The Prequel

Pitter, patter

Pitter, patter

Rain battered the cracked windowpane of the desolate apartment. Inside, the room was suffocatingly dark environment.

There was a man.

His name no longer mattered. The world had completely stripped him of his identity, his dignity, and his reason to breathe. Tonight, he was finally ready to abandon the broken shell he had been forced to inhabit.

​He clutched his knees tightly to his chest, making himself as small as possible. His bony shoulders trembled violently. He was not shivering from the biting winter draft that seeped through the shattered glass. He was shaking from a profound fracture deep within his soul.

It was a fracture that had spiderwebbed across his sanity over the past five excruciating years.

He squeezed his sunken eyes shut, pressing the heels of his palms hard against his temples, pressing until it physically hurt, desperately praying the pressure would silence the agonizing chorus of memories echoing inside his skull.

​It did not work though. On the opposite, the voices only grew louder, as if mocking his misery.

​He vividly remembered the exact moment his reality began to shatter.

It was a rainy Tuesday evening. He had returned home early from his architectural firm, carrying a bouquet of white lilies to celebrate his 10th wedding anniversary.

Yes, he had spent a decade building a beautiful life for his family. He had poured every ounce of his sweat, his youth, and his pride into providing for the woman he adored and the two radiant children they shared.

He had worked 80 hour weeks so they would never know the sting of poverty.

​However, instead of a warm embrace, he found the front door unlocked. He then heard the muffled sounds of laughter drifting down the hallway from the master bedroom.

"Mmph~ Harder Lark, harder! Ahhhh!"

The betrayal he received behind that heavy oak door was a venom that permanently paralyzed his heart. His wife, the core of his existence and the only woman he had ever loved, lay tangled in their marital bed with the man he had called his brother.

His business partner. His best friend since they were both struggling college students.

​He stood frozen in the doorway, dropping the lilies onto the polished hardwood floor. The white petals scattered like the fragile illusions of his perfect life.

"Matheo, when did you come back? I thought you’re working overtime today."

​There was no apology in his wife’s cold eyes. There was no guilt or shame in his friend’s arrogant smirk.

They had simply stared at him, mildly annoyed that he had interrupted their private evening.

​That night was merely the prologue to his absolute destruction. The two people he trusted most in the universe had not just been sharing a bed. They had been meticulously and ruthlessly dismantling his life behind his back for years.

​Within a matter of weeks, his entire company was stripped from him through a complex labyrinth of forged signatures, hidden offshore accounts, and manipulated corporate contracts. The architectural firm he had built from the ground up, the legacy he intended to leave for his children, was swallowed whole by his former best friend.

He was ousted from the board of directors, buried under mountains of manufactured corporate debt, and left completely destitute.

The legal system, blind and easily bought by his partner’s newfound wealth, offered him absolutely no protection.

​But the financial ruin was utterly insignificant compared to the emotional slaughter that quickly followed.

​His wife filed for divorce and launched a campaign of character assassination so vicious, it left him entirely breathless.

She painted him as a monster to anyone who would listen. An abuser. An unstable, violent alcoholic who endangered their family.

She whispered these poisonous lies into the impressionable ears of his children, twisting their precious, innocent memories until they looked at their father not with love, but with terror.

​He remembered the final day in family court with agonizing clarity. The judge slammed the heavy wooden gavel, stripping away all of his parental rights and hitting him with a permanent restraining order.

He had looked across the fluorescent lit courtroom, desperately searching for a single drop of mercy in his children’s eyes.

​His seven year old daughter had hidden her face behind her mother’s expensive designer coat, trembling. His ten year old son had glared at him with pure hatred, fully believing the monstrous character their mother had created.

​"Please," he had begged falling to his knees right there on the cold courtroom floor.

"Please, you have taken everything else. They are my life. You cannot take my life away from me."

​Withou giving a shit, the bailiffs dragged him out by his arms like a feral dog.

Bang.

The reverberating sound of the heavy courtroom doors slamming shut was the loudest sound he had ever heard. It was the sound of his entire universe ending forever.

​Months turned into years, though time completely lost all meaning in his creeping isolation. He became a ghost haunting his own miserable existence.

​His mutual friends abandoned him, taking the side of the wealthy, charismatic business partner. His extended family, swayed by the relentless public smear campaign, cut all ties and refused to answer his letters. Society looked at him with profound disdain, seeing only the fabricated monster his ex wife had so carefully projected onto the world.

He was entirely, utterly alone in a world buzzing with billions of people.

​He had tried to rebuild. He truly did. He took grueling, manual labor jobs just to afford a moldy slice of bread and a roof that leaked brown water onto his mattress. But every time he managed to scrape together a meager savings, the crushing pressure of the legal debts and the exorbitant alimony payments garnished his minimum wages, leaving him starving and broken.

Right now, he was only a slave, working himself to the bone simply to finance the lavish lifestyle of the very people who had maliciously destroyed him.

​He had tried to see his children one last time. He had waited across the street from their elementary school, just wanting to ensure they were healthy and smiling. But his ex wife had spotted him. She screamed, calling the police.

He remembered the blinding red and blue lights afterwards, the rough hands of the officers throwing him against the pavement, and the horrifying sound of his own daughter crying out in fear of him.

​That was the day his spirit truly snapped.

​Now, he sat in this dark, freezing room. He had finally reached the absolute bottom of a bottomless abyss.

​He slowly lowered his trembling hands from his face. He opened his weary eyes. The decaying room blurred as tears spilled over his eyelashes, tracing hot, jagged paths down his sunken, unshaven cheeks. He raised a calloused hand and wiped his face, sniffling softly into the suffocating silence.

​When he looked at his fingers in the dim light of the streetlamp outside, his breath caught in his throat.

​The tears coating his skin were not clear. They were thick. They were incredibly dark.

​They were real blood.

​His profound sorrow had finally transcended the biological limits of the human body. His physical vessel was literally breaking down under the magnitude of his grief.

Solitude had completely hollowed out his chest, leaving nothing but an echoing cavern of pain.

Loneliness had frozen his veins. Self loathing, planted by the very people who had betrayed him, had taken deep root in his mind like a parasitic weed.

He blamed himself entirely. He asked himself every single night what he had done wrong, why he had not been enough for his wife, why he had been so blindingly naive to his friend’s true nature.

​He could not endure this torturous existence for another second.

​He had fought valiantly. He had tried to survive against impossible odds. He had hoped, incredibly foolishly, that the truth would eventually surface, that his children would grow up and realize he loved them more than life itself, that the universe would eventually offer him a single, tiny ounce of redemption or justice.

​But the universe was entirely indifferent to the suffering of good men.

​He slowly stood up. His legs shook violently beneath him, frail and severely malnourished. The wooden floorboards groaned in loud protest as he walked toward the exact center of the room.

He stared the hanging rope he tied on the ceiling fan.

He had spent seventy two agonizing hours staring at it, desperately waiting for a single, fleeting reason to step away.

​No reason ever came. No one called. No one knocked. No one cared.

​He pulled a wobbly wooden dining chair directly beneath the dangling rope.

He climbed onto it.

His movements were strictly mechanical, entirely devoid of hesitation or fear. The man who had once loved life so deeply, who had once smiled with a brightness that could rival the morning sun, was already dead.

This final, desperate act was merely a biological formality. It was the necessary disposal of a corpse that had somehow stubbornly kept breathing.

​He slipped the rough, scratchy hemp loop around his neck. The coarse fibers bit sharply into his sensitive skin, but it was a surprisingly welcome sensation.

It was a tangible, physical pain that momentarily distracted him from the agonizing, formless void expanding in his chest.

​He closed his eyes. The bloody tears squeezed out from beneath his eyelids one last time.

​In his final moment of consciousness, he did not see the cruel wife who had betrayed him, nor the greedy friend who had ruined him. He saw the beautiful faces of his children, vibrant and smiling brightly, just as they had been on that rainy Tuesday afternoon before everything shattered into a million irreparable pieces.

​"I am so incredibly sorry. I just wanted to be a good father to you both."

​With that, he kicked the wooden chair away.

​He did not make a single move to save himself.

After all, pain was an old friend.

Soon, darkness swallowed his existence, ending the pain of betrayal, and the unbearable loneliness that had defined his final years.

​He truly thought this was the absolute end. He completely believed the dark void would grant his weary soul eternal peace.

​But, he never could have possibly imagined that decades later, in a magical world utterly foreign to his own, another soul would feel the phantom burn of that rough rope around his own neck, waking up in a cold sweat with a terrifying disgust for the fragility of human trust, vowing never to become the pathetic, broken man who had just taken his last breath.