"“Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return.”"

"(Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude)"

Those who look at it will remember the woman at the roots, learning that the first taste of freedom is also the first taste of irreparable loss.

They will see the warrior who has won his vengeance, stands over his enemy and feels his triumph ring hollow because love is no longer there to hear it.

They will notice the old king walking into a dragon’s fire as if leaning into the last verse of his own song.

They will find a knight on a lonely shore who discovers that loyalty sometimes means abandoning the last light of an age back into the waters of oblivion.

They will pass the usurper king who has everything and trusts no one, who sits in the middle of his own prophecy, surrounded not by glory but by the slow rust of fear.

They will remember the thin, ridiculous knight who would rather be broken by his dream than "fixed" by the world.

They will reach the young man with the perfect face and the ruined soul, staring at a picture that knows him better than he knows himself.

And if they lift their eyes higher, they will see a lonely Traveler walking the long path by which art turns the world into a stage for knowledge.

This project is a journey, a single arc told through seven tragedies.

At the base, the self first awakens with Eve, reaching for untouched freedom and first taste of consequences.

In Achilles, that self throws its new strength into feeling: love and rage tangled together until empty vengeance leaves only grief behind.

With Beowulf that same strength is mastered on a higher purpose, facing an impossible foe, only to fall as the song ends.

Through Bedivere, courage and might are now placed in service of ideals; yet those very codes of honor demand the end of the age that forged them.

Once the end of ideals is proclaimed, Macbeth shows what happens to strength without them: ambition feeds on itself in dark corridors until power becomes its own impending doom.

Without strength and with a longing for ideals once lost, there's a new quest and a new fight, but no place left in this world.
Don Quixote follows, all force spent, hurling himself against a world that no longer has room for the dreams he insists on serving.
Once strength is no more, ideals are no more and dreams offer no comfort, there's only the self left.

With Dorian Gray all that remains is the naked self, obsessed with its own image, collapsing under the weight of a soul it can no longer ignore.