The Key to Before

Chapter 1

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This is a story about power, but also about weakness. It's about courage and fear, about the extraordinary living amongst the ordinary. It's a story of contradictions, I suppose.

To be honest, I don't know who I'm writing this for. I don't know if you're reading this in the future, or in the past. Things are going to get really complicated, you see. As if they weren't complicated enough to begin this whole story with.

But just in case you're from the past, or if they hide the truth from you in the future, here is what you need to know happened, to bring about the reality I was born into. There's no way to tell it nicely, or poetically, because the things that happened were neither nice nor poetic. So I'll just tell you the facts, so you can know.

In 2132, a war broke out across the entire planet. I won't go into the politics of why it started, and truthfully, the history books that I was taught from were probably full of lies anyway. All you need to know is that it happened, because it triggered something - something that would come to define all of life thereafter.

It wasn't the first of the world wars, but it was the largest. No country, no nation, no region was left untouched. The battles were terrible and millions died, but then again, that's what happens in wars.

And sometimes, betrayals happen in wars, too. On May 2, 2134, one of the major powers did the unthinkable, and launched The Bomb. It wasn't supposed to be used - it was supposed to be a deterrent and a safeguard against the very destruction that it caused. It was a chemical, bio-engineered weapon of mass destruction, and that was the most that people knew about it, until one came hurtling down onto the United States of America.

Then America launched one right back, across the sea.

And all hell broke loose upon the earth.

By the time the bombing stopped, the planet was devastated. There were more ruins than buildings. There were more dead bodies than living ones. It was one of the darkest times in the history of our kind.

Still, many survived. And the war ended, with no clear winner because all sides had lost too much to allow any pretensions at victory.

Years passed. Countries rebuilt themselves, slowly. People did what they've always done: moved on, lived, got married, had children. And the whole world thought that they had learned from the darkness. They thought that they knew better, because they had suffered so terribly. That, if ever faced with the allure of power and the temptation of seizing it, that they would turn away from it. They thought that they would choose love for humankind over love for self. They actually believed that the war had wiped out the greed and corruption from their natures.

They were so, so wrong.

The first recorded case of a Power emerged a mere decade after the war's end. He would later become known as Decimus, but when he was born, he was just Jack or Jason or something like that. Just ordinary. When he was born, his parents thought that their son was fine, just a little imaginative, perhaps. But eventually they realized the truth.