Excerpt: Personal Wasteland (working title)

Prologue – Into the Fire

My name is Giuseppe Davies and I am Fae. I am a Sword Dancer. I am a Killer. I am a Hunter. I am a Mage, and more recently, I became a Father.

Those words I never thought that I would say out loud, nor write in something that our scholars couldn’t hide. I was born May 2nd, 1945 in Positano, Italy. I am called Jesse by my friends and Assassin by those less than charitable to my life. That is what I am. I never denied it, nor have I ran from it. Everyone has a job and this is what I was called to do.

I was three when my mother died and I went to live with my father on Senalta. The culture shock was almost nothing for a child that young. All I remember was being taken away from my home in Positano and my Aunt Graciella weeping fierce tears as the man, that I would come to learn was my father, ripped me from my old life. Toys and mementos were left behind, to be summoned at a later date, hopefully. The only thing that Sean Davies allowed me to have was a tiny cross made from my mother’s bone.

If I had known then what a powerful gift that was, I may not have cried as I was lead to a carriage and carted away to a new life. A symbol of life and blood, of that which is most sacred to my kind, of connection to lives passed beyond and into the shadows of time. My kind have a type of genetic memory. Something that has to be awoken by a link to the past. We look as human as you. We bleed and we love. We hate and we wreck havoc. No one knows exactly what we are. Mercenaries. Pirates. Immortal. Cursed. Twice damned. Human spawned.

All of these can be used to describe us. Especially for those who have ties to Senalta. Immortal we seem to be to the less informed, but we aren’t. We are just long lived. Something that we use to our advantage. Sometimes I wish that things could have been different. But you know what they say about wishes.