Sokolov has a minion!

Zephyr the Naphal

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Prologue

This is a world that is true, unnatural horror. It surely must be the Devil's own doing. Nothing short of Hell could be this bad. Every day I walk through the ruined streets of some now nameless town, staring at all the blood, all the victims, how their tears flow like the rivers long dried up. It wounds me deeper than any bullet or knife ever could. I see children collapsed over the corpses of their parents, weeping, while mothers cradle the lifeless bodies of their offspring, hoping their soft words and kisses will restore innocent lost lives. They never do, of course, and many who never deserved their violent deaths lay scattered in the streets, their families having no time to give them a proper burial. What makes these crimes against nature, against humanity all the more worse is that this situation could have been completely avoided. No, we are not in the middle of a war, which is too kind a word for the world's current state. We are experiencing the worst extermination that would make Adolf Hitler himself quake in his boots. Some would say that such a time will never be seen again in our lifetime, and to which I shake my head. Humans will never see horrors like these again, period. If humans survive these times, there won't be a second.

And yet, even in these dark days, I still could find the time to ask myself ''Why?'' Why are these horrible things happening all around us with barely any resistance? Why has everything once good in this world been consumed by hatred and fire? Why would anyone go to such amazing lengths to make sure me and my kind are wiped off the face of the battle-scarred earth? When I was younger, I would always ask these questions, and now, sometimes I lay awake at night and wish that I didn't know the answers. Through my travels, I learned of the driving force behind all this. One man, one single, solitary human man has caused all this pain and all this bloodshed. He didn't do it for anything petty, like monetary gain or political power. He did it for the simple reason that he wants to no longer exist in his psychotic new, perfect world.

One important question is answered, and yet more surface. Just who is he trying to rid the world of? That...might be harder to explain. We are commonly known as Gifteds, humans who are gifted extraordinary powers. Some of us can move objects with our minds, others can control the very elements. And there are even those who can defy death itself. No scientist or hospital has been able to uncover just what causes this strange genetic twist, or when the first of our kind appeared and how. All we know is that we have these powers, and because of them, we're being unfairly hunted. As for me, I'm sure you're curious as to what my power is, but I'm afraid that is another story for another time.

I will tell you all about the man who started these horrid events into motion, a man feared and hated. A man who has convinced many of my kind to join him, to help him, blinded by their own stupidity. This man will not stop until every last Gifted is dead, including those who ally themselves with him. The morons are digging their own graves as the hunt after their brethren. If you join him, you save yourself for another week, another month, perhaps even another year, but sooner or later, you will realize that not only have you lost your humanity, but your life in the process. He is a man with as past as terrifying as it is amazing. A man named Seimei Sokolov. He was born not as a child, but as a monstrous waste of good genetics. In order to understand the travesty that was his birth, one must travel down the bloody road that is his family's lineage. The prestigious Sokolov family is nowhere mentioned in the history textbooks, but I can tell you they have ruled Russia for a very long time. Many, many names and faces have gone by during Russia's glorious and rich history, yet each and every one of them have been mere pawns to the Sokolov men.

Though not of royal blood, they held more power than the great kings and czars of the past. Living and thriving in the political shadows, controlling the rulers like little puppets on strings. Many facts have been changed, altered in order to make sure that they remain hiding away like the rats they are. A widely unknown fact: The great Romanov family was not murdered as history tells this horrid tale; they were, in fact, all killed by a single man. His name was Viktor Sokolov, a brutish man, having a physique that could intimidate a grizzly bear. He killed every member of that famous family, murdering, without batting and eyelash, the czar and his kin. This beast then handed off the throne and resumed his life in the shadows. During his fifty-seventh year, a poisonous cancer spread quickly and held his wicked heart in an icy, vice-like grip. It was at this time that his son, Dmitry, took over the Sokolov household. Unlike his father, Dmitry was more of a slender man, with angelic features. He had one goal and one goal only as head of the family name, and that was to increase wealth and power as much as he possibly could.

And he did just that, furthering the Sokolov name all across Europe and Asia, securing an astronomical amount of wealth. His dealings eventually lead him to the vast Japanese markets. It was during a rather successful trip to the Land of the Rising Sun that he met Momoka, The Peach Blossom. The woman was nothing short of beautiful, with hair as black as the night sky, eyes like two rich chocolates just begging to be devoured. She worked at an upscale and regal brothel, one of the finest in the area, entertaining not only men from all around the country, but all around the world. She got her working name from the sickly-sweet perfume she wore, always smelling of sin and peaches. As soon as he laid eyes on her, Dmitry had fallen head over heels. His black heart yearned for this raven beauty, he had to have her.

Night after night he spent with her, paying an enormous sum over the course of seven months. What he failed to realize was that all the money he had spent paying for her company had bought him a son. Dmitry had never been married, yet had sired four sons before, so hearing that he was going to be a father of another child shocked and partially disgusted him. Every one of his four sons back home were pureblooded, one-hundred percent Russian born and raised. Finding out that he would be the father of some illicit, mixed bastard child shook him to the core. The night he found this out was the last night he ever saw his once-beloved mistress., for it was only a few months later that the child came into this world.

There were only two reasons one could think of that Momoka would even consider keeping a child in her womb; a pregnant prostitute lost so much value, especially after the baby was born. Her first reason was that, once upon a time, she had grown to love Dmitry, despite how cold-blooded he appeared to be. She knew that, like all the other men she had ever met, he too would grow to love her completely. Which was partly the second reason she didn't rid her body of his spawn. Momoka had hoped to use the infant as leverage, as blackmail even, to get herself out of the dark life in the Japanese underworld. She knew that she could escape her daily routine of selling her body to the highest bidder for a life of luxury in the Russian countryside.

But her reasons died with her when she took her last, bloody breath and Seimei took his first. Complications in the delivery led to a traumatic end for the famed working girl. Surrounded by her closest and only friends, she muttered two names and instructions for her baby. "Take him to Dmitry Sokolov in Russia, to his father. Our child's name is Seimei." It was a peculiar name, perhaps she had such high hopes for the baby boy, and she wanted to bless him with a name that would lead him on the right path of life. How pitiful that she was so wrong, how ironic his name truly is. Despite how he had killed his mother, killed their beloved Momoka, the women of the brothel fulfilled her last wishes.

The baby was an odd one, with eyes like blue marble and a fine little tuft of chocolate brown hair, just like his father. What he had inherited from his mother was her luscious pale skin and her fine Asian features. He never once cried, not even at his time of birth. The poor mixed infant was wrapped in his mother's finest kimono, a lovely orange color decorated with exquisitely detailed peach blossoms. When he arrived on his father's doorstep with nothing but that kimono and a small note written in sloppy Russian, he smelled of a wild orchard of Momoka's favorite fruit. Perhaps there was some love for the woman in his cold heart, because instead of leaving the child out to die in the cold winter air, he took the baby inside. That was the first time little Seimei had cried.

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