BEFORE THE STORY BEGINS

Welcome to Echoes Before the Reset.

Before you enter this world, I wanted to show you how its first image came to life.

From the earliest sketch to the finished cover, this is where our journey begins.

Echoes Before the Reset is a work of fantasy.

Its characters are fictional.

Its world has never existed...

Or perhaps it simply hasn't existed yet.

The events within these pages are not retellings of my life.

But the emotions behind them are real.

There are pieces of me scattered throughout this story. Not necessarily in any one character, but in moments. In the way someone loves, loses, fails, endures, betrays, forgives, or sometimes refuses to forgive.

Some of the wisdom found here carries the echoes of people who guided me when I was young. Their lessons, discipline, principles, and even some of their flaws found their way into this world.

There are echoes of victories I once celebrated and defeats I would rather have forgotten. There are friendships, rivalries, betrayals, losses, hopes, fears, and moments that changed the way I understood the world around me.

None of them happened as they happen here.

Life gave me the feeling.

Imagination gave it another world.

Perhaps that is the simplest way I can describe Echoes Before the Reset.

It is not my life disguised as fantasy.

It is the echo of a life, transformed by it.

And some echoes remain long after the moment that created them has passed.

That is why this story is so personal to me. I have carried pieces of it for much longer than I have been writing it. Some came from childhood, some from the person I became afterward, and others from questions I still do not have answers to.

So yes, there will be strange things here.

There will be philosophy beside magic, science beside mythology, moments where characters simply live before the world asks them to survive again, and probably more explanation about how something works than any reasonable person ever asked for.

That part is me too.

Because while this story is fantasy, I never wanted its people to feel as though they existed only to move a plot forward.

Life does not happen only during its important moments.

Sometimes the smallest, quietest moments are the ones that follow us the longest.

Those are the echoes I wanted to preserve.

So before you turn the page and meet Victor, Elira, and everyone waiting beyond this one, I wanted you to know where they came from.

Not from my life exactly.

But from somewhere within it.

Thank you for joining me on this journey.

Now, the Journey begins.