"In my country we talk about people being like a yin and yang," Ling explained. He grabbed a pebble and scratched out a yin-yang symbol onto the roof's concrete. "It's a symbol of half white, half black, that intertwine with each other. It means that there's light and dark inside every person. Those pieces are all you. They hold each other in place, so to speak. A person who was completely perfectly good and righteous would never be able to forgive anybody! They'd never be able to understand what it was like to have made a mistake. They would simply insist that their way was right all the time, and never compromise."

"But imagine a person who was all darkness. They'd never be able to love anybody, they'd never treat anyone with selflessness or gentleness. So if you take one of those two away-- in the case with the Witches, perhaps they took the light away-- all that was left for a time was the dark part."

"Does that make any sense?" Ling asked, pausing to pat Takuto's back. "Because there's somewhere I'm going with this."