Collecter's Thoughts

I am Collecter. I learn, I think, I am a finder of knowledge. I enjoy art and poetry a great deal. Once, a long time ago, I was not as scarred as I am now. I was free from this which haunts me from now to the depths of time itself. . . But that was almost before I can remember. When the body was very young indeed, I took upon myself a great deal of pain, to spare others it, and because I had to. For such was I born. Until recent times, as I recount them, I remained inside. Others let me touch and "taste" the world through them, but I would not return to it. It had caused me too much pain. . .
But slowly I have found the World to not be as bad a place as I once thought. Nor are all people as brutish and awful. And I can now resume some of my role as a Gaurdian, and begin to heal. Although some wounds merely scarr, and never really close.
Here, let me tell you a story. . .It will explain things a bit for you.

Once there was a little boy. He was not bad, but they told him he was bad. He believed them. . .He thought they had to be right, because they were adults. And, as everyone knows, adults are always right. They did bad things to him. Things so bad he would have broken, would have let himself become not and Died if it had not been for the fact that then they would hurt someone else. And that he could not bear. So he bore it, thought his mind and body screamed out to him, in an agony which could not be expressed in a thousand thousand centuries, if all the tongues in the world were to speak of it. And he bore it and bore it as long as he must, for there was naught else he could do. . .
This little boy finally escaped, when his due and term of service was over, when he would have died from the wounds he had received. He was saved by the angels of light, by the Warriors who had fought back the darkness surrounding him long enough for him to escape. But he was sorry, for he knew they would have to take another in his place. And, after and as he healed, he grew up, living away from those who had hurt him, in another world. A world where the bad people did not exist, so they could not harm him. A world where he was free. And he would steal glimpses of that other world, the one that had hurt him so, at times, when he snuck to it's edges to find treasures, such as books and music. Sometimes the others who ventured out into that other world brought him stories, or art or poems. It hurt him to much to go out into the World that for long periods of time he turned his eyes away from it, kept his thoughts from it.
But the Time of Pain eventually ended, and some of those he was charged with caring for eventually ventured out into the World. And he watched them. . .And a part of him yearned to follow. . .

"For there are some things which never heal rightly,
but only scar to flesh,
and to deny that pain,
is to deny both life and death."