Imagine you are a draugr.
Not the rotten corpse of the Icelandic myths. You inspired those myths, but no more so than the bogeyman or the vampire.
Your life is devoted to hunting one particular food source. You can eat other animals, but they don't have what you NEED. They are only half measures.
You are an anthropophagi, a man eater by necessity.
You are a cousin of the humans, but distant. Illegitimate. Your face is a very close mimicry, but not perfect. The humans have a mechanism for detecting you. They will one day call it the Uncanny Valley.
Your greatest strength is in your ability to drop into the deep sleep, where your veins bulge black and swollen with hoarded blood, where your skin looks like a bloated black corpse. You can sleep decades like this, long enough for the human prey to forget.
You always pick deep, dark holes for the deep sleep. Barrow mounds and caves, abandoned wells. Anyplace dark, confining, and safe. You cannot abide bright light.
When you wake from your strange dreams to hunt, you have strength and stamina and sensory arrays on your side that outstrip any man. You can pluck the eyes from a man's head before he can blink. You can use simple spears to strike from a distance. But your chief weapon is your mind, your intellect that so surpasses men. It allows you to outmaneuver them, to act as if you know their souls.
You hunt, and you kill, and feast.
You hunt alone. Because you are not a social animal. You have no friends, and your joy in life is hiding when you're not hunting.
Occasionally you will mate, a dangerous and violent affair, and one that always leaves you with new scars before you leave. If female, you rear an offspring or two to maturity. Then you will drive out your children and be glad they're gone.
You never see your kind aside from those brief moments. Your territory is far too large to hope to chance encounter strangers. The humans aren't numerous enough for your kind to come into close contact as tigers do.
You hunt, you feast, you dream. You can live centuries like this, spreading months across decades. Humans burn their candles so fast. You hoard days like a dragon, spending them rarely.
You see the human prey change, but you do not realize the implications until that fateful day where you encounter a village, no rude camp of tents. They have barking, degenerate sons of wolves as their pets. They have long spears; their reach is grown longer than your own. You fall back, wounded in five places. You flee to your cave bleeding.
They follow, and they plunge their spears into your flesh. You die hissing.
One hundred thousand years later, your tissues are extracted from near fossilized bones. Your genome is sequenced, and the human prey clones you. You grow, and you are born from an artificial womb into the waiting arms of what in another life would be your first kill.
The prey has no answers to their dying planet. They need you. They need your brain, your ability to use the deep sleep, the explosive power of your muscles and mind.
But you only need them as food. And one day, they will not be the only ones with the master's tools.
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