As you can imagine, it all began long before your time. You know the story well though. It began with a baby in a basket floating down the Nile to avoid being culled by the king of his land. The baby was found and raised by Pharaoh's family and later became the stuff of legends as he led his birth people on the Great Exodus from Egypt. Before his people's release from slavery though, he had to convince his former adoptive family members to release them. This required that plagues be released upon Egypt to change their minds.

It began with our beginnings; the plague that turned the waters of Egypt into blood. Most of us wouldn't tell you this, but none of us were aristocrats. In fact, we began as the lowest of the low. We were the ones that depended solely on the Nile for water. When all of the water turned to blood, it left us with nothing. It was drink from the river or die. Many chose to die. The few left chose to risk the poisoned river. We waded through heaps of scaled carcasses caked in the rusty scabbing from the rivers bite to drink from the Nile.

And so we were cursed. No one knows why we didn't meet the same fate as though blighted fish. I ask you though, if we were meant to die, wouldn't we have died then? Apparently not.

The next thing we know, water isn't a problem anymore and the other plagues are mere annoyances. Maybe the Hebrew god decided we had suffered enough. We lasted through the frogs, the dust to lice plague, the boils and sores; they were all nothing to us.

There were two plagues that apparently our suffering didn't excuse us from: the darkness and the death of the first born. The last two and most severe plagues.

When the sun didn't come up that faithful morning, everyone cowered, including us. When one of us did manage to set our fear aside and go out to fetch a drink for the children, imagine our wonder to find that we could see better without the face of Ra blazing above us. This was the beginning of our night dwelling, and set us apart from those others who survived without our curse.

The final plague was not such a blessing to us. As all others in Egypt lost their first born children, so did we, but ours weren't lost the the Hebrew god. Ours were lost to our fellow “citizens”. The ones who figured out that we survived on something different than water. They killed our first born when they found their own dead in their blankets. That was the beginning of the Pact.

I know, I know, you've never heard of anything called the Pact. That would be because humans weren't invited to the meetings that defined it. We fought to keep it secret. Yes I said we. I was there as the world's first constitution was formed. Not to brag or anything, but I was one of those chosen to sign it.

The Pact itself changed the rules of our existence. We agreed to survive off of humans alone in revenge for the killing of our young. Later we lifted the ban on drinking from animals, but most of us stuck to the old ways. Sorry but you bathe a lot more other than your livestock. It's just a fact of life. Learn to live with it.

Still the Pact governs us. It's signed by the Congress of Elders. Believe me, you can't get any more “elder” than us.

After the formation of the Pact, we decided to call ourselves something. Every great nation needs a name, right? Our name is simple and to the point. We are Cursed. The name carries over to present day in every vocabulary except that of the “human” world.

Skip forward a few thousand years and here we still are. Not so much despised anymore as denied. Everyone denies we exist except those few who do the exact opposite. Those few who believe so violently that we exist that they try to become one of us. This is the story of one who succeeded.