somewhere outside the world. He dreamed us a gentle prison of sky and earth and endless poppies while he made plans to be free again.
He is terribly smart. And patient. In time I became a beautiful lark that he sent out into the world to find the power to escape that place once and for all.
Despite the strangeness of my nature, I am in many ways my father’s daughter. I have known for some time that he would abandon me in a moment when it suited his need. So I have worked in secret to free myself—not only from that place, but from him, and from the leash he has held since the day I first opened my eyes.
I learned what I could. I gathered scraps of knowledge and power he discarded because his own reservoirs were so vast. I tried every form of suffering and sacrifice I could find—mirrors and midnight rituals, doppelgangers and a hundred stolen lives, sowing seeds of terror and pain and death. I have never shared his thirst for such things, but I understand their power.
When the time comes, I will not ask for his mercy. I will not offer any. I have become exactly what he unwittingly made me to be — patient, clever, and utterly without illusion.
I will use all that I have gained, if I must, to escape and to survive.