For all his attempts to console the weeping girl, he only seems to make it worse, the hacking of her sobs deepening as he presses blame on those who should be here to console their lost kin. He reaches out to touch her shoulder gently, deciding that maybe she has been avoiding them, a good reason she would be here alone and why he’d been the one to bring conversation to light for once. Maybe his initial assumptions that she’d rather he just went away were proper ones. It makes him frown, brows crinkling in wonder as his features are hidden by his subtle embrace of comfort, unsure whether he should now just leave or if his presence helps her somehow.

Judging by the crying, it did not; she also had not made her exit, either, and so he was left with a half hearted conviction to keep trying.

Leaning into his story of Shadow and the red bindings of his soul, he hopes that maybe through his own confessions, she can think less harshly of herself; it had taken many months of ponderous thought for him to decide that the true evil in that situation had been Ricochet, and like all stories of wickedness he had heard, the darkness gleamed and glistened as if priceless and precious, tempting to all. He had been young, foolish and lost; it made sense that one such as himself would reach for that shining beacon.

His confession leads to her second mentioning of her father, and his ears fall to either side of his head, crestfallen and sad that such was the path fate had put him on. Its too late now to take it back – he can only hope she doesn’t say anything, or if she does, that the crime is forgiven. Either way, he hadn’t been the reason Shadow had died; that reason was the same one that left Ranjiri softly hiccupping with tears.

At least the crying had slowed, replaced by discomfort, something even a man as socially dense as Dragomir can notice by the way she shields her body with her wings, falling into a long silence that he almost takes as his invitation to leave before she’s again speaking, leaving him with a softly ironic smirk on his lips as she points out the only thing she needs to do to help herself out of the hole she’s fallen into.

It’s interesting, endlessly so, to the young man; that life loops and twines together so, that two people with such different problems encompassing the same core had found one another and aided in ways they hadn’t foreseen. He wonders if praying has helped her – the last time he’d gone to the shrines of the Gods and fallen to his knees seeking assistance, the very ground itself had rebuked his presence, trembling and throwing a massive fit that he had come anywhere near the sanctified pillars. He doesn’t plan on praying anytime soon, at least not after that experience, but it does tempt him, memories of his youth filling him with late night conversations with the cluster of stars he had, in his innocence, believed to be Nieque and his powerful son, Aarde.

Those were days long passed. He had true Gods now, ones he could see, but it did little to ease him back into a life of devotion; in ways, he was afraid of these deities, afraid they would dislike him as Mirage said they would if they came to see the color of his heart.

But then Ranjiri, sweet Ranjiri, lays her gentle hand of benevolence across the brow of his fears, leaving him with an empty mask that stares at her through wondering eyes. Is she right? Is he not as wicked as he believes himself to be?

”You deserve kindness, as do most I have met here,” he says, turning his eyes away to look at the horizon, taking in her wisdom imbued words that he should forgive himself, the words the sort of lingering, heavy things that imply he does not deserve the same treatment as Ranjiri does. He finds that he doesn’t want to let go of his aching heart; it was that grief and guilt that had forged his soul into the shape it held now, the black pain he inflicted on himself all that kept him moving forward on the path that Mirage had shown him, the one she had promised ended in happiness and belonging. To let go of that remorse, to forgive himself for what he had done, opened up a thousand doors to fail; if he forgave his actions, what would hold him back from doing it again? Not all insults to the flow of fate could be so easily repaid. He wears his guilt as a penance for what he cost that woman, as a chain to keep him from flying off the edge of that precipice ever again.

If he forgave that indiscretion, the briars lining the adjacent path would take the appearance once more of rose littered bushes, the gnarled hungry branches morphed into the soft ripple of a willow’s leaning boughs, and he would soon be found lost along the incorrect path again. It was pivotal that he wear this badge of horror, if only to feel as if the Queen of Dragons still loomed in the distance, watching each of his movements, judging him, guiding him. He does not know how to explain this to Ranjiri. He does not try.

”But I think you’re right, about having to let it go,” he says, convincing enough as he does think that this is a good path for the black and gold girl to take with her cloak of sin, ”though it is surely far easier to say than bring it to fruition.” His own darkness was one that he figured would take much longer to die out than Ranjiri, one that still jabbed at him as he struggles against the backward flow of this land on a daily basis. She cannot see it as clearly as he can, for she does not have his mind, but daily he fights the urges to be gone from this land of misfits and hybrids and hourly he struggles with the concepts Mirage has shared with him in contrast to those he had been taught as a young boy. He enjoys the golden lining of those theories shared with him by Mirage, and he wants them to be true so much that he is still here, arguing with himself and his past.

How long would it take him to forgive his parents for raising him so incorrectly for this world? How much longer still until he can forgive the land that crafted the black laws of Nieque that corrupted the soft hearts of his family?