Prologue

After Julian lost his parents and sister several years ago, he didn’t know what to do. As just a young child, he wasn’t emotionally prepared to deal with everything that came after. Their deaths hadn’t even been a possibility in his mind. Death was an obscure thing to young Julian.

They were killed in a car accident. Some stupid drunk driver coming home from the bar late at night was several times over the legal limit and hit them head-on, killing them instantly in a ball of flame.

He didn’t have any other relatives other than his mother’s father. Luckily, his grandfather took him in and raised him as his own. His gramps had lost his own wife a few years earlier, but learning of his daughter’s death had hit him harder than it had hit Julian. Julian had seen his grandfather often crying over old photo albums of his mother.

He had been angry for a long time. It took years before he was able to get past the worst of it. The rawness faded with time, but the pain and rage never went away. However, the loss and anger he and his grandfather shared brought them closer together. They would take week-long camping trips into the middle of the wilderness, hunting, fishing, and enjoying nature in its purest form. The time they spent together was therapeutic for both of them and helped them heal from their anguish. They both learned to continue living their lives, and they did, for several years at least.

But now he was gone too. It wasn’t like it was unexpected. His gramps was almost 80 years old, but it still hit Julian hard. In fact, it might have hit him harder than losing his parents and sister. Because this time, he understood the value of family and appreciated it more than before.

His gramps didn’t want to have a funeral or any type of service. Most of his friends had passed away already, and he wanted his ashes spread on the mountain they had often camped on.

So that was exactly what he did. He was sitting on the edge of the cliff that he and his gramps used to watch the sunset over the horizon. He had his gramp’s urn full of ashes lying in his lap, looking over the green forest that expanded all across. He spent hours there, sitting there and reminiscing about the memories that they had gathered over the years.

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He didn’t have many close friends after his family’s death. He had friends from school, but most of them were just people he saw and hung out with. Most of them didn’t even know about his family’s death.

His gramps was his best friend. They had shared everything together. He taught Julian all he knew, from cooking to hunting to just being a decent human being; he taught him everything.