I own none of this. Please don't sue me.

Prologue

Life.

It's such a wonderful thing, isn't it?

Full of hope, and love, and longing for things just out of reach.

Full of possibility, and despair, and the realization that what you seek is impossible to obtain.

Full of rules and conditions, of unforeseeable situations, of missteps and regret and that mind weariness which we call experience.

Life.

What is it good for?

What is good for it?

What is the point of something so resilient and so fragile, so unpredictable in its cycles, repeating patterns that are at once incomprehensible and frighteningly mundane?

And what is the best way to cultivate such a self-contradictory thing, the best way to maintain something that always moves towards its own destruction? How do the living maintain themselves when they realize they hate existing, and hate the end of that existence even more?

Life.

To err is to live, and to live is to err. It's a simple reflexive property, one seen countless times.

And out of these errors, human interaction emerges. It accumulates and coalesces into something so horrendously complicated that we come to hate it, trapped as we are by it. We start to strive for that which is out of reach, for something that will never be touched by our callused, broken, bloodied hands.

By itself, this is nothing worthy of note, as everyone faces this to some degree. What is interesting is how one reacts to this. Does one ignore it? Oppose it? Accept it? Something in between?

It is hard to say which way is right. Right and wrong, good and evil: all these are human concepts, invented to try and explain our own existence. And though we try as we might, life always has the upper hand, constantly ridiculing our attempts to comprehend its secrets, berating us for wasting its gift on trying to discover how the gift works.

All anyone can really say is that life goes ever onwards, towards an unknown and unknowable conclusion that some view as our salvation, others as our destruction.

Life.

We can say it is like water, torrential and unfathomable. We can liken it to the earth, nurturing and unstoppably powerful. We can speak of how it is like fire, consuming and hauntingly beautiful. And we can whisper of how it resembles the wind, ethereal and beholden only to itself.

It is all these things, and it is none of them. Cliché, but true nonetheless. Whenever we try to ascribe certain attributes to life, it simultaneously conforms to our expectations and works to undermine this perception. That is its nature, the legacy it has left for humanity. It is at once illuminating and obscuring, informing and deceiving, invigorating and parasitic.

Perhaps the best comparison we can draw with life, then, is something necessary for its continued existence, something that also conceals its dual nature with the shroud of familiarity.

That is to say, the closest thing to life is light.

And the easiest way to disperse that light is through the use of a prism.

...

But you're not here for my ramblings, are you?

No, you're here for a story. A story you've heard many times before, and one that you never seem to tire of. You probably know what to expect by now.

Let's try something a little different, then.

This is the story of a man who had a dream, one of heroes and salvation and justice for all. It was as selfless and hopeful as it was unrealistic.

This is the story of a man who was tested, pitted against those who sought the prize of an impossibility realized. He fought, and fought, and fought, until his body withered away and his dream lay dying in the dust.

This is the story of a man who was broken by his miracle.