1. To remember

The introduction/prologue thing :)

A grimy city buffeted by driving rain was deserted save for a solitary child. Clumsily, the child bumped his shoe against a small shard of glass in his haste to escape the torrent. It pounded against buildings with a mighty fury as the boy searched quickly for a shelter. He rested under a feeble awning, glanced at the tarnished locket hanging from his neck and struggled to remember. The sense of loneliness and despair cast by the emptiness of his memories seemed to increase with the ever-persistent rain. The boy slid to the ground, peered at the locket again and slipped into a trance-like state as the memories found him…

 

Years and decades flashed before his eyes as he recalled the events that led him to that place. He remembered being naught but a juvenile arguing for hours upon end with his mother to allow him to fight on the front lines in his deceased father’s place; losing the fight but slipping out in the dead of the night anyway. Realising as soon as the battle had started that he had well and truly bitten off more than he could chew. He wished he had heeded his mother’s wise words. He struggled to even lift his blade when the time came. And as a man triple his height came rushing forward he felt the agony as he ran a terrible, cold blade through him. Then in the minutes later lying in the bitter, rank mud he hoped and prayed for death to discover him.

 

He remembered choking and thrashing as a creature only visible to him descended from the heavens and told him in the most ancient of tongues that for failing to regard his elder’s words he was to be blessed and cursed as a phoenix was in both body and mind. He recalled rising and striding through the battlefield with mute purposefulness, starting his journey and silently vowing to remember.

 

The memory of walking; walking to one edge of the world and back again found him. He remembered growing old and then young again so many times it hurt to count. He remembered civilisations rising and falling around him. At times others walked beside him and at times they did not.

 

Whole lifetimes passed in the blink of an eye as he lay in the dilapidated city street. He remembered, at times, pausing in his endless pilgrimage to have families of his own. Countless lovers filled his mind; some sympathetic to his condition, others oblivious. He remembered all the children he had sired; cursed to wander as he does.

 

Without warning the memories sped up and he remembered what was most important of all. All the battles he had fought, in all of the causes that had seemed right and worthy at the time. And as he awoke he realised that it had all been for nought. That no matter what he stove for he had made little difference in the world. With a final glance at his treasured locket he passed into the void.