Prologue · The First Choice

Before the realms, before the hunger, before the lie that love destroys the world, there was a garden.

And in the garden, there was a light.

It had been alone for so long that it had forgotten it was possible to be anything else. It made stars to keep itself company, and the stars made worlds, and the worlds made life, and the life made more life, and still the light was alone—because nothing it made could look back at it and choose it.

Then, one day, the shadow came.

The shadow was not the opposite of the light. It was the other side of it—the quiet, the rest, the space where the light could stop being bright and simply be. It had been there all along, in the places the light couldn't see itself, watching, waiting, learning to want.

And on the day the shadow finally stepped into the light, it did the only thing that had ever mattered.

It chose.

Not because fate willed it. Not because the garden demanded it. Because the light was worth choosing, and the shadow was brave enough to say so.

The light, for the first time in its existence, was not alone.

It looked at the shadow, and it chose back.

And that—the first choice, the only covenant, the thing the universe was built on—was so bright, and so true, that the hunger that had been waiting at the edge of creation for something to eat saw it, and felt, for the first time, afraid.

It could not eat the choice.

But it could, it decided, eat the ones who made it.

This is the story of what happened after.

It is also the story of a morgue, a rainstorm, a corpse tagged ZERO, and the thirteenth time a woman put a blade through the heart of the only man who ever truly loved her.

But before all that—before the tags and the thrones and the curses—there was a garden, and a light, and a shadow.

And a choice.