Prologue: the dreams of childhood

“Corentin, this way!” being tagged along by a cute, young girl as if nothing else in the world mattered. “Quickly, quickly!” she uttered cheerfully as her smile painted the very picture of ‘freedom’. Freedom not in the sense of liberation and self-determination, but by the absence of responsibility and hopelessness of the world’s problems; the kind of freedom that would suggest a king was not as free as the child of a peasant who knew not the woes of society.

I gazed upon her glimmering azure eyes and sighed a breath of relief as though all the worries of the future and past were meaningless. My heart grew lighter and my legs ran faster while she continued to drag me off to somewhere. It felt like I had woken up from a long fever dream. The untainted air of the countryside rushed down my lungs, healing me from the inside. It was a symphony of nature: the crashing sound of a waterfall in the distance, the swaying of trees and their leaves like the echoes of a hundred cymbals, and the carefree laughter of the young girl who tugged me along.

A dream or reality? It had become dangerously ambiguous as to which it was. Conventional attitudes would suggest such a tranquil perversion of freedom couldn’t possibly exist in these woeful times. If it was a dream, I didn’t want to wake up.

Suddenly it happened. The world around me began to warp; all sound of which I had heard with clarity until now had become muffled and indistinct, the vibrant colours of the world became a jumbled mess of odd shapes and colours, and the firmness of the ground grew uncertain. It all happened so fast and placed a massive strain on my body. I heard the young girl’s voice shouting at me desperately, yet I couldn’t understand what she was trying to say.

Then, everything became dark.

A silence…

A lonely silence of which I had been familiar with for a long time…

The dream had ended, and I was confronted by reality.