My father was a winged wolf named Petter Josefsohn. He disappeared when I was about five. Dead, my mother told me, but she would never talk about it. I was christened 'Jakob Pettersohn', since it was the tradition of our family to take the name of our father as our surname.
The loss of my father aside, my life was not too unusual for a Being of that time. I grew up on a small family-owned farm in the middle of a forest, and we would often make journeys into the nearby town to sell our spare produce and visit the church - something my mother, Dulcinia, insisted we do every week although I can't say I really enjoyed it.
My younger brother, Izak, and I were encouraged to learn to read so that we could benefit from the collection of books that my father had amassed. Many of these dealt with magic, and we quickly discovered that we were quite adept at it, taking after our father like the wolves we were.
Eventually, Izak left home to study in one of the nearby cities, while I stayed on to help my mother run the farm. I was happy enough, at least to begin with. But when I turned 26, my life took a sudden change for the worse.
After a particularly moving service at church one day, I developed a series of chronic headaches, much to my mother's distress and mine as well. From her reactions, I began to suspect that my father had died of a brain sickness and that I would soon follow. Nonetheless, with my brother studying and my father dead, it fell to me to help her manage the farm and I was determined to do so for as long as I was able.
One night I had a dream which ended with my being shot in the back of the head by a band of murderers. I awoke with a scream but the pain was real, although it faded quickly. Feeling the back of my head, where the crossbow bolts would have entered my brain, I discovered a small pair of feathered wings.
Hearing my cries, my mother entered the room and found me like this, sitting half-naked before the mirror, and she began sobbing anew. I just sat there, staring at my reflection in shock, convinced that it was an hallucination caused by my dying brain.
When the following morning I awoke, the little wings were still there, minute copies of the larger pair I had always had upon my back, and I began to accept that they were real. My mother however was in no fit state to tell me what this meant although she seemed to have realised that the time had come to explain the manner of my father's demise.
That evening I went into the forest to gather firewood, shivering at the eerie feeling as the breeze ruffled the new feathers upon my head. As I was about to leave, I was suddenly attacked by a group of shadowed figures.
For a while I was convinced that the dream of my murder had been a premonition, and so I fought back like one possessed. Fireballs and other offensive spells whizzed through the air damaging trees and scorching the earth. Whatever else happened, I had made up my mind that I was going to leave evidence of my struggle so my mother might know what had happened. Finally a tall, shadowed canine figure came out of the woods and caught me with a stun spell.
I suddenly remembered the beating my mother had given Izak for casting one on me years ago, just before everything went black.
I awoke to find myself back in bed. Taking stock of my last memories I knew it was no dream because there was a burn on my left arm from the battle in the forest, now bandaged. Wandering out of my room to try and find my mother, I noted that although it was around noon, all the windows were shut.
She wasn't in the house. Perhaps she'd gone to fetch a doctor or something. I opened one of the shutters and my stomach turned cold. Out of the window was not the familiar scene of our quiet farm in the forest, but a long drop onto flagstones. The house was at least five stories in the air.
Trying the front door, I opened it to find that it now lead onto a landing - it seemed that my house was now inside an apartment block. Most interesting.
Now I had seen these before, as my brother was living in one. Generally they were only found in the largest cities as it took a great deal of magic to pump the water and coal gas. As a rule I had never really liked cities myself, but I could definitely see the advantages. For one, coal gas was so much more convenient to cook with than the wood-fired range we had back at home.
Looking around the house again I noticed a number of rather odd things... my mother's bed, for instance, had never been slept in. The décor on the walls was new and untarnished, and only some of my possessions were actually here. It became pretty obvious that this was not my house at all, but a cleverly-built replica of it.
Studying the range I found that like the rest of the house, it was only superficially similar to the original. It was in actual fact gas-fired... whoever had done this obviously intended me to live here for quite some time.
The initial shock had worn off, but I was naturally rather concerned. Where was I? Who had brought me here? What did they want with me and why had they put so much effort into getting it? Suddenly I remembered that the shadowy figure had had wings on her head too - so had her minions come to that. But what did it all mean?
I left the apartment to try and get some answers, but I didn't get far. There was not a soul around... the other apartments were empty although one of them was filled with preserved food, apparently intended for my use. On the landing was a bin marked with my flat number. I ignored this, and heading down the stairs gave a sudden yelp of pain - it felt exactly like I'd walked into a brick wall.
Rubbing my injured muzzle, I prodded the air before me tentatively, and found it solid and unyielding. Looking up at the ceiling, I noticed a faintly glowing rune.. apparently a ward to prevent me leaving.
My mind was starting to sag now.. too many strange things had hit me all at once and I was rapidly beginning to lose my grip on reality. As a compromise I decided to treat it like the headwings... sleep on it and hope that everything would revert to normal when I woke - perhaps I was really still lying in the forest in some kind of concussion.
Unfortunately I was not.
Over the next few days I ate, slept, read and waited patiently for someone to arrive and explain what they wanted. Sadly this never happened. Often I heard noises in the night, and several times I saw nervous Beings, sent to replenish the food stocks and keep the other apartments clean.
As soon as they saw me they would run to the stairs, which they were permitted to enter even though I was not. One day I decided to set a trap and managed to chase the man into a tripwire which I had set around the other side of the block.
Yet even when I'd caught him, he remained mute no matter how I pleaded or threatened him. Eventually a stun spell took me from behind and when I came to, he was gone.
Realising I was trapped, I began a frantic series of escape attempts. I began with fairly simple tricks, a rope ladder made from bedsheets for example, or climbing out of the window and around the outside of the building to reach the fire-escape. Each time I was caught by a stun spell and awoke on my bed once more.
As time went by my attempts became ever more elaborate. On one occasion I even dug through the floor into the rooms beneath. Getting off that floor of the building wasn't exactly easy, but on the other hand it wasn't the worst problem either.
Once I got out, I had to evade the guards or else I'd soon find myself stunned again and waking up in bed with a throbbing head. This happened many, many times and although they always caught me in the end, it did allow me to explore somewhat and build a map of the complex in my head.
It was a shame my mother had confiscated the book Izak had learned 'stun' from - I'd never had time to get the hang of it myself. More importantly, the book might well have had a counter-spell.
After five or six months, I finally decided it was time for drastic action.
Acting casually I visited one of the other apartments, and examined the stove. As I turned to go, my hand brushed one of the controls as I left, surreptitiously turning on the gas. Shutting the door behind me, I walked back down the corridor, and sat lazily by one of the walls. Five minutes later, I spun round and ignited it with a fireball spell, ducking behind the corridor to shield myself.
It blew the room clean out the side of the building and brought the floors above crashing down on top of it.
In the chaos that ensued I was able to slip past the guards, but even that didn't help so much. I had no real idea where I was, and the grounds of the complex, extensive though they were, were isolated by some kind of magical barrier, something more powerful than a ward. I remained free for about three days before a shadowy figure appeared on the edge of my campfire, dressed all in pink and with white wings upon her back and head.
I immediately realised that it was the same person who had stunned me that evening in the forest all those months ago. She was in fact none other than Fa'Lina, the much-feared headmistress of the S&I Academy, known to most as 'SAIA', although I didn't know this at the time.
At length Fa'Lina told me that she was rather impressed by my efforts. As a matter of fact I had actually done something that she had not foreseen, a rare thing indeed.
Getting straight to the point, she offered me the chance to hone my skills at her academy of magic. I declined. Why should I trust someone who had imprisoned me for half a year, after all? But she had foreseen that reply.
It was then that she told me what I had been wondering ever since that night we first met. The wings upon our backs, which our mother lacked... the magical skills... these were all signs of something that Izak and I would have recognised had we only known what it meant.
We were not, as we had guessed, some rare hybrid of wolf and phoenix - we were demons, and the wings upon my head were the the mark of an incubus.
How clearly I remember that feeling... I guess we all do, those of us who were never told of our heritage. So many fantastic possibilities were suddenly opened up before me.
I could stay young for nearly three thousand years... or longer still if I was willing to pay the price. I would never need to sleep or eat again, being able to feed myself instead on the emotions of nearby Beings. Indeed, I had been feeding unknowingly upon the emotions of the church congregations and it was that accumulation of energy which had resulted in my headwings. Apparently all 'cubi grew these when their store of surplus energy reached a certain level, and it was taken as a sign that they had reached adulthood.
I would also be able to change my shape and disguise myself as anyone I wished, read minds, enter other people's dreams and, if I so desired, steal souls.
These possibilities excited me, yet my enthusiasm was still tempered by the way she had treated me. I was not yet convinced and I told her that I would learn all these things by myself, in my own time.
Fa'Lina had apparently foreseen this too as she changed tactic yet again. She warned me that the world was not yet safe for our kind, that too many Beings hated and feared us for our powers, that they believed we lived only to eat their souls and that they would try to hunt us and kill us.
Furthermore she explained that her Academy was one of the few places where a young Creature would be safe from adventurers. While this was reasonable enough, the way it was told sounded far too much like patter to me.
"Very well," she said at least, "I foresaw this might happen. If I cannot convince you myself, let me introduce you to someone who can."
As I stood there, Fa'Lina beckoned to someone I hadn't noticed and a handsome grey wolf incubus who had been lurking in the darkness strode out into the light of my campfire. He looked very, very familiar.
"Izak...?" I asked, astonished.
"No," he replied with a grin. "Close enough, though. It's been a long time, Yak. Last time we met, you called me 'Daddy!'"
Fa'Lina had kidnapped him as soon as his own headwings had blossomed. He didn't look a day older than me.