Foreword by Hirb Peace, written in 12,544 Iiadian Time/Fourth System/53 years AC:

This is a story about what it is to love someone. It's about what it is to be alone, and what it means to be together. It's about discovering a world that is beautiful, after all. It's about pain - how it can drive you, push you forward, change your whole existence. It's about giving up everything you had, and stepping into the darkness.

This is a story about hope.

This is a story about resistance.

I am lost, sometimes - wandering through shelves of memory and emotion so tall I can't even see the top, anymore. Searching, searching, for that particular piece of truth, that particular pine forest, that particular person's experience.

My head can be a rambling, roiling, boiling ocean. Always exchanging flashes of thought, always working, always floating through this opal-tinted world. It's overwhelming, sometimes, the sheer pace and form of it. I can get so that I don't know where I am or when I am.

All I know is who I am, and I hold onto that slip of paper tightly, tightly.

They call me Hirb. I am Hirb.

My name is Hirb.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Hirb - Old Territory, not like my mother's. Hirb - Combination of Glir, Hars, and Noerb. Hirb - it means Smoke.

This story is an important one, because if you are looking for the truth of what happened - with me and Tetik, with Smoke and Sharp, with the Border-walkers, and the Shadowers, and the True Revalench, and the Revalench Territories, and Sundland, and the ever-growing Iiad - this is the only place you will ever find it.

Because it's just me, now. And if I don't tell this story, no one will ever know for certain.

I'm going to dive deep, here, deep into many people's memories, but first, into my own mother's.

How do I know these memories?

I know them because I can see them on her face - every little line and twitch, the subtle movement of muscles beneath carefully changing skin. They scream it at me, the ghosts that she thought she’d banished long, long ago. They seem to look out through her eyes.

You see, all of this began, not truly with me and Tetik, but years, years before. Before we ever existed.

Let’s see. When, exactly?

Some would call it 20 years PC, twenty years Prior to the Convergence. But I don't like that measurement - there was no convergence. Fate had no hand in our meeting. Chance simply stepped in and took the reins, and drove us straight into the fire.

No, I’ll use the old version of measurement - it was in 12,471 Iiadian Time. Or, I could just say that it was sometime in the Third System, as the Lal-kein call it.

12,471 Iiadian Time, Third System.

That was the real Convergence.

So listen, listen close. Listen, and you might see the fragment of truth here, where all the others have let fancy and fear and fervour cloud their tellings.

Are you here for the truth?

My namesake lived and died for the truth. What will you do in its name?