Path of the Tiger

the realm of current scientific knowledge, will be determined by a number of tests, once we get the creature to HQ. To this end I’d like to request an aeroplane and backup, post-haste; keeping this thing locked up is proving difficult.
Agent Gillespie interrogated the creature, who in outward appearance is an albino Caucasian male, around six foot two and of a wiry build with long, thin limbs, crew-cut platinum hair, and a white goatee. He is able to speak a number of languages, but is most comfortable conversing in Russian, in which Gillespie happens to be fluent. We suspect he may be the result of some sort of Soviet experiment, and he could very well pose a threat to the continental United States if he does turn out to be a biological weapon. The following is Gillespie’s summary of what the creature has told him thus far, details repeated verbatim.
‘My original name was Borislav Ivanovich, although I have gone by a number of different names over the centuries. I started out life as a simple cobbler, but since receiving the blessing of my animal form and the concomitant long life and immunity from disease and decay it has provided, I have lived a number of different lives. I have been a scholar in Constantinople, a trader in jewels and precious metals in Iraq, a composer in Prussia, a monk in Japan, and a pioneering photographer in the earliest days of the American West. These days the Great War – and by this, I am not referring to what is commonly called The First World War, but instead to a war of which you mortals know nothing, a war that has been raging in secret for centuries – has reached such a critical state that I have been forced to fight, if for no other reason than my own survival. So here I am, collecting intelligence and undertaking missions of sabotage in service of the Rebels – a force to whom you people unknowingly owe what little remains of your freedom. This is all I am prepared to tell you at this point; you no doubt think me insane or delusional, so there is no reason for me to continue talking of these matters.’  
UPDATE: The hominoid escaped from FBI custody the day after this report was received in Washington, D.C.

‘In the ancient K’Nganwa culture, it was believed that two souls would be forever bound when joined by a love so intense that with its forge-heat it melded their hearts into one. Such a connection was held to be beyond sacred; indeed, it was thought that this love would surpass the barriers of time and the human lifespan. For after the sickle of death cleaved that unified soul into two, each broken soul would thereafter traverse lifetimes – tens, hundreds, thousands – to find its lost complement once more. This was the love of which all the great poets through the ages have written, the master artists have painted and sculpted, and of which the bards have sung since man was birthed from a falling star from the night sky. It is a love that is transcendent, eternal, and the epitome of beauty.’
Annals of Vanished African Civilisations, Volume III (Central Africa and the Great Lakes Region), 2003, translated from ancient Ge’es by Amha Senai.


PROLOGUE
21st June 1908. Remote Ewenki camp, Tunguska Region, 600km North-East of Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, Russia.
‘Turn back,’ the old woman croaked, every syllable wrung from her turkey-neck throat like a reluctant droplet from a damp rag. ‘You have reached the end of the world. There is nothing for you beyond here but death.’
A gust of biting Arctic wind howled through the camp, rippling the Ewenki’s furs and whipping a few strands of her ice-white hair across her tattooed visage. The wind battered the grey greatcoats of the men standing before her, but they stood like stones, each in his assigned place, their weapons gleaming and their gaze steely and unwavering against the surreal, endless twilight of the Siberian summer evening. The old woman’s eyes, two pearls of bright onyx buried in piled folds of skin, glinted as she turned her face to the midnight sun.
‘Death will take you,’ she rasped, ‘as surely it has taken all the others who have come before you. Turn around, go back to your towns and cities and forget this place. Stay there, in your vast grey settlements in your houses of stone, your castles and palaces. Warm yourselves in your great halls by the fires of your hearths, where you burn all the forests of the world, tree by uprooted tree, and tell your grandchildren one day of the time you journeyed to the very end of the earth. Tell them that you stepped into the land of the Old Gods and Goddesses, but that you had enough humility to know that you did not belong there, and that, having peered through the veil that separates your world from Theirs, you realised that this place was not for you. You have come a long way, and you have reached the edge of the known; is this not enough for you? I say again to you, do not venture further, for if you do you will not return.’
Captain Vasilesvky’s blue-grey eyes, almost unsettlingly large, set deep between a prominent aquiline nose and nestled beneath bushy blonde eyebrows, transfixed the old Ewenki’s with a ruthless glare while the interpreter translated.
‘Tell the stubborn old hag,’ Vasilevsky growled in Russian, addressing the interpreter, but staring unflinchingly into the windows to the elderly woman’s soul, ‘that I’ll double my offer if she provides us with a guide. Cold hard roubles in her wrinkled claws, right now. More cash than she’s likely ever seen.’
The interpreter relayed this offer to the Ewenki, who, like her far younger adversary in this set of negotiations, did not once break eye contact. Sinkholes, however, slowly appeared in the corners of her gash of a mouth as she listened, deepening the gouges and