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CHAPTER ONE / VOL. I, BAD OMENS EVERYWHERE
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REMEMBER: virtue is a fickle thing—volatile and wayward, subject to change at any time given the right circumstances. As you may see it, the hero stumbles through mire and slays the dragon, rescuing the princess who sits perched in her tower like an object of desire, but never anything more than skin-deep. However, the hero still has something to gain and selflessness doesn't exist even in fairy tales. So the hero has self-interest at heart, the princess waits to be saved, but what of the dragon who dies at the hands a of proud man—a villain. Even if the dragon is self-serving and antagonistic, the hero is the one swinging a sword and carving through flesh. At the end of the day we are all the same ugly, belligerent creatures predisposed to breed rancor and chaos. And what becomes of us after? Well, that doesn't matter much.
Somewhere along the way the hero may look upon their own reflection in a window and see the incomplete parts of a human being, some malformed creature made up of vices and sharp objects. The hero wallows in their own fragility, wondering at what point the world had fell to ruins. At the same time, the princess might be pacing the tower, glimpsing in a mirror at all the pretty parts that don't quite form a whole. More importantly, the tower has become a prison with bludgeons for stones and nooses for curtains. If the hero comes too late, still in shambles from their own misery, they might find the princess in pieces, lost in the mire, a long way down from the tower that watches on, seeing all and saying nothing.
But the dragon is still a dragon. It doesn't care for the trials and tribulations of mankind. It still treks through the brambles, spreading droplets of blood and setting fires everywhere, bleeding from a laceration that should have been cauterized, but some wounds never heal. It's important that you understand who you are: the hero, the princess, the dragon. A lot of things depend on this, including whether or not you make it to the end of the story—that, of course, doesn't take into account self-destruction. But Will is none of the above—not the hero, not the princess, and not the dragon. So what does that make her?
Will has never tried to mask the monster she is. She'd learned long ago that it didn't matter how violent and volatile she was, or how antagonism was laced in her DNA, inseparable from the most fundamental framework that forged her. It didn't matter because Will was never made to be anything good. Haunting and devastating, she is a perpetual open wound, raw and exposed—digging deeper with bloodied fingers to reach bone, lancing with pain, but still enough to bring relief. After all, pain is proof of life.
