Prologue
The day I feared is here.
The day I admit I am not what I thought I was.
No king. No curse.
Nothing.
Just a man at an oak table, in a room too small for the weight of his memory.
I did not always live this way.
Once, I was certain.
Now that certainty feels like it belonged to another man.
The table beneath my hands is real. Its grain presses into my skin, cold and indifferent. It is the only kingdom I have left.
The pencil between my fingers is ordinary. It does not tremble—I do not let it. I press harder than I should, forcing it to drag across the page and pull out what I have refused to say aloud.
The book before me is clean. Leather-bound. Dignified.
I am not.
Memory is exact. It does not fade. It does not forgive. It does not loosen its grip.
So I do the only thing left that resembles resistance.
I write.
Not because I trust it. Not because I believe in confession or mercy.
Because if this remains inside me, it will finish what it started.
Every word cuts something open. Every line bleeds. Every page is a wound I choose.
This is not art.
This is amputation.
There is only one thing on these walls.
The axe.
Clean. Oiled. Silent. It hangs where I cannot avoid it. Its shadow falls straight across the room, measuring what I became. Not what I wanted. Not what they needed.
What I became.
It was not mine first. It killed before it came to me, in hands I never knew, for reasons I inherited without being asked.
I am not its first sin.
Only its most recent.
I am not dust yet. Not while my hands can still drag the past into the light, where it cannot pretend to be clean.
The dead do not stay buried here.
Not by my hand.
So I begin at the only place that matters.
At the foundation.
At the first choice that taught my bloodline what it could get away with.
I draw a line across the page.
Steady.
As if I have always known how this must begin.
I write the first name.
