There is a story I’ve been trying to tell my whole life. It’s the reason I tell stories.

Sometimes I come very near to it, either in writing or in reading, but the note is never quite perfect, never quite completed, the taste never quite right. Or else I find it to be too apologetic, or else too sarcastic.

As far as I can tell, from the pieces I have put together thus far, it involves a graveyard and a garden. It features a heroic, magnificent knight who is utterly broken, and a broken heroine who is also utterly magnificent. There lurks in the shadows of the tale the ultimate evil of a dragon, and the ultimate innocence of a unicorn. It involves in the forefront a lion and a doorway, and the journey consists of a descent to the underworld and a rising to the afterworld. In its very fabric it communicates final suffering, and ultimate joy.