Nightlight

If you haven't been there, you don't know how often the urge to comfort is an urge to shut someone up and shove away their pain to where you don't have to see it, don't have to believe it, don't have to think about it.

Nightlight's been there. He doesn't believe in comfort. He believes in leaning into the pain. Nightlight knows that there is such a thing as a good grief, but only at the end of time and rage. Nightlight understands that those who loved you just the way you were are the last people who want to see and hear how you are changing. Nightlight knows that sometimes a stranger is the only person in the whole world with whom you can share what you are going through.

Nightlight isn't here to be your friend.

Nightlight is here to be your perfect stranger.

It is a little lonely being the perfect stranger, but it's part of it, that loneliness. There's an empty space inside that leaves room for so much listening. He has his beloved, EyeoftheStorm, and his brother, Bonereader, who understand him; and his mother Nightshade who does not but is very proud of him anyway. To all the rest, he is less of a person and more of a presence. He cares so deeply, and you can tell how he cares, yet nothing you pour out upon him-- not the hate, not the sorrow, not the embarrassingly unlikely hope-- is anything he takes personally. Nightlight's company is like a place you can be when you need to be away from everyone else, a place where it is safe to struggle out loud, to give in to the darkness and find out what's there, or to admit your gratitude for that which everyone else wishes never happened.

Nightlight asks hard questions, sometimes-- very simple, stark questions. He asks them the way Bonereader wraps himself around a pressure point; it's a hurt that brings things closer to true. He doesn't talk much, otherwise. There are no words. He cannot imagine what it is like not to be pulled to the dragon sitting at the edge of the light. He can't explain to you what it is like, feeling so intimate with all the world, so honored, and so humbled. And it would never occur to him to tell you what the sparkle nymph who hovers like a satellite around him knows...

...deep inside, beneath it all, there is so much joy.