Glau asked for a record.

  That is the sort of thing he does, of course. When the world begins to shake loose at the seams and all sensible people are busy sharpening blades, sealing pacts, raising walls, counting omens, or pretending not to fear what they already know is coming, Glau asks for ink. Not because he mistakes writing for action. Not because he is sentimental. Certainly not because he believes memory to be kinder than war. No, Glau asked because he understands something the rest of us are usually too proud, too frightened, or too blood-soaked to admit.

  If we fall, someone else will tell our story.

  And they will tell it badly.

  That is not arrogance. I have heard the way mortals speak of the dead. I have heard the songs made from men who died face down in the mud and were later turned by a minstrel’s tongue into shining paragons with clean hands and noble endings. I have heard cowards made martyrs, fools made saints, and butchers made tragic heroes because no one living had the stomach to tell the truth of them. Memory is rarely honest. Legend is worse. Legend does not merely forget. It edits.

  So Glau asked us to write.

  Not decreed. Not commanded. Asked.

  That is an important distinction, though I suspect history would miss it if I did not write it plainly. He did not summon us like a magistrate, nor speak like a priest with prophecy lodged up his spine, nor act as though godhood had carved the right to obedience into his bones. He stood among us as one who had walked the same road, looked toward the same horizon, and understood—as I think only we could understand—that there is a particular kind of terror in standing at the threshold of a war that may unmake not only your future, but your meaning.

  “We should leave something true behind,” he said.

  Simple words. Glau has always had a talent for that. Hand him a mountain of dread and he will carve a sentence from it that lands light as a feather and heavy as a tomb.

  We should leave something true behind.

  I laughed when he said it.

  Not because it was foolish, but because it was cruel.

  Truth, in my experience, has never been a clean thing. It arrives mixed with pride, shame, grief, vanity, longing, and all the thousand private cowardices a person spends a lifetime arranging into a shape they can live with. Ask a man what happened to him, and if he has any scars worth the name, what he gives you is rarely a lie—but it is rarely untouched by his own hands either. Memory is like that. It cannot help itself. It dresses wounds. It polishes rage. It hides tenderness where tenderness feels dangerous. It lets you remember the line you spoke before the battle and forget the moment just after when your knees threatened to give out beneath you.

  So when Glau asked for truth, I told him he ought to have started with someone holier.

  He looked at me, and with that infuriating patience of his said, “You always mistake honesty for innocence.”

  I hated him a little for that.

  Mostly because he was right.

  That is another thing history may forget if I do not pin it here: by the time a man is called a god, people become terribly eager to believe he was always meant to be one. They begin rummaging backward through his life like scholars through an archive, searching for early signs, noble omens, secret stars at his birth, old women who prophesied over his cradle, wolves that bowed to him in the woods, or teachers who looked into his face and whispered, yes, this one will stride into eternity. People love inevitability. It comforts them. If greatness was foreordained, then perhaps all the ruin it demanded can be forgiven. If godhood was destiny, then the blood on the road may be counted as tribute rather than cost.

  It would be a lovely lie.

  I was not born under a sign anyone bothered to record. No star split the sky to announce me. No oracle named me. No god reached down with warm hands and marked my brow. I was born in the Azuri Ranger Corps, in a place where duty was more common than affection and competence was a closer thing to prayer than any hymn I ever heard. My first inheritance was not prophecy. It was expectation. I was taught to stand straight, speak clearly, clean my blade, honor the dead, obey when obedience mattered, question when conscience demanded, and carry my share of the weight without whining loudly enough for others to hear it.

  If there was divinity in me then, it was buried so deep beneath mud, discipline, hunger, fear, and the ordinary cruelties of being alive that no one could have dug it out with a kingdom’s worth of shovels.

  That is how it truly was for all of us, I think, though each of us would phrase it differently.

  We did not begin as legends.

  We began as people.

  People are smaller. Stranger. Harder to forgive.

  A legend can carry a wound and still appear beautiful. A person limps. A legend loses and becomes tragic. A person loses and becomes bitter, frightened, or mean. A legend sacrifices and is remembered for nobility. A person sacrifices and sometimes spends years wondering whether the choice was courage or simply the inability to imagine any other path.

  I have known all these things. So have the others, though they may clothe them in finer language than mine.

  And that, perhaps, is why these journals matter.

  If we fall against Ohm, and I write that name without title because I have no desire to adorn an enemy with reverence, then what remains of us will be seized upon by survivors, enemies, allies, priests, cowards, scholars, carrion-writers, and every bright-eyed fool who has ever mistaken proximity to power for understanding. Some will call us chosen. Some will call us monsters. Some will call us thieves of heaven. Some will call us proof that mortals should never have reached so high. Others will place us on altars made from ignorance and kneel before versions of us that never existed.

  They may even mean well.

  That is the trouble.

  Falsehood born from hatred is easier to confront. It comes armored, shouting, with banners raised. You know where to strike it. But falsehood born from admiration is patient. It smiles. It preserves the shape of you while hollowing out the substance. It takes your grief and makes it noble, your pettiness and makes it charming, your fear and makes it resolve, your mistakes and makes them stepping stones. It does not spit on your grave. It tidies it.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I would rather be cursed accurately than worshiped falsely.

  So I am writing.

  Not because I think myself the best among us to do so. If anything, I suspect I am one of the least suitable. I have always had too sharp a tongue for sainthood and too little patience for the kind of self-forgiveness old age is said to bring. I remember too much to think well of myself, and not enough to trust every memory without suspicion. But perhaps that is exactly why I should be the one to begin. A cleaner soul might make cleaner pages. Cleaner pages would be easier to preserve, easier to recite, easier to love. They would also be less useful.

  Glau understood that too, I think. He asked not for perfection, but for witness.

  There is a difference.

  Perfection is for monuments. Witness is for the living.

  And if anyone is reading this beyond the handful of us who first set pen to paper at Glau’s insistence, then I assume matters have gone badly enough that you deserve better than monuments.

  Perhaps you have found these pages after our deaths. Perhaps after our defeat. Perhaps after our victory, though if victory has come and still someone is pawing through our old words for guidance, then I suspect the cost was dearer than we wished. Perhaps you have found them in a time when our names are already splintering into doctrine and counter-doctrine, into shrines and slanders, into schools of thought founded by people who never heard us speak except through the mouths of their own ambitions. Perhaps you are frightened. Perhaps you are angry. Perhaps you are merely curious.

  If you are wise, be all three.

  Know this first: there was no single moment in which I became what I am now.

  People ask that sort of question because they want transformation to arrive like lightning. A revelation. A door thrown open. A crown descending. They want an answer they can paint on temple walls. Tell me, they ask, when did the mortal become divine?

  As if a life can be cut so neatly.

  As if a soul does not change by inches before it changes by storms.

  As if all the roads that matter are not built from smaller steps taken long before anyone thinks to mark the journey.

  If I am to tell this properly, then I must begin where godhood was farthest from my mind. Before power. Before revelation. Before the names that cling to me now like armor that cannot be fully removed. Before companions who would become more precious than blood. Before war opened its jaws wide enough for all of us to see the shape of what waited within. Before Ohm became a horizon we could no longer ignore.

  I must begin as I was.

  A boy of the Corps.

  That phrase means more than I can easily explain to someone not raised beneath those banners. To be born into the Rangers was to inherit a world already moving. There were always boots by the threshold, tack needing repair, messages arriving at odd hours, half-finished meals abandoned for duty, quiet griefs carried without performance, and the constant understanding that the world beyond our walls was forever threatening to become someone else’s problem if we were not willing to make it ours first. Childhood, in such a place, is not softer than elsewhere. Only more disciplined. Wonder still exists, but it learns early to share a bed with vigilance.

  That was the cradle I knew.

  Not silk. Not prophecy. Not any grand design.

  Leather. Woodsmoke. Routine. Orders. Laughter too sharp to be called gentle and too familiar to be called cruel. Men and women who were competent long before they were kind, and kind in ways you only recognized much later, when you had enough scars of your own to understand what they had been trying to spare you.

  My parents were both of the Corps. Of them I will say more when the road reaches them, and less than they deserve when it passes on, which is the burden of writing about the dead or nearly dead or those placed so deep in memory that they have become a country more than a pair of faces. I knew them first as fixtures of the life around me: voices before dawn, hands callused from bow and rein, the smell of rain trapped in cloaks, the silence of fatigue mistaken by a child for distance, the lessons tucked into every glance and correction. I loved them. I feared disappointing them. I resented the Corps for claiming so much of them. I loved the Corps for the same reason.

  There. That is a truth ugly enough to trust.

  You see how this must go.

  I cannot tell you the story of becoming without also telling you the story of belonging. Nor can I speak honestly of belonging without touching the old splinters buried in it. If these pages serve any purpose, let it be this: to show the whole shape, not only the polished side turned toward worship.

  We are close now, all of us, to something final.

  Even gods feel the air before a storm.

  It gathers differently than mortal weather. Mortal storms roll in over land and sea, announce themselves to the skin, the birds, the leaves. This kind comes through silence first. Through the strange restraint of powerful things preparing to collide. Through the sense that every conversation is happening slightly too late and every kindness must be weighed against the possibility that it will be the last chance to offer it. Through the knowledge that sleep is no longer rest, only postponement.

  I have fought enough battles to know the taste of coming blood. I have buried enough of my own certainties to stop pretending there is glory in the anticipation. Whatever songs are sung after the fact—and there are always songs—let no one tell you that those who stand at the edge of great war do so with clean hearts and uplifted chins, grateful for the chance to be tested. We stand because something worse would happen if we did not. Courage has always been far more practical than poets like to admit.

  So yes, Glau was right. Someone had to write.

  Someone had to leave a trail back through the dark.

  Not because the past can save you by itself. It cannot. But because there is power in understanding that those who stand tallest at the end were not born there. They stumbled. They failed. They doubted. They wanted small things and lost them. They loved unwisely. They survived by luck when they preferred to call it skill. They made terrible bargains with themselves. They kept going.

  That last part may be the only sacred thing about us.

  We kept going.

  If I have any authority now, let it rest there, not in what I became, but in the fact that I once had every reason to stop and did not. Perhaps that is all godhood truly is when stripped of theater and temple-work: not perfection, not destiny, but endurance sharpened until the world can no longer ignore it.

  There. Listen to me. I set out to write a record and have already begun sounding like a preacher. Glau would be delighted. Or horrified. With him the difference is often slight.

  I should say, before I go further, that I am not writing these pages in the order memory offers them. No one could. The past is not a road laid neatly behind us. It is a forest. You find one path and it reminds you of another. You kneel to examine an old footprint and uncover a grave. You chase birdsong and discover you have wandered back toward the place you swore you would not look again. So if there are moments here where one season calls to another, where one wound reaches forward to name a later scar, forgive the shape of it. I am building with human hands from human memory, however much power may now sit behind my ribs.

  And I am tired.

  That too deserves saying.

  Not defeated. Not yet. But tired in the way iron must be tired of fire. Tired in the way a blade is tired after long use—not broken, not useless, but aware now of every strike that brought it here. There are faces around me I would burn worlds to protect. There are names I carry like old debts. There are dead who still walk beside me in the private places of my mind. There are choices approaching for which no amount of power makes the price lighter. If these pages tremble anywhere, it is not from fear of telling the truth. It is from knowing how much of that truth was paid for by people who will never read it.

  So let this be the first line driven into the ground before I begin the march backward.

  I do not write as a god speaking down to the past.

  I write as a man who remembers.

  Whatever else has been placed upon me—whatever light, whatever burden, whatever name others now raise like a banner—memory remains the truest country I possess. And in that country I am still mud-spattered, sharp-tongued, half-angry, stubborn, uncertain, trying not to show fear where others can scent it. I am still the boy who mistook discipline for invulnerability. The young Ranger who thought endurance alone could save everyone worth saving. The fool who believed the world’s deepest wounds would yield if only one pushed hard enough against them.

  If you would understand how I came to stand where I stand now, do not begin with the miracles. Do not begin with the battles that drew the eyes of gods. Do not begin with the titles or the radiance or the war with Ohm.

  Begin where I began.

  With the Corps.

  With the sound of boots before dawn.

  With gold eyes I had not yet earned, staring up at those who had.

  With a life ordinary enough that no one looking at it would have thought the heavens had any cause to remember my name.

  That is where this starts.

  That is where it must.

  And if I tell it well—well enough that you can see the boy before you judge the god—then perhaps Glau will get what he asked for after all.

  Something true.