✨ Reflections of 2025: A Note From Izayah & A Note From Runa ✨

By M.D. Petrocco

As 2025 comes to a close, I wanted to do something different, something that honors not just my journey, but the journeys of the two souls at the heart of Moons and Shadows.

This year has held edits, rewrites, refinements, expansion, breakthroughs, moments of near-collapse, and moments of the Blessed Father-given clarity. But through all of it, I have carried these two characters with me.

So today, I’m giving them the last word.

Here is 2025 through Izayah’s eyes and 2025 through Runa’s heart.

Two perspectives.

Two voices.

Two truths that shape one story.

🖤 A Note From Izayah: “The Weight of a Year”

There’s something about the close of a year that makes a man reckon with the truth.

If 2025 taught me anything, it’s that clarity isn’t a gift - it’s earned. Hard-earned. Through failure, grit, and the unsparing silence where every unspoken thing comes back sharpened.

This year has been a study in discipline.

Not the kind you can measure in drills or commands, but the kind forged in the dark—when no one is watching, and no one is coming to save you from your own notions.

I learned that memories don’t stay dead just because you bury them deep.

I learned that duty doesn’t loosen its grip simply because you’re tired.

And I learned that love, the dangerous kind, the kind that rewrites the very edges of a man, doesn’t fade, even when time and shadow threaten to strip you hollow.

2025 forced me to confront what I lost.

What I failed to see.

What I failed to protect.

And the person I must become if I’m going to stand in the place where truth demands I stand.

This year carved me open.

Next year…Next year, I mean to rise.

Not for redemption.

Not for glory.

But for her.

— Izayah

🤍 A Note From Runa: “A Year of Remembering”

If I look back at 2025, I don’t see months.

I see moments - soft, scattered, glowing like orbs tucked along the memory vines.

This year was not loud for me.

It was quiet in the way dawn is hushed - patient, steady, waiting for me to open my eyes.

So much of 2025 felt like waking up inside myself.

Like learning the feel of my own breath again.

Like touching a dream and realizing it is not a dream at all.

I learned that healing is not a rush.

It’s a return.

A slow stepping back into the places you once hid from.

And I learned that the truth doesn’t come all at once - it arrives in fragments. A flicker on the skin. A warmth in the dark. A whisper in the space between worlds.

If 2025 was anything, it was this:

A year where I remembered that I am still here.

I am still rising.

Still reaching.

Still becoming.

And though the shadows have teeth…the light is mine.

— Runa

🌙 Closing Thoughts From the Author

What a year.

A year of editing, rewriting, ripping apart and rebuilding.

A year of refinement — not just for the manuscript, but for me.

Walking with these two characters through 2025 shaped me more deeply than I expected. Izayah challenged my discipline. Runa slowed me down and taught me to listen. Both reminded me why I write: not to escape the world, but to transform within it.

2026 is coming.

New chapters.

New truths.

New awakenings.

And I am grateful — deeply — that you are here walking this story with me.

Tell me:

What did 2025 teach you? What are you looking forward to in 2026?