Prologue: Light’s Feast

About the vagaries of memory, trauma, and the stories we tell ourselves.

The Hunter series: Book 1 – Origin

Cover Art: Placeholder done via AI re-doing my own drawing (*)

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All Dreams end.

No matter if they’re good or bad.

But finding their origin? That’s the real Art.

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(Artist unknown)

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Prologue: Light’s Feast

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I never thought bringing order to my own memories would be this hard.

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The selection, the choice, finding out which parts to leave in and which to take out, what to hide and what not, which story to tell? That, I had expected.

But not this. Finding myself troubled by mere chronology. Stunted by something so simple as the fact and order of actual history.
It’s laughable. Especially if you consider who, or more accurately in this case, what I am. I am used to diving into this and feeling right at home like a fish in water. It’s what we do. So why does my own confound me like this?

I thought we’d extinguished any traces.

For a moment the old fear flares bright. Did we miss something after all? Despite everything? Is there yet another layer to it that we— but no. No. I think this is… just me. Just the way it was back then. The confusion. The chaos.
There’s nothing external to it, is there.

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Here I am, surrounded by the highest beauty you could possibly imagine:

Ears filled by the ethereal sounds of melodies at home in such a temple of nature. Beautiful enough to make you cry. A concert sung by a choir of birds, chiming flowers and soft petals, the gentle susurration of rustling leaves. At my side, the one who makes me whole; on my skin, the gentle caress of the wind in the trees, the soothing warmth of sunlight and the deeper one of his hand—but all I can perceive is an entirely different place.

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One surrounded by the continuous backdrop of an immense lake, filled by the incessant fog of my youth and the deeper darkness of the deep forest all around. The mist is everywhere—in the village, in the woods, in my head.

On the surface of the lake, on the other side, it is as impenetrable as it is in my own head. A wall, towering at a giant’s height and covering up the whole of the lake in all its immensity for miles, as if a rampart of mist, hiding the other side.
The other side—as well as what lies deep within and on the lake.
The hidden island deep in the void, the gate to the Elsewhere; a place where something lurks that one might call my fate or my ruin.

Even that I can barely intuit, my head filled with memories of childhood and sheer chaos. Laughter and screams, and a darkness that is not my problem but my hiding place.

And what I’m doing is huddling in a corner.

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Someone carrying power others would kill for; who has done and lived through things that would make someone else wish they’d be killed—or had never been born at all—if only it would let them avoid that fate. And I am huddling in a fucking corner.

Well, that just goes to show, doesn’t it?

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I was never chosen. Least of all ‘the chosen one’.
I chose my fate on my own, from start to finish; created it, no matter what others might claim. This, here? I chose it myself. Made it my own. Not because someone else wanted me to, but because I deemed it right. Necessary.
And then I went ahead with it, right to the bitter end.

Despite everything it cost me, and others. Despite the blood on my hands. Ours, theirs… the blood of a whole world. I did what I could to save it.

I didn’t always win. I knew that before I even started. That the likeliest outcome was that I’d lose. That I might just lose everything. I always knew I wouldn’t be able to save them all. There was even a time, when I thought I couldn’t save anyone at all, not a single one. But I always came back to it. Hell-fucking-bent on saving others. Found no other choice that even remotely seemed to make sense. I’ve never been someone to just lie down and take it. Drown myself in despair. Though there was one time I was close… Even then… my rage was always bigger. I could never witness injustice and just shut my trap about it, even when it would’ve been better for myself.

But why? Why did I even do all of that?

Because I couldn’t save myself? Because they wanted me to? Because I desperately wanted to be a hero, a savior? Is that why?

… did I, want that? Did they even want me to?

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By now, I know I did a lot of things in my life that I had never wanted. World, I even realize that many times the others, too, did not want me to. Much less demand what I thought was being asked of me. I’ve always asked more of myself than anyone else ever did. Well. That is, if you disregard the ones who never cared for the well-being of anyone, not even their own.

Anyway. How could that be what is holding me back right now?
I’m far past the moment of choice. Made my choices years ago. My own. With eyes wide open, no longer blind. No longer what others wanted or supposedly wanted, but determined by a single question and that alone: What world do I, personally, want to live in. And what am I willing to do to get it? What am I willing to sacrifice?

And then I did just that.

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So how can something like this be that hard for me?

I am no longer the child I was. For better as well as worse. I have everything that child could never even have dreamed of, could never have believed possible. I know, and can do, things that would sound like a bad joke to that child.
For example, find the right moment, the right person across the span of a whole world and several centuries. Just an example.

All I need to find, here and now, is myself. A lesson I believed to have conquered an age ago. Even easier than that: Myself and those closest to my most private little heart; in spite of everything I could never do for them.

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And yet, for just one moment, it is almost as if I could, of all things, not do that: Simply finding us. The I of that time.

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(Artist unknown)

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You’ve been reading an excerpt

of the Hunter series : Book 1 - Origin

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A general note about updates:

I aim to publish a new piece of this translation once per week, hoping the publishing helps me get it done consistently.

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However, I am publishing this “hot from the oven” (i.e., the book already exists in full (if maybe not in the ultimate-final draft)—but in a different language). I am doing the translation on my own, in realtime. Thumbs crossed!

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Verstehst du Deutsch?

Psst. Die deutsche Version ist schon weiter als die Übersetzung;
da es sich bei ihr um das Original handelt ;)

Du findest sie hier.

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(*) PS:

No, I do NOT use AI to write for me. I write on my own.

Glad you asked.

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In fact, I don’t normally use it for pictures, either. I even make my own art, ffs.

(*) You can find a more extensive explanation as its own article in my general pub stuff, if AI (and how to spot it) is a topic of interest to you.