Crow

For a long time, several thousands of years, a single man had been desperate for the power needed to defend his land from a tyrant that threatened to leave him and his people penniless and hungry. He had sought advice from many priests as to what he could do to stop the tyrant, to no success. However, one day he had come across an injured shape-shifter, who he had taken the time to heal despite how little time he had left to save his people.

Humbled by the generosity and suffering of the man, he had offered a solution to him; seek the great demon king to drive the man away in exchange for allowing his subjects to wonder the human world.
Desperate, the man took up the shape-shifter’s offer, and as he was brought deep down into the earth to see the demon king, be begged for the demon king to spare his people from the suffering at the hands of the tyrant.

The demon king agreed, and he descended to the human world and turned the tyrant into a demon that would forever remain under his thrall, incapable of disobeying. With the deed done, the demon king returned to his home of fire and mortar whilst his subjects entered the human world for the first time; demons, vampires, mermaids, werewolves, shape-shifters and witches over run the landscape and turned any and all humans that wanted it.

However, the humans were scared of the monsters that escaped the shadow realm, the land of the demon king, and started to hunt any and all of the ‘Shadows’ they could find. Angered by this, the demon king gave his subjects the ability to turn unwilling victims.

The man and his family were killed in the crossfire, and many humans died and turned because of his fool-hardy desperation to protect his family and people.

The Shape-shifter that had caused it all wept and waited to die in his guilt and grief for what he had caused.

That, dear children, is how the Shadows joined our world.