Long ago, over 2000 years in the past, humankind was in a golden age. Technology was advancing at a phenomenal rate. The well-developed nations enjoyed better standards of living each year. People lived lives that would have been unheard of just a few generations earlier, and even those who were just having their first children were realizing that their children's lives would be far different from what they knew while growing up.
It was a time of change, of advance, of plenty. And no one knew that it was about to end forever.
One day, a group of men committed an act of terrorism fit to scar an entire world worth of people for the rest of their lives. It was the sort of happening that made even the most forgiving and loving of people just shake their heads in shock and ask "Why, God, why?" And those with less faith in the good of humanity... Well, they lost the last scraps of whatever might have kept them believing that day.
It was a horrific event, but, as always, the world went on. Scarred and disillusioned, the human race started to pick up the pieces and go back to life. That was the only real choice they had, so they took it. And they lived on.
That happened during the fall. Come spring, the true disaster hit.
They called it the Cataclysm... after the fact, of course. The true cause of it is shrouded in mystery, and the only explanations that have survived to this day have taken on a sort of mythical air. Of course, the records from that time are spotty at best, and the stories passed from parent to child are really all there is to go by anymore. But one truth remains, and that is the fact that the Cataclysm came from the sky... and that destruction followed in its wake.
Some say it was the work of aliens come to Earth for war and conquest. Some say it was angels, bearing the wrath of a disappointed God. And some even say it was just another terrorist attack, some radical group with the long-feared nuclear weapons that everyone knew were bad news.
Whatever the true identity of the beings who descended that day may be, the fact remains that they brought with them death, destruction, radiation, and an electromagnetic field so strong it fried every single piece of electronic equipment it touched. In just a few seconds, these beings, or whatever they were, brought an end to the lives of ninety-nine percent of the people on the Earth, and the radiation and geographic upheaval that followed them would do away with another ninety percent of those who survived. In the blink of an eye, the population of the Earth was decimated, and the land was rearranged so that it was barely recognizable as the same Earth in many places. Oddly enough, some parts of the land itself were left untouched, though the death and radiation still affected those places.
Despite this, the human race pushed forward, as we always do. Survivors grouped together and sought out the most stable and least dangerous places out of the lands ravaged by the Cataclysm. Almost all communications had been knocked out by the fall of electronic devices, and people were forced to fall back on skills they had all but forgotten with the rise of technology. With people still dying from radiation - and hunger - the only skills that mattered anymore were those that increased a person's chances of surviving, and many areas of knowledge and skill were abandoned.
But humanity managed to persevere through the darkest times after the Cataclysm, and before long people stopped dying so easily. The survivors figured out how to live with what they had left. And they did just that.
The unpleasant surprise that awaited them didn't become evident for a year or two after the Cataclysm. No children were born in that time. At least, none were born alive. The survivors tried to carry on their lineages, but only a handful of women around the world actually managed to conceive. And not a single woman managed to carry a child to term that wasn't stillborn. As this continued for a few years, the survivors started to wonder if this truly did mark the end of the human race. They had made it this far, had finally started to regain a semblance of actual lives, but without children, it would mean nothing.
Relief came a few years later, as children who had not yet hit puberty at the time of the Cataclysm started to try their hands at reproduction. As more of these children succeeded in conceiving, hopes started to rise. And then, approximately nine months after the first of these children conceived, the first new baby since the Cataclysm was born - or so the stories tell.
The first new baby was a boy, through others followed close behind. It was only a matter of time - a few babies, really - before the adults started to notice the oddities in some of their children. Babies born with feathers on their backs that later grew into actual wings. Babies born with slits on their necks that looked almost like gills. Little girls who could shapeshift when provoked. And... little boys - including the first new child - with psychic powers. Telepathy, telekinesis... even the ability to teleport.
Before long, it became evident that every single baby born after the Cataclysm, all to young men and women who had been prepubescent at the time of the event, had one of these... oddities. Only boys had the psychic powers, and only one power per child. Only girls could shapeshift. And both boys and girls could be born with wings or gills, both of which later proved to be fully functional, even though science would suggest that functional wings on a human body would be a physical impossibility.
Every now and then a child would be born who didn't have one of these oddities. Unfortunately, these children were almost grossly deformed - often to the point where they were unable to function independently - and often handicapped mentally as well. Though most knowledge and skills that weren't directly useful for day to day survival were being abandoned very quickly, those who knew anything about genetics surmised that these deformed children were a result of the radiation that had killed off so many. Still, these children were few and far between, and almost all of the babies being born belonged to one of the four "altered" groups.
Time saw the continuation of these alterations, and as the post-Cataclysm babies started to have children of their own, it became evident that the oddities seemed to not be connected to any sort of genetic inheritance. Aside from the fact that only boys had the psychic powers and only girls could shapeshift, it seemed that any child could be born into any group, no matter which groups the parents fell into. A psychic man and a woman with wings could have a daughter with gills, or a son with psychic powers, or a shapeshifting daughter... or a son with wings. There seemed to be no correlation between the groupings of the parents and that of the child.
And thus, the human race continued on - though slightly changed. Slowly, but surely, they lived on and started to rebuild both civilization and technology. With time, the individual pockets of survivors began to band together, and over the years, a distinct culture started to develop among those who had joined together, who constituted the majority of those left on Earth. Pockets of isolated cultures remained, especially in areas that had been lightly touched by the geographic upheaval, but were as a result increasingly hard to get to. Still, most people feel into this one culture, which had at its heart a religion and a social class system that came to be known as Mayinism
Mayinism gave names to the four groupings of people. The winged ones were the aivan, the gilled the quarun. The shapeshifter girls were the duseken, and the psychic boys were the mayin, which is where the name of the religion and the culture surrounding it came from. Mayinism taught that the mayin were the beloved of God, and that they were inherently superior and holier than all others. As a result, Mayinism also taught that men - as the only ones who could be born mayin - were inherently better than women, though likely this belief was mostly just an extension of the similar one that had been present throughout history.
As the holy ones, all mayin could become priests of Mayinism, and only mayin could become priests. In addition, most Mayinist societies were theocratic - run by the mayin clergy. The hierarchy within the Mayinist church became the hierarchy of the government, and the highest priest of the church was also the ruler of the people.
As much as the Mayinist church tried to forget it, there was that fifth grouping of people. The "throwbacks" - the poor children born outside of one of the four groupings, but with physical, and often mental as well, deformities - had not gone away. They were rare, but they continued to be born occasionally. The Mayinists called them shelon, and they had no place in Mayinist society. Shelon existed, but they were considered subhuman, people to be ashamed of, and families with shelon children hid the fact as best they could.
Though shelon were still born, few were as deformed as the first shelon had been. In fact, most shelon in Mayinist society were only slightly handicapped, if that, not the children with extra limbs or faces that looked horribly mangled that had been born to the survivors of the Cataclysm. Most shelon were only mildly deformed or just physically handicapped - with an extra finger, or blind, or missing a hand... Many, in fact, could pass for a "normal" person at first glance. The one major difference was that they weren't aivan, or quarun, or duseken, or mayin. They were shelon.
However, as shelon deformities became less and less alien, the idea of the "she" came along. The idea of the "she" was simple. They were "normal" people who were a step closer to shelon than most. They were anyone who was in one of the four recognized groups but had some sort of handicap or deformity, physical or mental. Rather than being aivan or mayin, they were she-aivan or she-mayin, and like shelon, they were considered lesser. Unlike shelon, they weren't quite considered subhuman, but they were still decidedly "inferior" to "proper" people, no matter how insignificant the quality that got them labeled she in the first place.
Though she were not as low status as shelon, most families still saw them as shameful, and because of that, special "boarding schools," called shelon schools, for shelon and she were built. These schools were places where families could dump their shameful shelon and she children and, if they wanted to, ignore their existence for the majority of the children's lives. Some children were given to these schools and then never saw their parents again... ever. Many of the shelon in these schools were transferred to work camps, places where they would live and work for the rest of their lives, in order to be "useful to society," right from the school. Most she would leave the schools for actual society, though often only a "special" she subset of society.
Shelon schools, despite the social stigma, were privately funded by families with shelon or she members and run almost exclusively by former students. There were usually a few select "normal" people in administration, often a low ranked mayin priest, and these "normal" people were there to keep the "lesser folk" from getting above themselves. But most of the running of the schools was left to the shelon and she... and occasional normal graduates.
That said, the shelon schools did receive a small amount of public funding to encourage them to take in some normal students at little to no fee. These normal students were from the poorest, lowest status families, and often the shelon schools were the only viable way for these children to get an education. The Mayinist church/government was more than willing to subsidize this, since most of these people were the sort that typical elitist Mayinist society would rather not have anything to do with, let alone have them actually living among them. The fact that a large number of former graduates of the school tended to stay there only strengthened the argument. Better to pay a little to encourage them in that direction and sequester them with the shelon and she.
And thus, the shelon, and she, and poorest normals of most of the world lived their childhoods, and often their adulthoods as well, locked away from society... I was one of them, a shelon according to my birth certificate, and like many, I never left the school. Unlike many, I had been there literally since the day I was born. My name is Kiya, daughter of Alansa and Isuni, and this is my tale, not to mention many others'.