Chapter 2

We basically grew up together - just a year apart in age. I don’t need to tell you we never fought or had any major issues. We were always on the same page, and our personalities, which were pretty different, actually brought us closer.

Elizabeth was chill and focused; I was more intense and super into learning everything. She loved getting lost in poetry and dreamy stuff.

And living in Switzerland - with those crazy mountains, the changing seasons, storms, sunshine, the quiet of winter, and the wildness of our summers - she found tons to admire. While she just soaked in all the beauty, I wanted to know why things were the way they were.

The world felt like a puzzle I needed to solve. I remember being obsessed with figuring out how everything worked - like, seriously curious. Discovering the hidden rules of nature? That felt amazing, honestly.

With the arrival of my little brother, seven years younger than me, my parents finally settled down for good, back in our home country. We had a house in Geneva, and a place called Belrive, on the east side of the lake, just a bit over a league from the city.

We mostly lived at Belrive, and my parents kept pretty much to themselves. I’m just not a crowd person - I really vibe with just a few close friends. So, I didn't really click with most of my schoolmates, but I became super tight with one guy. Henry Clerval was the son of a Geneva merchant.

He was seriously talented and imaginative. He loved adventure, tough situations, even danger itself! He was a total bookworm, obsessed with tales of knights and romance. He’s writing epic songs and tons of stories about magic and knights.

He’s always trying to get us to put on plays and dress up for these huge costume parties, where we'd all be characters from Roncesvalles, King Arthur’s knights, and those brave guys who fought to get the Holy Sepulchre back from the infidels. I couldn’t have asked for a better childhood, honestly.

My parents were just the kindest, most laid-back people ever. I knew they weren’t trying to control our lives, but instead, they were creating all these amazing things for us to enjoy. Whenever I hung out with other families, I realized just how lucky I was, and it made me love them even more.

My temper could be intense, and my passions ran deep. But somehow, I was driven not towards kid stuff, but towards a real hunger to learn - not just anything, though. I wasn't really into languages, governments, or politics. I wanted to unlock the secrets of the universe.

Whether it was the physical world or the deeper essence of nature and the mystery of the human soul, my questions always pointed towards the big metaphysical and physical secrets of existence. Meanwhile, Clerval was all about the moral side of things. Life, heroes, and what people do were his focus.

He dreamed of becoming one of those legendary figures whose stories are told - a brave and adventurous person who helped humanity. Elizabeth was like a beacon of goodness in our home. Her empathy, her smile, her gentle voice, the sparkle in her eyes - they always made us feel better.

She was the living embodiment of love, softening and drawing us in. I could have gotten moody studying, maybe even a little rough around the edges, but she kept me grounded with her kindness. And Clerval - could anything have dimmed his amazing spirit?

Maybe he wouldn’t have been so genuinely kind, so generous, so full of warmth and tenderness alongside his love for adventure, if she hadn’t shown him the real beauty of doing good and made helping others the goal of his big ambitions.

I seriously love thinking back to when I was a kid. Before everything went south and my bright ideas about doing big things turned into gloomy thoughts about just me. Plus, writing about my early days is also documenting how things slowly led to my whole messed-up story.

When I try to figure out where that passion that ruled my life came from, it’s like a river - starting from super low-key, almost forgotten places. But as it grew, it became a total flood, wiping out all my hopes and happiness.

Natural philosophy - that’s science, basically - is what really shaped my life. So, I wanna lay out the facts that made me obsessed with it. When I was thirteen, we all went on a fun trip to the hot springs near Thonon. But the weather was awful, so we got stuck at the inn for a day.

There, I stumbled across a book by Cornelius Agrippa. I opened it without much interest, but the ideas he was trying to prove and the crazy stuff he wrote about quickly turned that into total excitement. It was like a lightbulb went off in my head, and I was so hyped, I told my dad.

He glanced at the cover and said, "Cornelius Agrippa? Seriously, Victor, don't waste your time. It's just junk."

If my dad had just, like, explained that Agrippa's ideas were totally outdated and that modern science was way more powerful - because the old stuff was basically fake, but the new stuff actually worked - I would’ve ditched Agrippa for sure.

My imagination would’ve cooled down, and I’d have gotten back into my studies with even more energy. Maybe things wouldn't have gone so sideways for me. But my dad barely glanced at my book, so I didn't get the vibe he really knew what was in it. I just kept reading like crazy.

When I got home, I grabbed all of Agrippa's works, then the stuff by Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. I devoured their wild ideas - they felt like secret treasures, known only to me. I’ve always been super into uncovering nature’s mysteries.

Even though modern scientists have done so much hard work and made amazing discoveries, I always felt kind of let down after studying. They say Sir Isaac Newton felt like a kid collecting seashells next to the giant, unexplored ocean of truth.

His followers, even to my young mind, seemed like newbies just starting out.

The average farmer knew the world around him and how to use it. Even the smartest scholars knew about as much. They’d peeked at Nature's face, but her real beauty was still a total mystery. They could break things down, name them - but secondary and tertiary causes? Forget about it.

I’d looked at all the barriers keeping people out of Nature’s stronghold, and I’d complained, totally clueless. But then there were books, and people who really knew their stuff. I just took their word for it and became their student.

It might seem weird for this to happen in the 1700s, but while I went through school in Geneva, I mostly taught myself about the things I loved. My dad wasn't into science, so I had to figure things out on my own, like a kid with a huge desire to learn.

With my new teachers, I dove headfirst into finding the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life. But the elixir quickly grabbed my full attention. Getting rich wasn’t the point - imagine the glory if I could cure diseases and make people basically unkillable, except by some serious trauma!

It wasn’t just those visions, though. Bringing up ghosts or demons - my favorite authors totally promised that stuff, and I was so ready to see it happen. Even though my spells never worked, I figured it was just 'cause I was still learning, messing up, not because my teachers weren’t good enough.

So, for a while, I was obsessed with ideas that were already outdated, mixing a million different, totally opposite theories and basically drowning in all this random knowledge. I just followed my imagination and did what felt right, you know?

Then, something happened that totally shifted my thinking. When I was around fifteen, we moved to our place near Belrive, and we got hit by the craziest, most intense thunderstorm ever. It rolled in from behind the Jura Mountains, and the thunder just exploded from everywhere in the sky.

I was glued to the window, watching it the whole time - it was wild. Standing at the door, I suddenly saw a streak of fire shoot out from this old, gorgeous oak tree that was like, twenty yards from our house. The light vanished, and the oak was gone. Just a blasted stump was left.

The next morning when we checked it out, the tree was totally wrecked. It wasn’t just splintered - it was completely turned into thin ribbons of wood. I’d never seen anything so totally destroyed.

I wasn’t totally clueless about basic electricity, you know? This time around, a seriously smart dude, a real researcher in natural philosophy, was with us. He was hyped up by this whole thing and started laying out a theory about electricity and galvanism. It was totally new and blew my mind.

Honestly, everything he said just made Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus - all the figures I used to idolize - seem kinda irrelevant. But for some reason, seeing those guys get knocked down made me lose interest in my usual stuff. It felt like nothing could ever be figured out.

Everything I’d been working on suddenly seemed pointless. I just ditched it all, seriously. Natural history and everything connected to it? Total mess, a dead-end. I was so over any science that couldn’t even scratch the surface of real knowledge.

So, I dove into math and all the related stuff, figuring that was built on solid ground and worth my time. That’s just how our brains work, I guess. We’re tied to success or failure by such flimsy connections.

Looking back, it feels like that sudden shift in what I wanted was a direct nudge from the guardian angel of my life - a last-ditch effort by the spirit of preservation to keep me from the storm brewing on the horizon.

I knew I’d won when I felt this weird sense of calm and happiness after ditching my old studies. That's how I started to link those studies with bad things and happiness with just letting them go.

It was a real shot in the dark, a good try, but it just didn't work. Destiny was way too powerful, and its rules? They were set in stone. My destruction was basically a done deal.