Prologue
I’m not quite sure where to begin. I never had a knack for telling stories — whatever kind they were, long or short, happy or tragic. If we’re being completely honest, I never had much of a knack for anything, with the honourable exception of assembling and disassembling computers. Which, let’s be fair, isn’t exactly the kind of talent that makes people gasp with admiration at parties. But it was what I had.
So it came as no surprise — not to me, not to anyone who knew me — when I followed through with a degree in Computer Engineering. I graduated at twenty-four, diploma in hand, and the illusion still perfectly intact that I was going to conquer the world. Back then, there was this romantic idea floating around that technology was going to change everything, and that anyone who understood it was destined to become a millionaire before thirty. I believed that with a conviction that embarrasses me slightly now.
Needless to say: I did not become a millionaire.
I ended up working at the computer shop at the end of my street, listening to elderly ladies who swore their television remotes had stopped working overnight, without any plausible explanation. According to them, it was always the fault of the big corporations, deliberately making their devices more complicated every year. I never challenged that theory. Not because I agreed, but because I learned early on that some battles aren’t worth fighting.
The job was supposed to be temporary. Three, maybe four months, while something better came along. That was over ten years ago. I’ll give it this much — the job has a resilience I never quite managed to develop myself. Do I hate what I do? No. But I don’t love it either. To use the kind of analogy that only a software engineer would drop into normal conversation: I became a sort of background process. Running, consuming resources, performing functions — but without anyone really noticing, and without me really noticing much of anything either. I survive. Which is very different from living, as anyone with a minimum of lucidity already knows.
But not everything is grey. There’s always the odd window of light.
Mine appeared on an ordinary morning, during one of my coffee breaks at the bar next to the shop. She was there, orange juice in hand, with a slightly distracted look, as though her mind was somewhere else entirely. She worked at a travel agency nearby. I can’t pin down the season, or even the month. What I know is that I got lost in that awkward way she had about her before I even knew her name. There was something about her I couldn’t describe with any technical precision — and believe me, I tried. For weeks, the ritual was always the same: walk into the bar, look for the dark shade of her long hair, and leave without saying a word, with a flutter in my chest that had nothing to do with the caffeine.
It took me as long as it took to work up the courage. It wasn’t a glorious entrance. I failed memorably the first few times, with the elegance of someone who was never really taught how to do these things. But with time, she let me in. And for a good couple of years, my mediocre life had a completely different texture.
Like everything, our love had an ending. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. That’s a story for later, and there’s a lot of ground to cover before we get there.
What remained from our time together gave me the greatest joy I’ve ever known: my daughter. Small, loud, completely unstoppable. I’d never really imagined myself as a father. It was one of those things that existed in an abstract and distant future, like retirement or learning to cook properly. I remember the day I found out as clearly as if it happened half an hour ago. I was on the sofa, beer in hand, watching football — a cliché in its purest form, I know. She walks into the living room, holds up the test, and I stared at it with the same intellectual enthusiasm of someone reading the instructions for an appliance they don’t need. It took me a few seconds. I put two and two together. I turned off the television — which, given that there were only a few minutes left in the match, is perhaps the most heroic thing I’ve ever done in my pre-apocalypse life — and I hugged her with everything I had.
I think my team lost that game. Still worth it.
As for adventures, I wasn’t particularly well served there either. I was born in this city, grew up in this city, and until not so long ago, had never really left it in any meaningful way. The pinnacle of extravagance was a weekend in Paris with my friends, which resulted in sleeping in a hostel that smelled of damp and catching a food poisoning that left us all bedridden for two days. It wasn’t exactly the itinerary the films promise.
To summarise, because I think you’ve got the picture by now: my life, up until the moment everything changed, could be described in a single word. Mediocre. Not in any catastrophic sense — there are people with far less, and I know that. But in the sense of something exact and sufficient that never quite became anything else. A life running on low-power mode.
What nobody told me — and what I eventually learned the hard way — is that mediocre lives can be transformed too. That the same grey, rainy morning can give way to an unexpected sunny afternoon. That sometimes all it takes is a single day — a single moment — for everything you thought you knew about yourself to stop making sense.
By now, you’re probably wondering what on earth you’re doing listening to the story of a man in his early thirties, divorced, with a daughter and a job that was never part of the plan. That’s a fair question. The answer is better than the question.
Would you believe me if I told you I’m a hero?
Probably not. I wouldn’t believe it myself, if it hadn’t happened to me. Look at the portrait I’ve painted: am I brave? Not a chance — backing down from an argument might be wisdom, but it’s not quite the same as facing the apocalypse. Am I a skilled warrior? If the enemy is a computer virus, perhaps. Do I come from a glorious bloodline? That would be something. My father has gout and some days can’t get out of bed. My mother has high blood pressure and a very firm opinion on everything else. Do I have a devastating beauty, capable of stopping time? No. I would describe my appearance as functional. Gets the job done.
So why me?
If I told you now, it would ruin all the fun. You’ll have to keep reading.
What I can tell you, right here at the beginning, is this: what lies ahead is a world of magic and gods with a chronic bad temper, of villains that would thrive in nightmares and heroes worthy of poetry. And in the middle of all of it — me. The divorced IT guy who didn’t ask for any of this and, if I’m being honest, still hasn’t fully figured out what’s going on.
The final battle is tomorrow.
If I stop telling the story before we get to the end, it means things didn’t go well. In that case, I apologise for the inconvenience.
Good luck to all of us.
