(Author's Note: I haven't yet read Burned, so this is just for the heck of it. I know I had an old one, but it seemed oddly childish rereading it, so I'm giving it another shot.)
Sometimes, things happen that you don't want to happen. I didn't want to be where I was right now... I truly, truly didn't
The shadows of the world, they are one thing. It's one thing to face the darkness, all alone, crying for help that will never come. It's one thing to fight the enemy, and lose, and fear for no one but yourself. It's another thing to have fear for another. It's another thing to face the darkness with a friend, and watch them suffer when you lose, and watch them fall away.
In many ways, it is safer to go on your own. You worry for no one, you fear for no one, you hurt for no one. If you die, you need not worry what will happen to those you've left behind. You need not worry for those that will leave you behind.
But it is never better to be on your own. To fear for others, it gives you strength, to feel for another, it gives you purpose. It makes you move through the thickest snow, douse the hottest fire. It makes you live, you laugh, you love, you wonder, you smile.
When those people that you've loved, you've filled up with, leave, there seems to be nothing else.
These are the times, when it is safer to walk the world alone.
The shadows, the calls of life wax and wane, like the flickering firelight in the woods upon the trees. The shadows dance, and spin, and spit darkness, and the fire spits its matching sparks. The people that leave, leave the shadows. When the wander, it's one more spirit left in your heart, one more adding to the darkness. But though the darkness fills the holes in the world, it cowers at the edges of the light.
So mind this, and mind this well: keep the fire lit, at all costs.