He was 12 when he found the necklace. His father took it away saying it belonged to his mother. It was round, with a T at one end, silver, shiny, and big; he didn’t see it again until he was going through his father’s stuff after he died.
Damon Emmett was an orphan at 17. Technically he was supposed to go to a foster home, but he had proven to the court and Child Services that he was fine on his own. With his orphan’s pension and a secure fund that his father had set up in the event of his death, he was taken care of. His aunt Bess – his father’s sister – kept checking on him, not out of concern, but out of nosiness.
About two months after his father’s death, he finally had the nerve to go into his room and start sorting through the things. In the nightstand, he found the necklace.
He knew what the symbol was called: an ankh. He sat on the bed with it, staring at it – the last remnants of his mother. He had no pictures, his father never talked about her. He slipped the ankh around his neck and kept cleaning.
The nightstand’s drawer was deeper than he thought, as he awkwardly pulled out a thin leather book. It was a scrapbook, the old fashioned kind that people kept newspaper clippings in. Again he sat down, and opened it up to read.
Villain heist in Fort Knox!
November 13, 1972, Fort Knox, Kent.
A new Super Villain has shown his face in stealing over five billion dollars in the Federal Gold Depository at Fort Knox.
Dressed in black with black wings, he glided onto the grounds over the razor wire, then disappeared from view and from the myriad of spotlights put upon him. His henchmen broke through the blocked gates, severely injuring Corporal Matthew Lane in the process. Even though alarms sounded throughout the compound, the heroes Witchling and Mirror did not arrive until after the perpetrators were gone.
The Super Villain is unknown at this time, but it is so far assumed to be part bird.
He continued to page through the book, finding that the super villain called himself Starcrow. He stole art from the Louvre, the Vatican; money from banks in Greece, Russia and Turkey; trinkets from Egyptian museums; diamonds from London and Africa.
The scrapbook ended with a caper in 1996. A year after he was born, and the year his mother died in a car crash.
They had grainy pictures of the man, but he always wore a mask with a pointy nose, and had a star on his back. He had broad wings which couldn’t have held him up, used only for decoration. He studied the picture, and as he was studying it, something gray was touching the picture with him. He removed his hand, but the gray bit still touched the picture. He dropped the book and got up.
A gray form sat on the bed where he sat, touching the book, and then it got up in a hurry, crossing the room to him. He backed up. It stopped in the place he had been, waited, and then followed.
“Oh, my God, don’t come near me!”
He held his hands up and backed out of the room, slamming shut the door. The gray matter went through the door, stopped, and made a slamming motion of the door, then advanced. Damon backed up. “You’re me.”
He looked down at the ankh around his neck. It was black, no longer silver and glowing. He screamed, tore off the necklace and threw it to the floor.
The gray matter was no more.