The Emblem of the Star-Crossed Lovers

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 portray. 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. (Hit the Word limit, please continue in the Prologue) Content Warning: Violence (sometimes graphic), sex (very little, brief, nondescript), villainy, crime, dark subject matter.