The Purveyor: Prologue

         If there were only one faction, one race, one religion, and one creed in the world, war would still exist. After all, having seen the many ways the world could botch itself back into conflict, Roland knew of the only grim fate that the blighted future held for him and everyone else for that matter. It was sickening, it was deafening, and it was overwhelming. But it was life. Cruel as it was, it was the only life that anyone really had, and though it was hard, they got by. For that was their only real instinct as a species was to survive. Well, aside from killing one another from time to time. After all, somebody was always pissed off at somebody else.

         It was always the same promises, the same ideologies, the same suits, and the same lies. Always something. After having heard "It won't be business as usual anymore," probably one hundred times over, he had taught himself to slight away the promise of peace.

         Peace. What an empty word. An empty word with an empty meaning. He had done the mathematics countless times. Over and over in his head, the numbers rolled themselves back into turmoil, just like the world had always managed to do. You couldn't bring peace to chaos. You couldn't bring peace to anything, especially when humans were involved. So sadistic and single minded they were. Always fighting over such petty and material things. The things that didn't even make a man a man in the first place. Perhaps it made them a rich man, but riches and luxuries were overrated in terms of the necessities in life.

         The only thing a man really needed, aside from a very high caliber gun, was a place to call home. Unfortunately, such places were dwindling away into long forgotten memories and ash piles. Though survival was an instinct, it was quite hard to do when there was no real reason to survive in the first place.

         It was a hard life, especially when people more often than not, overlooked those trying to make a better life for everyone... It was much more difficult when most couldn't see him to begin with. He wasn't entirely there after all. Well, he was, but not in body. Perhaps in spirit, but he wasn't sure if he believed in that christian nonsense. After all, they were always the cause for so many disasters. All he knew was he once called himself Roland... then he died.

         How did he die? Well, that was difficult to explain. Simply put, he was the victim of war. An addition to the billions of men and women who had found themselves thrown into a conflict that they had never asked for. What were you supposed to do when uniformed men showed up at your door without invitation? What were you supposed to do when they demanded everything you had ever worked for? Well... he was the example of what happened when you refused to meet such demands.

         So, he was alive once... was he dead now? He had always believed that if someone died, they were dead and that was the end of it. Well, his current state of being enlightened him on what he actually knew. As usual, he placed his faith into something, half the time he was right, and half the time he was wrong. Just like anything else in the world, it was about fifty-fifty. He never placed faith in Christianity, or any of the other religious ideals that drove the world into madness. Though having read the bible twice, there was little he could connect to as far as the teaching and the application.

         He had always found it foolish that Christianity could lead men to believing that someone survived inside the belly of a fish for three days. He had found it even more foolish that they could believe that the walls of a city were blown down by magical trumpets. In his wisdom, and in everyone else's, bombs seemed to do the job quite well, and were the common practice for siege. Music wasn't exactly considered to be a proper application of force.

         Though the idea was there, it was nothing more than an idea. A thought and story that someone dreamt up a long time ago that had died and gave rise to the extreme fundamentalism that had seemed to engulf the world. It was a comforting list of morals and principles, that had been stripped away by an angry little man with a very big eraser, and in its place he wrote in mandates and the punishment for not adhering to them. Revisionists... how he hated them. He had always though that he fought against the monsters of the world, but how could he when they always hid behind morals, faith, and the law? If they were stirred or shaken, they simply pulled out their big eraser, and rewrote history. It was life. He knew that the law was not written by men that believed in negotiation, for they believed only in violence and spreading their influence upon the masses. He was one of those masses. Well, he was at one time.

         That time had long since disappeared, and he was something else now. Perhaps not alive, but most certainly not dead...