Prologue

         Emblem of the Star-Crossed Lovers (Interitus 1: Book X)

            Prologue

            I wrote this journal for myself in the guise of a life I can dream when the stars sway. It is a gift for tomorrow left from today; it is a story of hope and also decay. It is a diary of a lifetime as it phases to gray. As time races onward and dances away, the memories will fade but these scars will stay. The malice within me will never allay—it is a madness that only these words can convey. But if I can write them and hide from the fray, then I can stay stable if just for a day.

I have a mind meant for math but not memory, so I am cursed to conclude that these words will one day rest as a reverie of the life I once lived and then lost to time. It is a faraway outcome I can infinitely extrapolate—an asymptote solved by my subconscious but only at a glance. It is both a restraint and a release that I will one day lose the whispers of her love and the crimes I committed to keep her by my side. She is the one for whom I spent my whole life chasing. She is the one for whom I would burn cities to the ground just to see the light shimmer on her skin.

            My story was never one of a willful man striving to fix a broken world; stronger men than me have tried. Some might even say that I have written this as a treatise to my own heartbreak or as a manifesto for my malevolence, but this is a charge conscripted by men constrained by their own morals. I am no philosopher. I am no activist. I am rightfully decried as a monster by the souls that served as steppingstones to the future for which I fought and failed. The truth is that I am a villain, driven by love and fueled by avarice to race toward a world where we could live in peace. I stormed headlong toward this ambition and destroyed everything in my path. But this is the nature of the sea, for I am the ocean and she is the rain. She is cursed to transience but also untamed; she is a force of nature and meant to be unchained. She speaks to time itself in a language unrestrained. She is untranslatable and nameless. She is firm and unashamed.

            While others would write letters on a world of love and loss, I have elected instead to hunt reality itself. I will bend existence as I have in the past. I will stop at nothing until the day I have her back. I may fade my memories while I am on this path, but I will stop at nothing until the day I have her back. I wasted years of my life building bridges just to burn them so the glow could light my shadowed path. But those bridges I’ve burned are ashes I’ve kept; it’s like my skin is stained with the cinders of what never was but could have been.

            In a city filled with orphans forced to forge their own names, I christened myself with a phonetic anagram for the avarice that set me on this path. The name Asivario will haunt the shadows of this world for countless years to come, until the day that she and I overcome her ephemeral existence. But until that day, this journal is a talisman of ephemerality; it is the emblem of the star-crossed lovers.