"Each journey, no matter how small, begins with a first step, I'm told. I never paid much attention to my steps, to the destinations of my travels, until finally I realized that those times passed without an advance towards any understanding of myself were those times wasted, and there is now nothing I can do to reclaim them. Time goes one way, unlike the paths of a journey, and once you come to the end... Well, that's where your part in the drama stops. No encores, no curtain-calls, no great comebacks from the graves of the past. Now, with time infinite to spend on remembering, I can recall with infinite clarity the lost seconds, minutes, hours in my life that I sat and stared at nothing, or listened to things best left without being thought, let alone put into action. I could even go to say that spending the time killing something would have been more constructive, if only to bring some variety to my self-induced limbo before death, and the time for introversion for the
spirit I would unwittingly release, as did my killer.

"I see now, after God knows how long to consider it, how rapid my decline actually was. On a planetary scale, my life would register as less than a blip. A fraction of a blip. A nothing. With my faculties aided (and impaired, I could say) by a mere twenty seven years of life, a tiny piece of wood through the heart was enough to bring my life as I knew it to a grinding halt. An arrow, physically, which inadvertently turned the blip into a flash; now, I have a purpose. Almost amusing, I would say, that through death I have discovered my life's purpose. I'll be telling the stories of the dead, and the living - mine included - to help pass the time. Never a metaphorical thinker, me, but to say that I will be weaving the threads of each small tale together for the story in full, that might be the most accurate of descriptions. Each person's steps bringing a new thread to the weave, finally resulting in a great collection that one might stand back and gaze upon, finding themselves
in front of something entirely different to the smallness of its beginnings. I, the great storyteller, whose eyes see the events of the past with total omnipotence. Each actor in the play, each leaf on the story tree, I can see them, see through them, and ultimately know them better than I know myself - if nothing else, I am able to provide an untainted point of view on what deeds they bring to our tales together; my tales.

"The scope of things I wish to tell are not altogether great, on the planetary scale. If my life was a blip, then the sum of my stories will be something slightly larger - perhaps a small dot. A speck of ink on a page without writing, eagerly awaiting the author's strokes to fulfill the plot and close the book. Thousands of years from the beginning, the first step of my story, to the present have passed. Simply unimaginable wastes of time. Things lurking. Things festering. Things fermenting, yes. Time heals all things, is another saying that I've yet to find meaning in, for someone left alone with their thoughts can easily turn to rot, which is exactly why I must begin my stories; I must begin with fervour. Simply to hear myself speak in this lacking, so that if nothing else is gained, I at least know I have the power of the language in me. Sometimes my tales may not make the sense of other, more educated men, or they may lack the colour and variety of them. The most
important thing is that I can tell you exactly what happened, and take a reasonably accurate guess at tomorrow's events. My words, above any others, ring true across space, time and death.

"So there it is. In it's purest form: I am dead, and I have been bestowed, however strangely, with the ability to let the living know how their lives have been changed by the past, those other dead just as easily forgotten as I. And what a story it is. The Creator, war, hate, love, brotherhood and insanity across the boundaries of reality... Though I will go no further into the scope of these tales, I will warn you that this is by no means a simple tale. It jumps, back and forth, around and about the order and reality you may well have called your own for your life. It will encompass it, involve it, destroy it and rebuild it anew. No things remain the same after a journey, no matter how small. There is only one thing that still manages to move me to bitterness. Of all these tales, I feature so small a part as to go almost without shaping the story. I do, though, simply have to tell it. Why, you ask? Because that's me, and that's my job. I'm the Narrator."