1 Foreword

Hello, fair reader. It is my humblest of honors to be able to greet you here, at the beginning of the largest project I've ever taken on at this point in my life. The current date that I'm writing this is right after typing the final words on the last page. Now, just because I mentioned them I urge you not go searching for them until you have properly gotten there on your journey. There is a reason that they're labeled as question marks in the table of contents.

Now, onto the more exciting bits of this introduction. This is my first original story I've tackled of such a girth. The planning of this story began as a simple stray thought sometime in the fall of 2016. I was facing a major roadblock on the second episode of Beyond The Logos and this stray idea of a russian roulette themed death game. I told myself that if I let myself become obsessed with it (as I do with the ideas that become stories in my head) then I would never finish Beyond The Logos, which still had two episodes that needed to be written. So, I put it on the back burner, but still, ideas kept coming—flooding in like a monthly period. I could not tell them no, and worse off I couldn't even use a tampon. They were unregulated ideas that forced their way into my mind and called "write me, write me, write me!" as if chanting by some church choir.

Beyond The Logos eventually did finish on February 18th, 2017. I gave myself two weeks off of writing completely and then right on March 4th of that same year I began in a frenzy of jotting down notes. First I began sculpting characters. Ever since the first story I had ever written, Zero (which eventually evolved into TELOS), I had been aspiring to write a story with a larger cast of characters. Back then I wasn't very good at writing, much less balancing a larger cast and keeping them all interesting and engaging to the plot at hand. So, for Telos, I chopped out what didn't work and ended up with a handful of main characters versus the ensemble I had originally envisioned.

I don't weep for this change, Telos is an infinitely stronger story for it, but I do weep for the loss of opportunity to tackle a larger group. I did get my fair share of fun when Dreamer, the follow-up novel as it contained characters from my previous stories, but it also relied on knowledge obtained in those two books being a third to a trilogy. I still wanted that "one-and-done" kind of experience. Something in its own category that didn't need prior knowledge—or if it was part of a series, introduced them from the start.

Beyond The Logos was my next stab at this, and while I feel it did do better in this regard, it is still a very personal story with a smaller amount of players at the heart of it. It scratched several itches I'd been meaning to scratch since the start—like an increased focus on world-building and inter-connectivity, but again there are moments (which I won't mention here because of spoilers) that are greatest enjoyed if there is at least some base recognizability with the original trilogy.

So, now with this new story, I wanted to scratch that original itch. I wanted to write a larger cast of main characters than I was used to, and I started by going to the handy dandy Enneagram Personality Chart. I won't go into the specifics of it here, but I had put an extra effort to sculpt characters that felt more like people and less like characters, but then something inside of me awakened and said "well, what if that meant the same thing?" And some of you might not get that, but it made sense to me, and so I modified my character list and refined it to the players of the show we have today, the protagonist Lucas Gray modeled after my real-life cousin and best friend, Lucas Knight.

I think that's pretty much all I wanted to say before you got started aside for some final thanks and acknowledgments.

Luke, of course for being the mold for which Lucas took form. And also for being a peer reader and trusted giver of criticism when needed.

Hannah, my loving girlfriend-hopefully-more-someday who supports everything I do with the largest smile I think any human has ever managed. She motivated me and kept me going when I hit blocks in the road.

I've also got to give special thanks to the entirety of the writing subreddit, for anytime I hit a writing block mid-sentence a quick visit would instantly jog any missing piece back into place. I never posted there, but there's something really special about seeing others in your shoes go through the same trials and see the same or similar successes.