"This is the very worst wickedness,
that we refuse to acknowledge
the passionate evil that is in us.
This makes us secret and rotten."
                            -- D.H. Lawrence

   I wait.

   For now, I have no other purpose.

   Slowly, as the days become weeks, and the weeks months, and more recently years,

   I grow in strength and knowledge.

   As I gain in sentience I become more aware of my physiology. By all outward appearances I will look like an ordinary man, one of Asian descent I surmise from the epicanthic folds forming around my eyes. Chinese.

   As I gestate within my hard coccoon my mind reaches out and senses many pathways into the future. Several of these possibilities are dominated by the Chinese, a huge populace that in many futures becomes, through years of immigration, the leading minority within every country in the world, thus setting the foundation for a bloodless coup. It is for this contingency that I have been created.

   My Creator. My Father. The Necromancer. The vanguard of a new order. The Sha'Daa'. The force which he served. The essense of what sustains me as I hibernate inside my shell deep within the recesses of this mighty city's underground transportation system.

   I am neither son, clone, nor parthenogenetic abomination. Or perhaps I am all three. My Father's memories stream into my mind and I ponder his final hours. His thoughts and feelings are forever burned into the archive of my soul. I relive them like so many television reruns.

   The day of victory was near at hand. Beach Heads had been established in every major city across the world. The living blood of The Sha'Daa' had taken point each night as the Dark Saviour grew mighty and huge inside the giant womb. As the day of reckoning dawns I am sloughed off from The Necromancer's embryonic universe to quickly dry and harden.

   A large figure, gorilloid in proportion, with hard skin and a mouth filled with shark teeth, lopes out of the shadows and picks me up. For the briefest of moments I feel my Father's regard. He speaks in my mind.

   "I must turn my eyes from you." His voice thunders like a thousand steel claws.

   "The time is at hand. Sleep well...my child."

   And I am taken away and sequestered among shadows.

   With each full moon I become stronger, more aware, more ready.

   Soon I will be born. A large man, well over six feet in height, a towering presense among my Asian peers.

   My name is Chao Shui.