Laruku had always cared far more than he wanted to about everything. Every person that chanced upon the borders, he had cared about, and every person that had inevitably left without saying a word, he had cared about. He had cared, and it had made him bitter. Every child his cousins would leave at his feet, and every subsequent child that ended up with too little love and too little to hold on to -- he had cared; it had made him bitter, and it had filled him with the guilt that still claimed him now. The hybrid had hated Clouded Tears for a time because it had been filled with people that had lied to him and that had abandoned him. It was funny that in time, he ended up being the one to lie to them, and the one to abandon them all in the end. The weight of the world was gone because he had tossed them to fire.
Yeah,
he affirmed. The blind man had ended up loving Clouded Tears as much as he could have loved any place. Even now, so many months later, he could not call the new forest home, and he doubted he ever would. Maybe it'll make up for you not having spent that much time there.
Laruku wanted to be forgotten in the grand scheme of things, and to some extent, he knew that his pack would be lost somewhere along the way too. But he liked to believe that its memory would live longer, and that people would have better things to say about it than that it had a shitty last leader. Maybe not all the words he'd written were positive in that regard, but it was better than leaving everything to decay in the minds of others. He didn't know how much Rachias had really liked living in Clouded Tears, if at all, but he really didn't have anyone else to give it to either.