And in the middle of the chessboard of global scale there is an ordinary

man Arthur King. He's just a man. The human being with limited power. The man who infuriates his inherent limitation. The man who fights against all the odds.

Having come into the world with a triple valvular defect, I’ve been living for years on the brink of life and death. My sands were running out. Doctors predicted my early death. They talked about the months, weeks, saying that I should be meek and mild, because death was about to take me. And I just refused to die. I turned to him whose power is beyond any limits… to God. And my life changed. God heard me. He gave me a new life.

I am grateful to my mother, whose tears and prayers were the force that defeated death inevitably approaching me. And from that moment I became different. My faith changed, I overcame temptations and disappointments. Even after a miracle performed for me I doubted the truth. But due to all those thorns I acquired something more valuable than belief – the ability to overcome. One of my characters says about the limit: «through my lifetime I’ve been put a limit. All my way, everything pushes me to the limit, but there is no limit. There is infinity. There is death. There is zero. There is no limit».

I and nobody but me is the embodiment and essence, which puts limits, but every limit is just illusion. The limit is specific. The basis of the limit is only theory, theoretical derivation based on the behavior of individuals encountered in a situation that puts the scope.

All our life though diverse and unusual, is trivial, and is in all its manifestations unambiguous. All our life is the road. It's the line from point A to point B. Life is a challenge, a puzzle, an incredible maze of human thought.

Every action has one task – to get from point A to point B. For others we are alive while we go this way, while we are at this movement from point A to point B. When the road ends, we cease to exist for those who have not arrived at the point of destination. What is beyond the destination point of this route?

Haven’t you understood yet?

But I'm afraid Preface is dragged out. Let’s go!

Chapter 1

the hIghlIghts of the Past

Near Tandrod. The year 475 after the Great Separation. The Second Age.

Time seemed frozen in a lonely desert, dimly lit with cloudy sun, hiding behind mournful clouds. Under a thick layer of the Lord snow in the dead vegetation there was life. Unconsciously, in oppression, under the white darkness, the life was seeking out to light, which possibly did not exist at all. But without ceasing to strive for, not tolerating frustration, and overcoming insurmountable and through the insignificance of breaking to the cherished light, so much desired and emerged into consciousness from the outside, the life was relying on the senses in the desire to break out of the thick snow and to behold the sun. The sun wilted, but warming a beautiful flowering snowdrop. This snowdrop, as a miracle, with its tender shadows of light colours and smiling life seen in a slightly bended bud, will emphasise the region bounded with rocky guards and haggard spruces-guards, a few dignified, but mostly shrunken, living among anarchically thrown clumps of grey stones. It was near the village. Poor and impoverished it seemed a cemetery opposite the rocks. It had some spirit reminding about former life, sunk into oblivion.

The silence enveloping the steppe soaked the air itself. As a sinister dissembler it was hiding the world, devoured and oppressed by the poison of death behind phony external unwavering, chilling calm. The eternity, as an outcast mother, was bewailing adopted world. The abandoned world was destroying the ways to salvation. The world was dying in tergiversation. The world grown dark and contrived its power has lost the Light as it was clothed in flesh and so it was dead.

The past has disappeared in frozen hearts as a green-leaved life under the thickness of snow. The world was neither dead no alive. It was languishing surrounded by a wall of fear. It was unfit to confrontation,

amazed with disbelief and obsessed with absurdity. It didn’t understood good or ill omens as it was sick and had lost its true image. That’s why even evil, staggered, torn apart. The link in the image of a belligerent man without joining any wrong part goes and does what is not abhorrent to his honour and duty.

Far away, from the lowlands of Tandor, surging skyward a man of huge height and stately figure was coming. He was dressed in red with black edging coat fluttering in the wind. The coat was tightly buttoned on his body with dozens of silver clinchers. He steadily rose opposing blizzards, hitting him in the face. He moved step by step in heavy boots with silver accents slowly but surely climbing the slope forbidding peaks. His gaze was directed upward through the pitch black glasses. His long hair, once tied with a ribbon, which a few hours ago was kidnapped and taken to infinity by the wind, was heavy with endless snowflakes and desperately evolved into a raging stream of air.

Having put his right foot on the protruding grey stone he stopped, slowly examined the world seeming tiny and insignificant from this height, sighed, losing the peace, which resulted in appearing on the face wrinkles. Removing his glasses and closing his eyes, he tipped his head slightly and uttered in a soft, strong, charming and bass slightly husky voice, «the World knew him and no one knew about him; and his name was Scott Renter»… So, father, the first lines of your diary run… So… so… You know, father, from a man I was reborn into a beast. It's hard, and the burden remains with me. And I am suffering, father, but as this suffering and pain touched me…, so that is my path and I must accept it and avoid becoming what people intended me to become. It hurts me, father…, excruciatingly hurts to realize that being clothed in the Good, I do not change the essence, I… I remain Evil… and the beast.