It has been at least an age, and yet how my story began seems like yesterday. For many years, I, Aurora Agape Kellogg, have held this story I am about to share close to my heart. I now am certain the time to divulge is upon me. The hardest part in starting this story, though, is to know where to begin. I suppose to start from the beginning, I should lead with my father. I did not get to know him until late in my life. My mother said he loved us fiercely, and then one day he was taken from us. You see, my father died when I was very young. My mother said he died protecting us. For the longest time, this is all I knew. I compiled this story you are about to read of those early years from several sources: my parents' journal entries, a newspaper article or two, the stories my mother told me when I was younger, and another man’s writings which I only recently “discovered” (for the second time, I am now told). As I put the finishing touches on this story, I hope it will bring me peace. Over the years (a construct which is hard to measure now, time has changed from what it was…) I have kept it bottled up inside, I felt a strong sense I was being untrue to something greater than myself. I felt I was holding something back someone somewhere desperately needed to read… I believe there are four certainties in life. The first two are **love** and **hope**. In the moments when you feel you have lost one or the other, those are the times when we are the ripest for personal growth. Once you have discovered the warm embrace of these emotions, then our singular drive is to hoard them at all costs. Of course, the world is adept at stripping them away from us. Now if we were to think even for a moment about the sadness of this conundrum, we might begin to discover a truth. If we have this innate desire for love and hope and yet we can so easily lose them - why do we have those desires in the first place? What could possibly be the reason to desire something so deeply which we can so easily lose? Could it be there is a love and a hope which we cannot lose? However, instead of traveling down this path in our minds, when the world does what it does best, we instead blindly rush off to reclaim what we have lost by any means possible. Then more often than not, our actions inevitably cause others to lose their love and/or hope, and the whole vicious cycle continues on and on without hope that it will ever end. Or will it? This then leads me to the other two certainties of life: **good** and **evil**. The greatest battles and struggles in the entirety of human history have been the battles between good and evil. Is a person basically good or basically evil? Of course, we do not want to stoop so low as to accept the latter, so obviously the former must be the truth. Could our pursuit of love and hope be the primary cause of all evil in the world? While my pursuit of love and hope may cause others pain, I would like to believe that this does not make me evil. Of course, when someone’s actions cause me to lose my love or hope, it is much easier to see them as evil. Okay, so if we are honest then we come to see we are **all** capable of evil (to be fair on a wildly sliding scale). And while we would rather not have this be so, we often feel we are powerless to save even ourselves from this reality. Still, we would want to be saved from it if it were possible, and just like that, we are getting much closer to the only pure love and hope, which most of mankind has sadly chosen to reject. This worldview, which in one way or another at one point was found in all major religions and even rejections of religion, formed the foundation of the revolution. But before we get into this piece of history, I must start, as I said earlier, with my father. My mother gave me my father's, her only husband’s, journals on the last night of the world. It seems strange to say, but it is true. The memory of that night has all but slipped from my mind. It is just something I have found too easy to forget. She wanted me to keep his journal safe. She said there was something about them, what it was she was not certain of. She just knew they should be kept. Often late at night, she would say he died too soon, he was not finished - often with tears in her eyes - even many years after it happened. The pain never seemed to subside for my mom. She thought his purpose could be finished by sharing his writing. She did not know how or even why she felt this way, but she knew without a doubt it was true. I always assumed it was a car accident or maybe the cold merciless winters which took him away. However, I was to discover it was something much more sinister. For years I would hear her calling out to him in her sleep. Occasionally she would speak of an evil whisper - a shadow which tore him away from us. This is a story about my father, and how despite what the world would consider a tragic story he saved the cosmos... ### Next Chapter: [[2 - The Beginnings of a Dreamer 🏔️]]