The Guardian

It might not be a religious proverb, but at least it ought to be a maxim of humankind. It’s certainly one of the greatest truths I’ve discovered: life is mostly bewildering.

I suppose when I found myself with an Immortal as a mentor, I should have expected that my world was going to change. But how does one prepare for the sheer magnitude of dissimilar perspectives they are presented with when their mentor is a more than thousand-year-old Greek? And he lives by a set of truths learned in a world long forgotten. Forgotten, but not gone.

One truth is our capacity for inadvertent adventure. Though there is civilization aplenty, the wild spaces between the cities have always surprised people with the unexpected. And here another great truth of Apollo’s time is found: those men who heed the call of such adventures often live just long enough to become dangerous but die before they can tell their children about the truly important discoveries they made.

And here we are, descendants with an indescribable deficit in our upbringing, a feeling that there is more to the world than we’ve been told. I know you’ve felt it. But though men are forgetful, these kinds of important things don’t just go away. They rest in the shadows and wait to be rediscovered.

I ought to have known some people would rather that such forgotten things stayed that way. Men who search for meaning and direction are far more controllable than they might be, if they knew the truths we learned from the Guardian. Neither of us intended to become historians, but once such information was recovered there was only one thing to do, it had to be written down, or be lost for another generation.

So then we begin the Books of the Disremembered.