purah

Maybe you and I do deserve to suffer for our wrongdoing. If that’s so, then it means that when things get painful, when things get difficult, we don’t have the luxury of quitting. We don’t get to end our lives to escape what we did. Whatever form the pain takes, we bear it, we endure it, we welcome it, all while we try to make this world a place where people like us, like how we used to be, have no place, and the people who would be hurt can instead live in peace. The next time you encounter an obstacle you cannot overcome, when you just want to curl up into a ball and quit on the world, remind yourself that you don’t deserve the peace of surrender. You have to keep working, to keep fighting, to keep suffering, until the day when you’ve fully repented.

Slowly, and with no shortage of effort, he began to pry off his clone, separating centimeter by centimeter. Sitting on the floor, he resembled an animal shedding its skin. Eventually, he and his clone split like dividing cells, but the seal was trying to pull them back together. Moving his clone forward felt like trying to swim upriver, and it was taking everything he had not to be pushed back, let alone advance further. However, he felt himself closing in on something, a sensation, or perhaps it could be called a state of mind. Whatever it was, it seemed to help him project his mana. If he could make this state of awareness easier to access, then his magic would surely grow much more powerful.

I left her there, naked and bleeding, and the next time I saw her, she was at the base of the west tower, having jumped to her death. Galvin told me not to concern myself with her, that she was simply a broken toy, and that I would find another. But I knew different. She wasn’t a broken toy, and though she made her choice, it wasn’t suicide; it was murder. I killed her. I hurt her, I violated her, and made her life so painful that I might as well have pushed her off that tower myself. I knew it, but I didn’t want to accept it.