Prologue: Awakening

  Jonathan mentally quivered, if such a thing existed. Not because of pain, no, there was no pain to be felt. Just emptiness. Pure emptiness. The wagon had hit him square on, the rock-hard front to boot, carrying with it such a force, he was bumped unconscious within the fraction of a second. His limp body had fallen to the ground, mauled by the wagon’s large wheels, and then crushed inch after inch by the indifferent, merciless hooves of the imperial horses following behind the wagon.

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  Was this death, he asked. A dark veil, with nothing but the blackest black to see, and the heaviest silence to hear? He pondered, in this mysterious state, whatever was enabling him to think. Then, as if his body had split up into millions of parts and these parts were scraping against each other, a numbing sensation came to be. Like the feeling of basking in the sun, or jumping in the gushing river a summer day, magnified by a thousand.

  Then came light. The vibrant colour of leaves, the crisp cries of the morning hawk. He observed his surroundings, finding himself on the same road he had been mauled to death upon. Blood covered his now ragged, tattered clothes, as well as the ground, where the bloody imprints of imperial hooves had stayed behind to serve as witnesses to his tragic and casual death. And yet he was alive. As if it was all a dream. But it was not. He knew this.