Let me tell you a story, the wise man said. Where does the story start? Perhaps it should start with the birth of the boy: the boy who will become the man; the man who will find his faith and flee and fight and bring about the ruin of countless worlds.
But what about the man who begat the boy? The man who tried to mould him and shape him in the brittle iron of his own image, only to see him shatter and break? What about the woman who bore him and bled away. Does his tale not start with them; their lives, their love?
Perhaps we should start with the girl instead, the one whose story stretches like a chain across the centuries. Death heralds her coming and it follows in her wake. The watching men made it a part of her, out in the desert. Are the links that came before not also her tale?
Where can a story start, asked the wise man, when beginnings are as innumerable as grains of sand in the dry sea? A thousand threads in an infinite tapestry make up the tale. For even the light and the heat of the cataclysm that began the Universe must have an origin.
So let us start in the desert. For that is always where gods and monsters seem to be born. Let us start in the glittering playground driven up from the dust and rocks, where human hubris reaches a neon pinnacle.
Let's start in Las Vegas.
