.X.

Yuan wondered often how it had felt to be whole. A millennia ago, before there was a great split in the world, before he’d grown to know too well the depths of enmity, he’d been a person in the truest sense of the word. He’d been capable of greater emotions than rage and petty irritability; he’d been able to love once, to laugh once. But then the only smiles that had played about his lips were mirthless, and any laughter he had to share had been cold and biting. The fall of Mithos and the reunification of the two lands had wrought great and unforeseen changes upon everything; what Yuan had expected in the aftermath he was no longer entirely certain, but what he hadn’t thought possible was that he’d rediscover a ghost inside himself, an echo of the mortal man he used to be.

He’d lost his wings after Cruxis had imploded and the grand plans had disintegrated, both of these downfalls wrought by a small group of friends and comrades that had done the unthinkable and changed the course of what had once been thought unalterable. He honestly thought he’d die—that he’d either be hunted down and executed for the roles he’d played and the lives he’d ended, or that along with the others of his ilk he would simply fade from existence, wasting away until the only thing substantial about him were the memories he left behind. But none of this had transpired, and he’d gone on existing—he could hardly call it more than that—as he’d done before. But something was different, for not only had he lost the mark of his angelic ascension—the wings that he had once thought made him greater and more divine than any other mortal—but he’d lost his apathy. Where once he’d felt hollow he now experienced things that made him by phases uncertain, unwilling, curious, intrigued and then a little satisfied. It seemed perhaps he was an empty vessel no longer; it seemed as though through losing what it was that made him an angel he’d regained, against all hope and possibility, his humanity.

With empathy came regret; the guilt that assailed him at times was almost too much to bear, and it was for the first time in centuries he felt the strange, alien moisture of tears as they etched their way slowly down his face. Perhaps it had been a blessing to be devoid of these things, he thought. But even though this passed through his mind he knew he would never trade what he’d rediscovered for the oblivious nature of all of Cruxis. Emotion, strong emotion, was the very essence of being human, and he knew with such conviction then that he and the others had been wrong to despise it, to look down upon it. It was this chaotic, roiling mass of feeling that made him feel alive in a sense he had not known for so long; it was this constriction in his lungs, this catch in his breath that made him realize that as an angel he’d been barely more than body that spoke with words both artificial and without heart.

After the fall of Mithos Yuan had lost his wings, but he’d gained much, much more. Memory and history would always recall him as a partial villain, as a traitor first one way and then another. But the man who was once and angel and became in his disgrace a man knew there was more to it than that, for he’d uncovered by happenstance what he had been unconsciously wanting all along—

He’d learned to be human again.

.X.