The Ashen Crown

There are no purely good people, and no purely evil ones. Sometimes the hand that gives and the hand that takes belong to the same person. You want to live with dignity, but dignity never asks whether you can afford it. You want to hate someone, then one day you see him crouching by the roadside, soothing a child, and swallow half your hatred. People do not live between black and white. They live in the gray. Gray means compromise, endurance, getting through today. Not brave enough, not fallen enough, just struggling to breathe between enormous gears. This is a story about the gray.