Video | un: nightwanderer

[dragonrising]

[It's been quite awhile since Runyu last made a post of his own on here. But he's feeling the mood for it. So he turns on the video and offers a smile to the network as a whole before he starts speaking. His dragon features are on full display.]

You know, when I arrived here I had committed a great many evil deeds. I looked on this place as a sort of new location to finish out my years of isolation for all that I'd done. Yet as I've been here I've found friendship, love, and, most of all, healing. Though my crimes are still many and cruel, I've found that I can atone for what I have done here.

[He laughs softly and shakes his head.]

Yesterday I was blessed to witness two people I love so very much get married to each other. Something I never would have been able to be part of before through entirely the fault of my own. I'm grateful, to say the very least.

[The dragon lowers his head a moment with a soft smile.]

Forgive me, I'm rambling. Thousands of years of life will make you ponder a great many things, I suppose.

[Runyu lifts his head again.]

I wondered if anyone has found healing here as well. A chance to grow to be someone better than they were and to heal from the shadows of the past. I'd like to hear your stories if you are willing to share them. Thank you.

Comments

[dragonrising]

[He quietly listens to the story. It's not quite as long as he expected for a long story but he won't comment on that. Runyu just nods as he tries to fill in the blanks a bit to understand fully what the other is saying to him.]

That would be a great deal to come to terms with. When you are surrounded by those you once trusted and then you're watching them hurt you instead of defend you...

[He's been through a similar enough situation even if he knows it's not quite the same.]

You may never fully come to terms with it and I wouldn't fault you for that. Betrayal is not easy to recover from.

[cupiditasmedendi]

[There is a lot more to it of course, but he realised as he began speaking that to actually explain it all at once would mean going into several different, complicated stories, giving an entire backstory of his own existence and that of several others, as well as describing two very long wars. It's not easy to know where to begin.

But he does appreciate the acceptance of what he did say.]

I was- we were made, by the being that created everything where I come from. We were made to do nothing but give our complete and utter devotion, every moment in perfect harmony, and we knew nothing else. [Clearly that is not the case now, given that Raphael is right here and extremely cognizant for someone who is not supposed to have free will.]

But He left us. Or... it seemed that He did. We couldn't hear Him anymore. My brother Michael, he took it the hardest. It broke him. He started the war. He was the one who accused me. I hadn't considered it a betrayal against me until so recently that the idea is still a strange one. [He lets out a soft sound, a breathy half-laugh.] I had no mind of my own for so long that even now I still feel like a fumbling child.

[dragonrising]

I would say you are less a fumbling child and more someone who has tasted the world for the first time. After all, a child would be unaware still but you are. Everything is new to you and you are processing it all. There is nothing wrong with that.

[He offers him a kind smile.]

I think that now is a good time to fully explore this freedom. Sometimes the best way to heal is to not dwell on the past but to look forward into the future. That is something I had to learn the hard way and didn't fully learn even then until I arrived here.

[cupiditasmedendi]

It can be a difficult thing, can't it. To not let the past intrude on the present.

[It hadn't mattered before, and time has never flowed in the same way for him as it does for mortals, but it's just different now.]

What my brothers did... it would be kind to call it torture. He was determined to extract information from me, but I couldn't give it to him. [And had it not been for Nephelea, he would still bear the scars from it even now. He rubs one of his wrists absent-mindedly.]

How were you able to learn?

[dragonrising]

[This feels like an expansive puzzle where he's only being given certain pieces to fill it and yet know the bigger picture at the same time. It's confusing but he's doing his best. He really is.]

To heal and accept it? By listening to those around me. By believing in the ones who told me that even someone as terrible and despicable as myself deserved to heal if I was willing be better.

Is it always easy? Not at all. But I try because those people believe in what I can be rather than what I was.