Compendium, Part One

This "story" is a compendium of writings that I've done in the past two to five years, which is mostly tied to the novel that I've been working on for twice as long as the latter amount of time. I'm not sure how much of each chapter is connected to the ones around it, in part because so much of this writing was done so long ago that I genuinely forgot it existed until I started thumbing through the "documents" tab of my laptop recently.
My personal opinion is that not much of what I've composed here is very good, but I was encouraged to post it regardless by someone who I care about and trust very much, so I figured I ought to.
The "cover" I chose for this was simply a copyright-free historical image that I liked.