The First Game

He wakes on cold stone at the bottom of the dark — no name, no memory, a glowing staff in one scarred hand, and a warmth in his chest that points like it already knows something he doesn't.

Twelve games. This is the first.

A man surfaces brand new in a library so deep the darkness has weight — nothing behind him, nothing remembered, and only one thing that crossed over: a warmth lodged beneath thought, beneath name, beneath everything the wipe can reach. It points. Not like a compass points — like a love points. At one person, out past the dark, doing one true thing.

His whole task, this first game, is to learn that the warmth does not lie — to walk toward what it names through every beautiful lie laid in the way, and to find her before the dissolution comes and takes the name, the room, the count, and her face clean off the front of his mind. It cannot take the warmth. It never has.

Narrated by the Shadow — the cold, clear-eyed half of him they pulled out so the rest could go be decent down there in the deep — The First Game is the opening movement of Across Infinities: The Twelve Games, a sweeping metaphysical odyssey about the one thing in a person that no oblivion has ever learned to erase.

Book One of Jonathan's Series.