Prologue

PROLOGUE

NO ONE DREW lines at the beginning.

There were no maps.
No countries.
No flags.

Just land — raw, breathing land — stretched under sky.
Mountains didn’t need names.
Rivers didn’t ask who owned them.
The world was whole, and no one had chopped it up yet.

People moved. They followed herds.
They settled near water.
They fought, sure — but not over dotted lines.

Borders didn’t exist.
Then we invented them.

Not carefully. Not wisely.
Not all at once.

We carved the world in pieces —
with blood, with fire, with ink on scrolls,
with treaties written by men who’d never seen the lands they split.

Empires expanded until they cracked.
And when they cracked, we filled the gaps with flags.

Sometimes the borders made sense.
A mountain range.
A coastline.

Mostly, they didn’t.

They were drawn by invaders, kings, colonizers, and clerks.
By generals with compasses.
By diplomats drunk on champagne.
By cartographers guessing in candlelight.

They sliced through tribes, cities, rivers, and families.
They created countries.
They created war.

And still we treat them as sacred.
We die for them.
We kill for them.
We print them in textbooks and call them facts.

But the truth is this:

The lines are fake.
The consequences are not.

This is the story of how those lines got there.