( Fingers curl and clutch and ache like the pains of long bones and thin flesh, warm in turns and cold again, hard. He half closes his eyes, ignoring for the moment the laughter, the murmurs, the shrieks, the screams, having remembered other times, other places, as thick with echoes of the departed.

He's made his own echoes, time to time. )

The Wens were not the only ones. ( A note, a nod, a consideration of a shared time in their lives he does not speak about. ) Only the most obvious and consuming.

( People cursed to lose the sanctity of their own minds, unable to be brought back, persisting in living. He remembers. He prefers the fiction of forgetting.

And so he does, now, smile in the flash of teeth of a predator aware of what games must be played in terms of dedication to find a meal that might, for a while, sustain. Tugs on interlocked hands and weaves forward, between cocoons, empty but for the painful hopes of those who'd been within them. )

You're right, husband. I have seen these stones with soldiers.

( Scared ones, two days past, and a different exhaustion and consideration. He strides through dust, spies footprints as recent, or slightly older than their own. Inevitably there are more eyes crawling in here to see than their two sets; inevitably he turns away from them, to forge his own path, deeper. )

Ones frightened of those they were overseeing. The training session that Emilia and I found ourselves wrapped up in, the day before the arena fell.