Chapter 1 The Commencement
No one ever knows how a story will end. No matter how much you guess, no matter how wise you are, the ending will always surprise you.
So many people live their lives wishing, wanting, wondering. Not Liv.
Now, don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying she doesn’t have dreams. She just doesn’t sit around waiting for life to hand them to her.
Growing up, Liv always felt alone in the world. Her family was bigger than most—and colder. She wasn’t wanted here. She was a mistake, born when her mother was just sixteen. Her father didn’t love her—but he forced himself to, or at least that’s what she told herself.
At an early age, Liv learned to cook, clean, and provide for herself—everything but care for herself. She did what the world demanded while forgetting what her soul truly longed for: deep emotional resonance, genuine closeness, a spiritual connection.
She was constantly met with the same worn-out lessons on gratitude. Gratitude is easy to preach, sure:
“Be thankful for what you have.”
“There’s always someone worse off than you.”
“Gratitude turns what we have into enough.”
But what about the bigger picture? How can you truly feel gratitude when your soul’s needs are invisible—and the world insists they are merely wants?
Liv never let the world define her. She knew there was more to life than checking boxes off a checklist or following rules that made no sense to her soul. While others kissed ass to meet expectations, she carved her own way, tearing through walls of ice with nothing but bare hands, blood freezing on her skin as the world tried to bury her.
How do you survive in a world that wasn’t made for you? How do you survive when love feels like a lesson you never learned—when the only love you’ve known is the half-hearted version your parents gave you? You think you’ve found it elsewhere, but it’s never enough, because you don’t yet know what love is.
How do you find happiness without love?
How do you even begin when the only love you’ve ever known is incomplete—given in pieces, withheld as leverage, forced rather than felt? Liv grew up thinking love was a transaction: give everything of yourself, do what’s expected, and maybe you’ll earn a fraction of it. And if you fail to treasure that tiny fraction, the world will remind you how little you truly deserve—and make sure you regret wanting more.
Yet she kept moving. Moving with life, but it felt like swimming upstream through frozen rapids, every inch a battle against the world itself.She gave, she fought, she survived—because even in a world that refused her, she refused to be broken. But deep inside, she wondered if surviving was enough. Could she ever find the love that felt real? Could she ever feel happiness in a world so cold?
And then there was him—the boy who would teach her that love could feel like fire and ice all at once, who could make her feel both seen and invisible at the same time. She knew she craved it. It was everything she had always wanted—or at least, that’s what she thought.
