Prologue
A human being has two essential virtues: reason, and subsequent action. Man cannot say he lives unless he possesses these two things. But when one is found without the other, then life, virtue, and desire are extinguished. Such was the case of one man—an assassin—a man who chose action without cause, a man who chose a life of death in order to escape the reality of understanding.
In the beginning, there was power. There was skill, there was cunning, there was a simple and physical existence motivated by an unnamed desire: a desire which, to acknowledge it, meant the shattering of his existence and his evolution as a different being. To acknowledge this desire meant to understand it and accept it, and to acknowledge himself a man. But in the beginning, he denied there was any desire at all.
Thus he forgot the luxury of life. He abandoned his own reason for the reason and desires of others—he became instead a person of skill, a machine without thought or purpose other than the master's objectives. He fought, not against his actions, but against his will; not against his master, but against himself. And he accomplished his solitary, personal objective in silence. His victory over himself was one without reason, one without passion, one without purpose, because he did not know the nature of desire, because he did not want or think or feel—or remember, in fact, what those three fundamentals meant.
Who, then, was the man before this empty shell? What was his story… before the beginning? It is a question I cannot answer, for no one knows—or understands, if he does know. But I do know this: the man I know now is a different man from the one who came before him—and I am a different woman from the one I was intended to be.
We are Jaffar and Nino, and this is our story.