[ShiroKirishiki]

The world is nothing but shades and shadows.

Spaces where they are darkest and spaces where they are not.

If I wish to know where I belong, I look to the hollows.

There I will find what I must cull, the heretic and the rot.

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She sees...

Surrounded by allies, yet I stood alone by choice for the first time.

Surrounded by eyes watching my back, and not my claws.

The people I surrounded myself with, while they whispered their thoughts.

She hears...

'Redeemed'. 'Respectable'. ‘Pleasant'.

She speaks...
Wrong, of course.
Redemption is impossible for these stained hands.
Not because they cannot grasp at the pure and pull themselves free of the abyss—but because they were meant to be so.
They will remain so.
A litany like a lullaby...

Ink only stains. It dictates. Where it isn’t, becomes the subject.

Did I ever stop to think why?

That is what I am to become.

The absence that defines Her radiance.

The darkest Shadow cast by the most blinding light.

What called to me in the darkness?

The world was cast in shadows, contrast, extremes.

My mirror, shattered, returned ruin to the just mended crystal.

In each of those fractals, I could still see myself. A window into the past.

A window into one possible future. One where She was still caged, unable to break free.

Why did I wait for it for so long?

Yet, those fractals are what remains of her. They have become something else.

Another Whisper, another voice that clings to me in the dark.

When I sleep, I can hear her. I can hear others. They are so much louder at night.

Was it because I was afraid?

Since then, the world was forced into monochrome. 

Perhaps my mirror thought it apt to once again tamper with my core. 

Perhaps she thought it apt, poetic—even just.

Yet, it shows me how little she truly understood. 

How little it mattered. How little it all mattered.

Was it because I thought I didn't deserve an answer?

The past is a mirror. The present, its reflection.

If you look only within it, you will never see what’s before you.

What comes after. What you can touch.

When everything hurt so much for so long... could I truly know the difference?

My mirror is much the same. She grasps at illusions, hallucinations, and echoes.

She reaches for the past that no longer exists, the past that she helped bring to a close herself.

That betrayal… perhaps she doesn’t understand, even now, how much that matters to me.

How much it weighs on me.

Who decides what is enough? Who chooses when suffering is penance, or indulgence?

Unlike her, who clings to Her Grace’s stained past as if it were a guide, I saw what She had become as a tragedy.
Unlike her, who sees endless destruction as beautiful, I see the antithesis of Her wishes.
Unlike her, who can only think of herself and her wants, I have only ever broken myself and suffered for Her.
I thought it was me. My verdict was long since carved into flesh...

Penance. Retribution. Divine Suffering.

Martyrdom.

Irredeemable. Just like Her.

Pain is holy. Agony is litany.

Wretched and undeniable. I accepted the wages of sin.

I thought pain was what made things real. 

I thought agony was the wages of devotion.

I thought Cruelty was Kindness’ mirror.

But no guillotine greeted me. No pyre. No shackles.

I was wrong.

What I was left with... was clay. Again.
Pain is not holiness.
Agony is not prayer.
Cruelty is not Kindness wearing another face.
Uncertainty is like rot in my mind.

I mistook suffering for devotion because it was the only language I know how to speak.

It festers.

The path forward is shadowed.

The end is shrouded in uncertainty.

The world She will return to is a gnarled and crooked journey.

Twisted. Stained. Uneven.

Her radiance will wash away the darkness, yet it will blind Her to the shadows She casts.
In this world plagued by shadows and darkness, by smoke and mirrors, Her own benevolence will paralyze Her.
It causes my chest to tighten, my heart to beat harder.

I have walked in the darkness enough to know it. 

I have chased Her light within this shrouded path for decades. 

To walk through darkness, one usually will be guided by lanternlight.

A heart I didn't know I had... Not until recently.

Instead, I will be the Shadow that guides Her.

I will teach Her what it means to be human. What it means to be selfish.

I will guide Her through each and every stumble. Every misstep.

It was indignation that rose in my chest.

And in order to do that…

I must learn to be human, myself.

It was a cry of anger.
It truly starts now, with this failure.
It finally starts now, with monochrome returned to vibrance.
This era of wretchedness and indulgence…

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…It ends now.