Forward
By The Chronicler, Unwilling Participant and Marginally Present Observer
Most books begin with the illusion of certainty: a bold statement, a thesis, a confident announcement that This Is What Happened.
This book is not burdened with such arrogance.
Truth is an unstable substance in the world you're about to enter—vibrating, refracting, disagreeing with itself like a chorus of poorly medicated theologians. Even memory, which should serve as bedrock, behaves here more like a skittish animal: easily startled, prone to bolting in several contradictory directions at once.
Still, some things are constant across most recorded strands of reality, and Joe—Crazy Uncle Joe, patron saint of bad decisions and accidental cosmology—is one of them.
He is not the beginning of the story. He is not the end of it.
But he is a fracture point.
A tear in the wallpaper of existence.
A man who pressed his face too close to the mirror and realized the reflection was breathing first.
Those who study such anomalies—formally, in sterile rooms beneath inconvenient mountains, or informally, huddled around campfires burning with colors found nowhere on the electromagnetic spectrum—argue vehemently about whether Joe is a natural occurrence, a designed instrument, or a cosmic clerical error finally collecting interest.
I do not have answers.
I have notes.
Some I wrote myself. Others arrived uninvited, scrawled in unfamiliar handwriting on pages that weren't blank when I closed the journal. Occasionally a sentence appears before I write it, which is unnerving but convenient.
My role, reluctant though it is, is to record Joe’s path as faithfully as the ever-shifting nature of reality allows. To testify, if only to myself, that what happened did happen, even if every universe but this one decides to forget.
I will also, from time to time, step forward to correct the record, because Joe—gifted though he is—tends to lie to himself in ways that have consequences for everyone else.
And if you, reader, feel something watching as you continue, perhaps a presence just over your shoulder or behind the glass of your phone—don’t be alarmed.
It is probably not Joe.
It is far more likely something watching him.
Consider this a travel guide. A survival manual. A confession. A warning.
Or perhaps just the story of a man who couldn’t stop touching the wound in reality once he found it.
Whatever this book is, it begins here:
A boy who knew he was different.
A mirror that finally admitted it.
And a universe that has run out of patience.
— The Chronicler
(Somewhere between places)
