“I… regret… what I did. It was wrong. Very wrong. But regret is meaningless.” He fell silent. I knew I should have let it go then, with the echoes of his pain still reverberating in the air around me. He was ancient, unfathomable; there was so much about him I would never understand. But I reached out with my good hand and found his knee. “Regret is never meaningless,” I said. “It’s not enough, not on its own; you have to change, too. But it’s a start.” Shiny let out a long sigh of almost unbearable weariness. “Change is not my nature, Oree. Regret is all I have.” More silence then, for a long
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