The Jingoist: Prologue

It has long amused my brother to insist that there are very few real beginnings. It’s like when someone attacks your city; chances are, the start is not when they light the first torch, or when some general in their army decided that it would be a good idea to lay siege to you. If you trace it all the way back, it probably started when your great-grandfather charged too much for the onions he sold to their clockmakers. That’s how the war on Llyra began, at any rate.
And now that I think on it, the beginning is probably even farther back than that. Why did your grandfather try to cheat the clockmaker? Maybe he was in debt, and needed the money to pay off a loan. He had to take out a loan to pay for his daughter’s wedding, which happened quickly and unexpectedly because she and her suitor were fooling around, and suddenly she was expecting a daughter of her own. Well that begs the question of where she met such a disreputable young man. And the answer to that raises even more questions. The beginning of the Llyran war could very well be that the onion seller’s daughter was born.
But that doesn’t make for an interesting story. It would be much more exiting to say that the fighting went on for ten years, and it was a Glorious Victory for the Empire in the end. You’d love to hear about that final battle, in which your father and uncle fought their way into the palace to raise the Empire flag on the highest battlements.
That’s why most stories don’t start with a beginning. It never makes since to begin at the beginning. I suppose my story begins 200 years ago, when the first of six generations of Sanderson men set foot on the battlefield. I couldn’t start there though.
My story begins, instead, with an end.

Yours,
Captain William Sanderson