I'm no longer a believer. Gods and devils seem like a far stretch, and the worlds behind my eyelids and between the covers of the books are just about as real as a perfect world—that is to say, not at all. Wisdom is faltering and hard to come by. Hatred can be rewritten, just like trust and comradeship. Every word hides a lie. Every person is a vessel of untapped betrayal. Love… God, I wish I could say I believe in love. I really do. And if there could ever be anything I could ever trust in my life, it would be love. But love makes us do stupid things. Love twists our perspective and makes a single person a deity. Love hurts, more often than not—and it won't stop hurting, not until the very end. Love is a beautiful thing. But I could never believe in it, no.

It's an odd thing, for someone as young as I am. I should be brimming with youthful radiance, ignoring the shadows in life and walking the wide and wild path that the spotlight leads me down. I should be feeling the happiness that comes with complete satisfaction—the wonderful realization that, "I'm growing up!", and the world is turned in my direction. I should be ecstatic at the petty problems that plague my life, no more harmful than a swarm of gnats; I should be overjoyed that my future is such a thick and beautiful mystery that lies before me. I should only know the patches of heaven deployed on this earth—a sort of advertisement, I'd say: "Isn't this nice? Do good and you can experience this all in heaven for all eternity!" or something irritating like that. I don't believe in heaven, either. Heaven is the role model of all happy endings, and I know those never to be true.

There's always a moment, though, when we're speeding forward in life, and suddenly we realize how terrible the world actually is. No matter where we go, we can't escape the shadows of reality. We see light and then notice the shadows; that's the way the world works.

I knew darkness from the beginning. It was engraved into me since the dawn of my conscious soul. By the time I was ten I'd witnessed death, touched death in the face a few times. Actually, I'd say that death and I were so well-acquainted that I was no longer surprised. Disturbed, yes. Angry, yes. Shocked, no.

When I met him, I'd halfway hoped that it would be the other way around for me: darkness, and then light. I was a little skeptical, but he was seeping in, like the rays of sun through the foliage in the trees, or the beams from a lighthouse to the shallow sea floor. I was entirely convinced that we wouldn't last.

But damn, I was in love with him. I was so, so invariably in love with him, and that was when I realized that my halfway hopes were completely right. That man set my life alight like an oil lamp—not really a fire, per say. Sure, he made my heart transcend the speed of sound and my dreams were aflame with his face. But he and I, we were like an oil lamp, or a candle, or the sun—whatever is the most constant kind of heat. We were warm and steady and spectacular.

Oh, I've got it. We and whatever awe-inspiring thing that we shared between us was the embodiment of all the stars before the universe's edge. And maybe, a little bit of what's beyond that as well. He was my world, my reality, the wall that cut off my terrible parts.

I'm not a believer, but I am a wisher, and a hoper, and a dreamer of faraway things. And I wish that it could have ended differently.

Do you hear that, universe? I wish it had ended differently!

But when it came down to the events that unfolded before me—my world, shattering in my hands; my sense of perception and emotion scrambled until I couldn't tell right from wrong; and him, infuriating, remarkable him, marching straight in and flipping it all upside-down, well…

I wouldn't have it any other way.

I probably should have ran through my gear to ensure that I had everything I needed, but by the time my mind wandered to that, I figured that it was too late to bother. The pistol was hidden under the hem of my shirt in my belt, my daggers were snug in their sheaths up my sleeves, and in my hand I crumpled a water-worn paper. There were a few smaller things that I usually brought along—an extra round of bullets, a pin, a map, and just in case, smelling salts, and I was fairly sure that they were in my pockets, but I'd accomplished in missions without those many times before, and I could certainly do it again.

I didn't appear to have any sense of purpose as I wandered down the cobblestone lane—I didn't have any purpose, not yet, anyway. The limits of missions were always nightfall, unless I received word of a more active military presence. It was a bit before noon, the sun was at high tide, and thankfully the town I was bound for was only a little down the road between the villages.

I found myself walking a familiar path—turn onto Rose Street, off of Main, and then three addresses to the left side—without really controlling my own feet. The hub of Maria was filled with the mingling scents of the butchery, the bakery, and at the edge of town, the beer-house. It wasn't a heavy town, but there were always kids around with a ball or two, tearing the relative silence with shouts and causing general chaos.

As a person who's traveled far (or, farther than most others, considering the circumstances), I like to believe that the beauty of Maria is taken for granted. What we have here cannot be easily found—it can only be easily lost. When I was young, very young, visitors used to frequent here. They never caused a grumble among the natives; the moment they arrived, they fell into a somber, awed quiet, overwhelmed, I suppose, by the majesty of it all. I might be the only person who lives here who can see into their perspective—sometimes, in the right light, or if you look suddenly after not thinking about it a while, it can look like the peaks of the Bavarian Alps that rise to the south are crushing you, or that the forest to the north is choking you. I'm always unsettled when I notice these things, and I think about something else immediately.

There were other things for me to be awed at, like how my mother went from maternal angel to warrior in a sliver of a second, or how light reflected off the stream, my stream, in the woods. We always have to keep on accepting, time and time again, that the things we are afraid of are the normal for others.

If there was any one thing I was scared by, it would be the worldly knowledge of the old man in the book shop, and the sweet yet conniving nature of his grandson. Armin's nose was almost constantly buried in a book, but his mind was always in the clouds, and his heart always reaching to the ends of the earth. It must have been why we connected so instantly. The difference between the two of us was that he carved new roads with his mind, and I paved new paths with my feet.

But there I was, anyhow, in front of the worn sign for Arlerts' Books, with enough books that Armin had lost count and enough shelves that I could get lost most times I was here. I entered, the broken cowbell clanging as I did so. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the dim light, but once they did, I took off into the narrow lanes between the shelves, following the faint sounds of spines scraping wood.

Since the burnings had commenced, the amount of books read had nearly halved. I must have been twelve or so when the soldiers ransacked the place. Armin was terrified—for his grandfather, for himself, for his home—but when I offered to take his grandfather and him to Shiganshina, he refused. "It's bad to get caught for having suspicious books," he'd said to me. "But it's even worse to run away."

I remember those words, clear as the outline of the mountains on the horizon. I knew those words gave him courage, but if this is the right time frame, then those were the worst words he could have said to me. I had still not gotten over the Failure—I didn't get over the Failure until I was nearly fourteen, and even now I haven't forgotten it. It was the only time in my career that I doubted my morals, even though I knew it would always be a risk.

It's a terrible story, the Failure, I won't lie—it's the worst thing I've ever encountered, ever done, and probably always will be. But I don't want to talk about it. It hurts too much even now.

I found Armin in the corner of the scientific section. His eyes were trained at the fogged window with its thin white light, and he was absentmindedly stroking the spine of a book. I hardly wondered where his mind might be; I usually regretted asking.

"Armin," I said softly. He snapped to attention with wide eyes and a high-pitched grunt. I smiled. "Hey."

He shook his head slightly, as if he were shaking off rain. "Oh—hey, Eren," he replied. "I'm sorry; that must have looked awfully strange."

"You looked like you were plotting a way to end the war," I said. "As well as take over the world, throw mountains at your enemies, and worst of all, pick up a lot of women."

"I am not that… mind-oriented!" he half-snapped.

"All in all," I continued, as if he had never spoken, "a normal day for Armin."

He cuffed my shoulder. I didn't even wince, rather throwing him a wide grin. "You're terrible," he grumbled.

"I can counter that," I said. I threw an elbow onto his shoulder. "I'm spectacular, you see. I have a secret fairy who lives in the woods. I climb mountains every day—backwards. I'm the Robin Hood of Germany!" A dry laugh emitted from my throat. "Hardly terrible," I deadpanned.

"I know you're teasing yourself," he said. "I think it's stupid." He straightened up and shook his head again, but this time, particles of dust from the shelves was flung into the faint glow of the air. He paused and swiveled his head to me, scanning me head to toe. "By the way. The Robin Hood thing. You're a bit too neatly dressed for a casual day. Are you…?"

I met his gaze, and my face dropped into a serious nod. "Yeah," I said. "I got an anonymous note from Stohess. I'll probably bring the captives into Shiganshina for the night before sending them on their way to the border."

"Have you got everything?" he asked. "Gun? Knives? Map?"

"Won't need a map," I answered. "I know the region like the back of my hand. Besides," I scoffed. "What kind of time will I have for map-reading if I'm rescuing people?" He fed me an exasperated look, and I sighed. "I've got everything. All prepared, and I've got eight hours, as well. This is a standard job. I'll be fine."

I wasn't sure that I believed the words as I said them. It was the weakest excuse that humans can give, and it is almost always a lie. But I was confident enough, I believe, in who I am and what I do, to survive. It'd worked for me for years now. I'd succeeded almost every time in what I did. Only once had I failed. And I like to think of that day as an outlier, a blip in my system.

"You shouldn't say that," he said.

"Why?"

"Because when you do, I start believing that you'll never come back." The silence of the bookstore began to pervade us, but he chuckled. "What am I saying? Will you be able to meet again afterwards?"

"Ah…" I trailed off. "If I can get them settled by 7, Mikasa can probably take care of them, so if you want, we can do something tonight."

"Sure. What?"

I tapped my forehead. "Eh, ah! I've got something."

"What?" he repeated.

I turned to face him, lifting my lips in a mischievous smirk. "Let's go to the beer-house!" I said enthusiastically. "I haven't been there in God-knows-how-long!"

Armin raised an eyebrow. "Eren, we've never been there, so much as I can remember. If you've ever been there, it had to have been in another lifetime."

I blinked. "Oh." Sufficiently confused, I took a peek at the book Armin held in his hands. "Wonders of the Outside World," I read. "Outside? Outside what?"

"I don't know," he answered. "The text is pretty old—ancient, actually, but language is close to German."

The volume was bound with worn leather, more white than the original brown, and tattered at every corner. I could hardly make out the title—the gold once embellished there had faded into a faint yellow outline. There was an aura of wisdom around it, and in that moment, I added it to the list of things that awed me. "That could be a thousand years old."

He smiled. "It's been here all my life, and Grandpa says that it's been here all of his. For all we know, it could be."

I couldn't find anything suitable to say to that. "Huh. Maybe a madman wrote it."

He shrugged and leafed delicately through its pages. "Maybe. The things in here are poetic if not a little disjointed. They call the Arctic seas of ice, and they call volcanoes rivers of fire. Sort of like everyone had forgotten the names or something."

"Strange. Your kind of thing, but strange." I stared at the book for a halted instant before shaking off the quiet of the moment. It unsettled me for reasons I couldn't find. I lived in a world of ancient things—mountains and forests grown in the time before time, a village built centuries before my birth. But seeing it there gave me chills up my spine, and while I knew there was something inherently wrong, I couldn't place the feeling. "Anyway, let's go to the beer-house today, alright?"

"Why?" Armin asked.

I scanned the forefront of my mind for any reason. "Eh. Well, we're sixteen, so it's natural to be getting into that, and, err, to celebrate my success of today."

"You don't know it's going to be a success," he interjected.

I gave him a withering look. "No, I don't," I admitted. "But I have a very good feeling that it will be. Don't worry about me, Armin; I've got this one planned out."

Though there was still worry evident in his eyes, he rearranged his expression into that of mock horror and surprise. "Eren Yeager, planning things out? Impossible, a bit of a nightmare…" He paused. "And definitely worth celebration. Beer-house it is."

I cuffed him again on the shoulder. "There's the man," I said. "I'll run now. I've got another life to save."

I propped myself off of the bookshelf and started to turn, but when I reached the corner of the stretch, his voice interrupted me. "Eren." Surprised, I peered back. "Don't get caught, okay?" The concern in his voice was commendable, and I bit my lip before laughing without humor.

"I'm the Rogue Titan," I said, lowering my voice to a whisper so only he could hear me. "Not getting caught is part of the job description." I walked away before he could answer. I didn't want him to protest with logic and sentiment and shake my resolve and then maybe, just maybe, in the end, stop me from going.

That must have been the scariest part of who I was, and who I had to be. It would be a different matter if I were a hired hand. I would have no choice but to keep going. But I did what I did because I wanted to. I'd been doing it for years, and had no plans of stopping, but if one day I were to lose my motivation, no one would be able to stop me. It was terrifying, the concept that I had a choice in what I did.

However, I heard nothing from him, no responses, no scrape of books on the shelf, not even footsteps. I didn't look back, but in my mind's eye, he was standing there, staring at nothing. Maybe he was thinking about my words; maybe his mind had already returned to the matter of the Wonders of the Outside World; or maybe it was out in the world again, in the adventures he was born to have. I had no way of knowing what he did in that moment, but for a few minutes after, I would think about it, and I would realize: he must be so afraid.

We were all afraid, to some degree. It wasn't pervasive, and if people were in their right minds, they wouldn't show it. But the fear was always there, lying under the surfaces of our appearance, whether it be that an air raid would catch us, or that we're incarcerated for some nameless crime we hadn't even known we were committing. Fear must be the inevitable curse of war, for if I thought of every person I knew—not one of them wasn't afraid.

I never knew and I still don't know if there were others who did what I did. I suppose I was doomed to never know if that were true, because the greatest condition of doing what we did was that not a single person could know our identities. I bent the rules a little—I told Armin; I told his grandfather; I told my mother. I also told Mikasa, but that was redundant. Mikasa was already my secret. I never told my father; he was always too involved in other's affairs. He was the greatest father I could ever ask for, but although I halfway regretted it, I knew I couldn't trust him with this.

I'm glad I told the others, though. I credited myself with the bringing together of us all, the odd circle of mutual trust and friendship that transcended age and family. But ever since I came clean about my identity—my secret one, that was—we gleaned the sense between the five of us that there was no one else we could trust more in the world.

By the time I found my way back to the front of the shop, Armin's grandfather was sitting patiently at the register, as if he had never left. He was swirling the stale grains of coffee around his cracked mug. My mother leaned on the wall next to him—she was neatly enough arranged that I could tell that she had just come from her mid-day cleaning. She held a basket of laundry and a small loaf of bread in her left hand.

"Ah, Eren," she said with a smile. "Are you setting out?"

"Yeah." I fidgeted with the hem of my shirt. "Why? Is my gun showing?"

"You're fine," she assured me. "But I brought a bit of forest bread."

My mouth involuntarily watered. She'd long ago found a way to make bread from the plant grains found in the woods; I wasn't sure how she did it, or how it was possible in the first place, but it was a treat, and a good way of dodging the rations. "I'll be fine," I said. "I won't need anything to eat along the way."

She furrowed her brows. "It's not for you," she said. "You might need an excuse to go wherever you're going. If you're stopped, tell them you're bringing them a present. You know what to do from there."

"Oh," I said with a tinge of sadness, silently willing myself to become hungry again. I accepted the loaf and exhaled softly. "Well. I'll be off then."

Before I could exit the shop, I felt thin arms pulling me into an embrace. Mother rested her head on my arm. "Do good, okay? Do you hear me? Do this world a little good." She let me go and shoved me lightly. "Now run along, Eren."

I tossed the bread to my other hand and exited the store, the cow bells ringing like a requiem for the living. The town was immersed in a morning hush, but that could be me. The realization occasionally struck me that this world was incredibly vast, and that at the moment, I was alone in it. It came to me very quickly, and left just the same, and it was the feeling that you first get when you're in your early teens, and you're allowed to walk through town by yourself. It was the feeling of impending adulthood, but for me, it had been around for a long time in my life. I went through the woods and through the neighboring towns with hardly a care, only a destination in mind.

I reached Stohess without incident. Upon entering the village, I passed a group of soldiers with tankards of beer sitting on barrels and rolling dice. One of them caught my eye, but in his drunken gaze he merely waved me off with a leisurely smile. I forced myself to smile naturally back at them—if they were actually doing their jobs, after all, it would make my job much harder.

I unfolded the paper in my hand. 7 Krauser Street. I knew where it was, but I'd never gone there. It backed up to the forest, at the very edge of the town. Getting them out would be almost ridiculously easy.

Too easy.

Ducking into a shadowed alley, I fished out a rough cloak from my back pocket and draped it over my head. It looked a bit odd, but something inside me, some hidden, carnal instinct knew that something was amiss. I was young, but I wasn't a fool. There should have been more of a conflict. Someone should have stopped me, at least once, asking me what business I had. It happened on every mission, and this one, on this day, should not have been an exception.

I knew that the Rogue Titan was wanted by all the military residents in the region, and out of the region, even into France. Over the years I'd accumulated a reputation as ghost of sorts, snatching people out, killing few. I can count on my fingers the number of people I'd killed.

There were seven. Seven too many.

And likewise, I knew that people were searching for me. They knew nothing—they didn't know where I lived, who I was, who I was affiliated with. They knew nothing of me except my height, or my height when I was younger. One advantage of fighting when I grew was that I was a phantom, constantly altering myself in the way that aging went.

I knew that I was smart, but others were smart, as well. Others had made the war into a thing of horror and clockwork and science fiction: all those things that I never understood. And while I had made it through, survived, and kept on going, for nearly seven years, I knew that the day was coming, whether it be soon or far away, years from now, or perhaps even today—yes, the day was coming when I would slip up. I would be found. And everything I had worked to achieve would go to hell.

I wasn't one of the people to fear death. It was war. Death frequented this place; death was the bitter scent in the air that stilled us in fear. It was the cage that bound us from changing things, from ending this war, from rising up and creating peace. In fact, I think it was my indifference to death that allowed me to be who I was.

I never feared death, or oblivion, or pain, or being forgotten, because I know that one day, all of those will be true, and there's nothing I could do about that.

But it didn't mean I wasn't afraid. My greatest fear was that everything would reverse itself when I died. All the people I freed would be sucked back into the hopelessness that once drowned them; Mikasa would be thrown back into depression and slavery; Armin would be weak and bullied again; and everyone I knew would wonder why I was gone, and whispers would float around and twist the meaning of all who I was. When I thought about it, it truly was illogical, but I was young enough for the fantasies within me to still have room for truth.

And it didn't mean I wasn't afraid of being caught.

Right there, the terror started to flood into my limbs, charging my heart into a wild inferno of drumming, making me struggle to keep my sanity from falling away and burning. It was the panic of being walked to the execution block or the whipping post, of going to the trial you know you're going to lose. The panic of a caged animal being sent to the slaughter, and…

All at once, the fear manifested itself into anger, like a devastating chemical reaction. I was not a caged animal, nor a caged anything. I was free, wasn't I? That's what I fought for. Freedom. That's what I lived for.

I removed the pistol from my belt and switched the safety off, clutching the handle and placing my finger over the trigger with an eerie calm. There were fifteen bullets, and I wasn't going to waste a single one.

"Seven Krauser Street," I said under my breath. "It might be real, it might be a trap, but either way…" I paused. "Either way, the Rogue Titan is coming. So be prepared."