"In any great endeavor, the hardest step is the first. It is full of fear and doubt, but it is precisely this step that opens the path to everything else."
So spoke the ancient sages, warming themselves by campfires under stars that flickered like shards of eternity. The first step is always the most terrifying. It is like an abyss full of shadows, whispers, and cold. Step over its edge—and before you unfolds a road with flowers and thorns, dreams and trials, leading to something greater than you could ever imagine for yourself.
I remember well how, as a boy, I first took up a pen. It seemed not a toy, but a weapon—thin and sharp, like a blade. My hands trembled. I feared that my words would be empty, that they would drown in the void of childish thoughts. But it was this first, timid stroke that opened the path for me—through forests where trees whispered in a forgotten language, through arguments with fate and myself, through love bright but not without its shadow.
Back then, time flowed differently—not like now, when I look back from the height of years lived. My story begins with the third diary—I was twelve. The first I started at eight, though I wouldn't count those childhood years as years—rather, I measure them by blooming groves, the play of sunsets, and the scents of a distant home.
The world then breathed with warm magic: in the rustle of leaves could be heard the call of dragons, and in the glints of sunlight, one could discern the shadow of a fairy. I did not yet know that fate is not only a gift, but also a burden. That every choice is like a flower, beneath which roots delve into both joy and pain, despair and hope.
My diaries were not just notebooks—they were gateways in an attempt to capture a spark of eternity. Each line was a thin beam piercing through the veil of childhood illusions. Sometimes in them rang a gentle self-irony, almost a bright sorrow for things I had not yet lost, but already sensed their loss.
In the knight's order-camp where I grew up, they taught: a warrior's path begins not with the sword, but with ink. The word is a bridge to eternity. It connects us to the shadows of ancestors wandering in the fog of the past. My first diary, tattered, smelling of leather and dampness, was a door—to myself, to the past, to the future, and to those I did not yet know.
Every night by candlelight, I wrote of battles with the windmills of imagination, of vows to protect a girl with eyes the color of a storm, of fear, of hope, of those words I couldn't speak then and learned to utter now.
The diary became a ritual. Many of us young knights carried this habit through the years, like a torch through the darkness. Now it seems to me: everyone should keep a diary—not for order, but for revelation. It is a conversation with oneself, a way to discern light in the chaos of days.
Some episodes I see as I saw them then—with childish logic, surprisingly poetic. Something I understood only later, but I write as if I knew it always. For the truth of memory is sometimes more important than the truth of facts.
I wrote a lot. Perhaps even too much. Likely, no one but me will read these pages. But isn't it for ourselves that we write first and foremost? The others are merely fellow travelers in our conversation with eternity. Here are gathered almost all my diaries into one great story. Even I am curious what will come of it. Perhaps the manuscript will help me in the future understand myself.
If you are reading these lines after all—know this: before you is not just a tale of a boy who dreamed of becoming a knight. This is the confession of a man who understood that true knighthood begins not with armor and sword, but with the readiness to look truth in the eye. Even if that truth concerns oneself.
Enough reflections. The story awaits.