As the first light of morning crept over the broken city, Kael was already gone, having returned to Na'reth's side before the day had truly begun. Thal had spent the early hours where he felt he was needed most — beside Tar.
The great minotaur lay where the healers had placed him, his massive frame barely fitting the makeshift bedding they'd arranged. Even unconscious, Tar's presence filled the room in a way that had nothing to do with his size — it was the weight of him, the particular density of someone who had never once in his life considered retreat. His wounds had been severe. The healers had said so carefully, the way healers say things they aren't sure you want to hear.
Thal had sat beside him and waited.
He had known Tar longer than most would realize. Longer than Tar himself remembered, in the way that very early memories blur and then disappear. He and his sister Tor had been calves when Thal found them — wild, abandoned, left to be prey in a world that had no category for what they were. Thal hadn't meant to take them in. Not at first. But there was a particular kind of thing that happened when you stopped to look at something lost and it looked back at you and you understood, somewhere below thought, that you weren't going to walk away.
Tar had always been the quieter of the two. Strength that didn't need announcing. Tor had been the storm — will like a tide, unmovable once she'd decided something. They were opposites. They had been inseparable.
Thal sat with those memories the way you sit with things you don't take out often — carefully, in the dark, where they can't do as much damage.
Then, somewhere in the grey hours before full morning, there was a shift.
A deep, rumbling breath. A flicker of movement. Tar's massive fingers twitched against the stone floor. His breathing changed — from the rhythm of deep unconsciousness to something more present — and then, slowly, his heavy eyelids cracked open.
Thal exhaled through his nose. "About time," he said.
Tar grunted. Shifted. Went still again, assessing himself the way a warrior assesses damage — methodically, without drama. He looked at his hands first. Then at the ceiling. Then at Thal, with the particular look of someone who had come back from a long way and was still finding their bearings.
They sat in silence for a while. That was fine. They had always been comfortable with silence.
Eventually Thal rose to his feet. "Meet us at the inn when you're ready," he said. "Take the time you need."
Tar grunted again. It meant he would.
The others were stirring by the time Thal returned to the inn. Nyra was already outside, her silver hair braided tight, her armor bearing the unremoved marks of the battle — she hadn't bothered to clean all of it, which told him more about where her head was than anything she might say. Luken sat on the inn's front step, quietly watching the city begin its morning. Valen stood a little apart, his hands in his pockets, his eyes moving over the street with the careful attention of someone who hadn't quite stopped being ready for something to go wrong.
They looked at Thal when he arrived. None of them said anything immediately. The morning felt like a chapter between things — the battle fully behind them now, the road ahead not yet begun.
Nyra broke it first. "How's Tar?"
"He'll be ready," Thal said.
She nodded. That was the end of that.
They waited. When Tar finally came — moving slowly, favoring his left side, but upright, his double-headed axe slung across his back with the ease of long habit — the group came together without anyone announcing it. Valen straightened. Luken stood. Nyra's posture shifted into something more deliberate.
Tar looked at each of them. Then he looked at Thal and gave a single nod that carried the weight of a longer conversation neither of them was going to have.
Thal nodded back.
"Before we go," he said, "there's somewhere I want to stop."
The group gathered outside the orphanage in the early morning light — all five of them, which made immediately clear why going inside was not a practical option. Tar alone would have reduced the available space by half. Together they filled the small yard outside completely, which drew the attention of every child near a window within thirty seconds.
Mira came to the door.
She looked at Thal first, then at the assembled group behind him, then at Tar, and her ears angled forward in the way that meant she was doing rapid spatial calculations.
"You're leaving," she said.
"Yes," Thal said.
She studied him for a moment. Then she stepped outside rather than inviting them in, pulling the door half-closed behind her — whether to keep the children in or to give the conversation some quiet, it wasn't clear. Probably both.
Nyra, Luken and Valen exchanged a brief look. None of them had been here before. None of them entirely knew why they were here now. Thal had simply said there's somewhere I want to stop and started walking, and they had followed because that was the shape of things with Thal — you followed first and understood later, sometimes much later.
The windows, however, were already filling with faces.
And then the door opened again — not because Mira had opened it, but because someone on the other side had decided waiting was over — and Davan came out.
He was broad for twelve, with the beginnings of tusks and the particular walk of an Ork boy who had been doing the work of someone twice his age long enough that it had changed his posture. He stepped into the yard, took in the assembled group with a single sweeping look — assessing, cataloguing — and then looked at Tar with the particular expression of someone recalibrating what large meant.
Then his eyes moved to Thal.
Something shifted in them — not the sharp assessing look he'd given everyone else, something more specific than that. More careful. The look of someone who had been waiting for a particular thing to arrive and was now making sure it had actually arrived before allowing themselves to believe it.
"You came back," he said. Vindication. But underneath it this time — just underneath, barely visible — something else. Something that had more to do with needing it to be true than with being right about it.
"I said I would," Thal said.
Davan held his gaze for a moment. Then he nodded once — the sharp, deliberate nod of someone filing something important away where it wouldn't get lost.
Behind him, through the windows, several children had pressed their faces against the glass. One of them was pointing at Tar. Two of them appeared to be having a disagreement about something, conducted entirely in whispers and gestures. A small head disappeared from one window and reappeared at another one closer.
Davan turned to the others. He studied Nyra first — a beat longer than the rest, just noticeably longer. Valen caught it. Filed it away immediately. Said nothing.
"You fight with an axe," Davan said to Nyra. Not a question. He'd already looked at the axe.
Nyra raised an eyebrow. "I do."
"I've seen people fight with axes," Davan said. "Usually they're slower. Too much weight on the upswing. You don't look slow."
Nyra blinked. Then slowly the corner of her mouth moved. "I'm not."
"How long did it take?"
"To stop being slow?"
"To be good."
Nyra looked at him for a moment. "A long time," she said. "And then a bit longer."
Davan nodded, filing this away with great seriousness. Then, as if the follow-up was obvious: "What's your name?"
"Nyra."
He said it back to himself once, quietly, apparently testing how it sat. Valen looked at the sky. He had seen this particular configuration of a twelve year old before and knew exactly what he was looking at. He pressed his lips together and examined a cloud with great interest.
Behind them, the front door of the orphanage had opened again. Two children had emerged — testing whether outside was available — and were now standing at the edge of the yard looking at Tar. Mira appeared in the doorway behind them. "Back inside," she said. "Both of you."
Neither of them went back inside.
Davan turned to Luken next, with the same directness. Luken, who had been watching the exchange with a carefully neutral expression, found himself on the receiving end of an evaluating look.
"You're quiet," Davan said.
"Sometimes," Luken said carefully.
Davan studied him for a moment. "You hold yourself like you're deciding whether to trust the place," he said finally. "Like you're waiting for something to go wrong."
Luken was very still for a moment. "Do I."
"Most people who do that have had things go wrong before," Davan said, matter-of-fact. "Mira says it's not my place to notice things like that out loud. But you're leaving so it doesn't matter."
Luken looked at him for a long moment. "That's perceptive," he said carefully.
"I know," Davan said, without apparent modesty.
By this point the two children at the yard's edge had been joined by three more. All five of them were looking at Tar. Tar had gone very still — the stillness of a creature that understood it was being observed by something small and had made a deliberate choice not to move. His tail, however, had begun to move on its own. Slowly at first. Then with increasing commitment.
Mira appeared beside them. "Inside," she said firmly. "He is a guest. He is not a — "
The smallest of the five reached out and touched Tar's leg. Just once. Then looked at Mira with an expression of complete innocence.
Tar's tail wagged harder.
"What do you fight with?" Davan asked Valen, apparently uninterested in the developing situation behind him.
"Blades," Valen said, dragging his attention back.
"Two?"
"Usually."
Davan considered this. "Faster than an axe?"
"Depends on the axe," Valen said, with a glance at Nyra.
"And the person holding it," Nyra said, without looking up.
Davan absorbed this exchange with great seriousness. He looked back at Thal. "They're good," he said, with the tone of someone delivering an assessment that had been requested, though it hadn't been.
"I know," Thal said.
Davan looked at Tar — now serving as a point of fascination for what had grown to seven children, two of whom had discovered that his fur provided adequate grip for climbing and were testing this theory while Mira attempted to explain why this was not appropriate and Tar stood absolutely motionless, his tail now wagging with complete abandon. "He's coming too?" Davan asked.
"Yes," Thal said.
Davan nodded slowly. Then: "Good. You'll need the size."
Tar looked down at him over the head of a child who had successfully reached his shoulder and was sitting there with the pride of a summit reached. His expression, as much as a minotaur's expression could be read, contained something that might have been approval.
Valen caught Nyra's eye and tilted his head very slightly toward Davan. Just once. Nyra followed the gesture, looked at Davan — who had turned back to her with the practiced casualness of someone hoping it looked casual — and something shifted in her expression. Not quite amusement. More like the particular expression of someone who has understood something and is choosing not to acknowledge it directly because acknowledging it would cost the person something they couldn't afford to lose.
She looked back at Valen. A look that said don't.
Valen's expression said I'm not doing anything.
Her expression said I know exactly what you're not doing.
He looked at the sky again.
Mira had given up extracting children from Tar and was now standing beside Thal with her arms folded and the expression of someone who had accepted a situation while reserving the right to have opinions about it later.
"He was up before dawn," she said quietly. "Checked on every child. Then sat by the door." A pause. "Waiting."
Thal looked at Davan.
The boy had moved back toward Nyra with the deliberateness of someone who had a question queued and had decided the time was now.
"You're going with him?" he asked her. Meaning Thal. His voice had shifted — still direct, but with a different quality underneath it. Something more careful.
"Yes," Nyra said.
"Do you always?"
"What?"
"Go with him. Into things."
There was a pause. Nyra glanced at Thal briefly — the weight of fifteen years briefly visible — then back at Davan.
"Not always," she said. "But this time, yes."
Davan took that in. Then, quieter: "He always comes back?"
The question was aimed at Nyra but it wasn't about her. Thal heard it. Mira heard it. The particular quality of it — twelve years old and trying not to show how much was riding on the answer — sat in the air for a moment.
Nyra looked at Davan carefully. Then at Thal. Then back.
"Yes," she said. "He always comes back."
Something in Davan's shoulders settled — so slightly, so carefully contained, that only someone looking for it would see it. He nodded once. Looked at Thal with that same careful look from before — the one that was more specific than assessment, that had something in it closer to the way you look at a thing you are trying to learn by watching it, because you have decided that thing is worth learning.
"You'll be careful," he said to Thal. Not quite a question.
"Yes," Thal said.
Davan held his gaze for a moment. Then he looked at the ground, then back up — and there was something in his expression that he hadn't quite finished putting away yet. Something that had to do with a boy who had been doing the work of someone older for long enough that he'd forgotten what it was like to let someone else carry something. Something that had recognized, in the man across from him, a version of that same weight worn differently. More deliberately. Like it was chosen.
"I'm going to be like you," Davan said. Simply. Not as ambition — more as a statement of something he had already decided, the way you state a fact about yourself that you've been carrying for a while and have finally said out loud.
Thal looked at him for a long moment.
Something moved through his expression that wasn't quite what Davan was expecting. Not pride. Not warmth. Something more complicated than either — the particular discomfort of a man who understood exactly what being like him had cost, who had watched people who loved him burn and break and turn to ash in meadows, and who was now standing in front of a twelve year old with watchful eyes and too much weight on his shoulders and hearing his own worst habit spoken back at him like a goal worth having.
He wanted to say don't. He didn't.
Because Davan was already doing it. Already carrying the room, already turning toward the hard thing instead of away from it, already deciding the younger ones were his responsibility without asking anyone's permission. The shape of it was already there. Thal hadn't put it there. He had just — recognized it. The way he always recognized it.
That was the part that sat wrong. That it was already in the boy, already growing, and there was nothing to be done about it except hope the world was kinder to him than it had been to the others.
"You already are," he said.
The words cost him something Davan couldn't see and wouldn't understand yet. Maybe wouldn't for a long time.
Thal hoped it would be a very long time.
Davan's jaw tightened slightly. He looked at the ground again. When he looked back up his composure was fully restored, which meant whatever that had cost him was fully paid.
He straightened. Looked at the group with the authority of someone resuming a role.
"I'll tell the others you kept your word," he said to Thal.
"Good," Thal said.
Thal crossed to where Mira stood slightly apart.
"The boy from last night," he said quietly.
"Awake," Mira said. "Asked for water. Then your name." Her tail moved slowly. "He's still inside himself a lot. But he's there. He didn't try to leave this morning when the others woke up." A pause. "That's something."
Thal looked at the doorway. Through it, just visible, the boy sat on his mat with a blanket around his shoulders. His eyes were clearer than they'd been. Still fragile. Still careful. But someone was behind them again.
"I told him you'd come back," Mira said. "I told all of them. I needed them to believe something good was going to keep happening." She looked at Thal steadily. "You were the most recent example I had."
He didn't say anything to that.
Her soul gem caught the morning light — red, steady, slow. "Come back," she said. "All of you."
Thal nodded once.
He turned to the group. They gathered without being told — Nyra pulling her gaze from Davan, Luken straightening, Valen moving away from the three children he'd been quietly keeping from climbing Tar's other side, Tar himself gently lowering the child on his shoulder back to the ground with a care that was almost comical given his size.
Davan was at the yard's edge already, arms crossed, chin up.
Then Davan looked at Nyra — one last time, quick, with the practiced casualness of someone hoping it looked casual — and looked at the middle distance instead.
Nyra looked at him. "Take care of them," she said.
Davan's jaw tightened slightly, in the way of someone trying not to look pleased. "I always do," he said.
As they filed out Valen fell into step beside Nyra. He said nothing for a moment. Then, very quietly, just for her:
"He has good taste."
Nyra's expression didn't change. "Say another word and I'll use you for axe practice."
Valen smiled — the real one, not the careful one — and said nothing more.
They left.
Behind them, Davan stood with his arms crossed and his chin level, watching them until they were too small to see. He didn't move until they were gone.
And behind him, inside, Tar had apparently decided that sitting in the doorway was the natural next step and had lowered himself carefully onto the step, which meant three children were now using his knees as a vantage point while Mira stood behind them with her arms folded and the expression of someone who had fully surrendered a battle they had never really been winning.
His tail wagged once.
They walked back through the city, the five of them, and the city noticed.
Not with ceremony — there was too much work left for ceremony — but with the particular attention of people who understand they are watching something leave that might not come back the same way.
A beastkin woman stood in a doorway with a child on her hip, both of them covered in the faint residue of ash that no amount of washing had fully removed. She looked at Nyra first — woman to woman, warrior to survivor — and then at Luken, and what passed across her face was the particular expression of someone who had watched people fight for them and understood, fully, what that cost. She didn't say anything. She pressed her free hand flat against her chest, briefly, and held it there.
Nyra looked at her for a moment. Then gave a single nod — small, direct, the kind that means I see you without making it larger than it needed to be.
Luken looked at the child on the woman's hip. The child looked back at him with the uncomplicated curiosity of someone too young to know what had almost happened. He exhaled quietly and kept walking.
An orc soldier leaned against a wall further down the street, his sword arm in a sling, his other hand resting on a blade he probably couldn't currently use. He had the look of someone who had fought past the point of being able to stop and was only now, reluctantly, allowing his body to have an opinion about it. When Valen passed he straightened — not to full attention, he wasn't capable of that right now — but enough. Enough to mean something. He looked at Valen with the level gaze of one fighter to another, someone who had seen what he could do and was marking it.
Valen met his eyes. Held them for a beat. Then gave him the nod of equals.
The orc soldier's jaw tightened slightly. He nodded back. Then looked away, back at his city, back at the work still left to do.
At the edge of the main street, outside a smithy that was already firing its forge again — the hammering audible before they turned the corner — an elder dwarf stood with a silver braid and arms folded. He was watching Tar.
Not with wariness. Not with the recalibration most people did when faced with Tar's dimensions. With the appraising look of a craftsman examining something built to a standard he respected. He watched the way Tar moved — the controlled economy of it, the deliberateness of someone who understood exactly how much space they took and made choices accordingly — and when Tar passed he gave a single slow nod. The nod of someone who recognised quality work, in whatever form it took.
Tar looked at him. His tail moved once, slowly.
The dwarf's expression didn't change. But something in it settled.
Kael, Na'reth, and Kalrith were waiting at the city's edge.
Kael was leaning against a cracked stone pillar, arms folded, his staff resting beside him. His eyes found Thal's when the group approached and something passed between them — quiet, settled, the particular understanding of two people who had said the hard things and were still standing.
He didn't say anything clever. That, more than anything, told Thal how much the previous night had meant.
Na'reth stood close by, her armor straight, her face composed in the way of someone who had decided that composure was what was needed now. She looked at each of them in turn — Nyra, Luken, Valen, Tar — and when her eyes reached Thal she held them there a moment longer than the others. Not searching. Making sure she had it properly before it became a memory.
"Take care of yourselves," she said. Her voice was steady. "All of you."
Kalrith stood slightly apart, her greatsword at her back, her bone tail moving in its slow unconscious drift.
She stopped beside Valen first.
Valen hadn't planned to stop. He was mid-turn, already oriented toward the road, when something made him pause — the particular reluctance of someone who has fought beside a person long enough to know that walking away without acknowledging it properly is a kind of discourtesy.
He turned back.
Kalrith was watching him. Arms crossed, her bone tail doing its slow unconscious drift — the one he'd learned meant she was at rest rather than ready, though with Kalrith the line between those two things was always narrow.
"You're going to do something stupid down there," she said. Not a question. Not entirely a criticism either.
"Probably," Valen said.
"At least you know it."
He looked at her for a moment. The gear from the industrial district was still in his pocket — he'd checked for it that morning without really thinking about why. "You should come," he said. Not seriously. Just to say it.
Kalrith's expression shifted — something between amusement and something more considered. "Someone has to stay and make sure this city doesn't fall apart the moment you lot leave." A beat. "Also I promised Mira I'd check on the orphanage."
Valen raised an eyebrow.
"Don't," Kalrith said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
He wasn't going to argue with that. He looked at her — at the streaks of dried grime her armor still carried, at the set of her shoulders that hadn't quite fully relaxed since the battle, at the way she held herself like someone who had put a great deal of things in a box marked later and was fully prepared to carry that box indefinitely.
"Yesterday," he said. "The wall. The civilian we pulled out."
Kalrith waited.
"You held that rubble for nearly a minute," he said. "I know how much that weighs. I watched your hands."
She said nothing for a moment. Her tail had gone still in the way it went still when she was paying attention to something she didn't want to show she was paying attention to.
"Point?" she said.
"No point," Valen said. "Just — I saw it. That's all."
Kalrith looked at him. The expression she made was the expression of someone who had been seen doing something they hadn't expected anyone to notice and wasn't sure yet whether that was comfortable or not. She held it for a moment. Then something in it settled — not softened, nothing about Kalrith softened, but settled. Like a thing that had been held at tension finding its correct position.
"You're not bad," she said finally. "For someone who fights with knives."
"Blades," Valen said.
"Whatever they are."
The faint edge of something that wasn't quite a smile crossed her face. He'd seen that expression twice in the last two days — once when the gear had almost made her laugh, and once when she'd looked away from her mother in the shadows between buildings — and both times it had been the same: completely unperformed, completely real, there for approximately one second before it was gone.
He reached into his pocket and held out the gear.
Kalrith looked at it. Then at him.
"Something worth keeping," he said. "You said you didn't know what it was."
"I said I didn't know what it was," Kalrith said. "I didn't say I wanted it."
"No," Valen agreed. "But you turned it over twice."
A pause. Her tail moved once.
She reached out and took it. Turned it over in her fingers — once, twice — and then closed her fist around it without looking at it again.
"Don't get killed," she said. The same words she'd say to Thal. But different — less weighted with history, more immediate. The particular version of that phrase that means I would find it inconvenient to not have you around.
"Working on it," Valen said.
He turned to go.
"Valen."
He looked back.
Kalrith was looking at the gear in her open palm now, not at him. Her bone tail had resumed its slow drift. "Next time you're passing through," she said, without looking up, "I want to see those blades properly. Not in a battle. Properly."
"You want to spar," Valen said.
"I want to see if you're actually as fast as you looked or if the dead were just slow."
"They were very slow," Valen said.
"Then we'll find out," Kalrith said. She closed her fist around the gear again and looked up. The almost-smile was back — one second, gone. "Go on then."
Valen rejoined the group and Na'reth said something quiet to Luken — something practical, something about the road south, supplies, the nearest settlements — and Luken listened and nodded and the conversation did what it needed to do. Nyra had moved slightly apart, her eyes on the horizon, already thinking ahead in the way she thought ahead when she didn't want to think about what she was leaving behind. Tar stood at the edge of the group with the stillness of someone conserving everything he had for what came next.
Kalrith watched all of this from where she stood. Then her eyes found Thal.
She stopped beside him. Not in front. Beside, the way she'd learned to stand when she wanted to talk to him without it looking like she wanted something.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
"I've been thinking about something since the battle," she said finally.
Thal waited.
"I watched you fight. Not the Harbinger — before that. In the city, when the lines were breaking." She paused. "You weren't using a weapon."
"No," Thal said.
"But your body was." Her tail moved slowly. "Every movement — the positioning, the weight shifts before contact — it was greatsword form. All of it. Except there was no sword." She looked at him. "That doesn't happen unless you've been doing it so long it stopped being technique and became something else entirely."
Thal said nothing.
"There's a term," she said. "From the old texts. Sword-Saint." She said it carefully, like a word that deserved its weight. "Not someone who's very good with a sword. Someone who's become it. Where the weapon and the body stop being separate things." A pause. "I always thought it was something warriors invented to have something to reach for." She looked at him steadily. "I stopped thinking that when I watched you."
Thal looked at her for a long moment. "It's not a gift," he said quietly. "It's what happens when you've done something long enough that you can't separate it from yourself anymore. It means I've been fighting for a very long time."
"I know," Kalrith said. Without pity. Just acknowledgment.
"The left shoulder," she said after a moment. "The drop in the guard. You said old weapon, different grip. But it's not just that." Her tail stilled. "Your whole form is built around something that isn't there anymore. Like your body is still making room for it."
Thal was quiet. "Yes," he said.
"What happened to it," she said.
He looked at the road south. "I put it down," he said. "A long time ago."
Kalrith waited. She could tell there was more to it than that.
"It's not that I can't," Thal said, after a moment. "It's that I won't." He paused, the words coming slowly, like something being uncovered rather than explained. "The sword was — it was the clearest version of what I am. What I'm capable of. Every war, every battle, every thing I couldn't stop — it was all in the blade. Every life it took." He was quiet for a moment. "Putting it down wasn't peace. It was a decision. A line I drew."
"But it's still there," Kalrith said. Not pushing. Just naming what she could see.
"It's always been there," Thal said. "It doesn't leave. It just — " he looked at his hands for a moment, then away, " — waits. The same way that shoulder waits. The body doesn't forget what it was built for." A long pause. "I don't miss the sword. But I carry it anyway. What it made me. What it cost. What I did with it." His voice was very quiet. "Those don't go away when you put the weapon down."
Kalrith said nothing for a moment. Then: "So you carry it without holding it."
"Yes," Thal said. Simply. Like she'd named it more precisely than he had.
She nodded slowly. Then: "When we trained — you didn't give me techniques. You gave me the thing underneath the techniques." She paused. "My weapons-master taught me the map. You taught me the territory. I didn't have words for it then. I do now."
Something moved through Thal's expression that he didn't entirely put away before she saw it.
"You'll get there," he said. "You're already most of the way."
"I know," she said. Matter-of-fact, not arrogant. "But I want to understand the rest. What it costs to get from mastery to — " she nodded toward him, " — that."
"Everything you think defines you," Thal said quietly. "And then something comes back that you didn't know you were missing. And you carry both."
Kalrith held that for a moment.
"When you come back," she said.
"When I come back," Thal said.
The sharp decisive nod. A door closing that she intended to open again.
She stepped back. And what was in her expression as she walked away wasn't just respect for a fighter. It was the expression of someone who has finally found the name for something they've been carrying for a long time.
Kael pushed himself off the pillar. He looked at Thal for a long moment — the usual performance entirely absent — and then reached out and gripped Thal's forearm the way warriors do. Brief. Firm. Final.
"When you fall," he said quietly, and there was something different in it now than there had been at the overlook — not a warning, not a wound, "make sure it counts for something."
Thal held his grip. "I always do," he said.
Kael released him. Stepped back. The faint tired smile returned.
They turned and walked back toward the city, the three of them. Kael didn't look back. That was the kindness in it.
Thal watched them go for a moment. Then he turned to the group.
Nyra. Luken. Valen. Tar.
No speech. No announcement. The road was ahead of them and they all knew it.
They walked.
The road south opened before them and they walked into it and the city fell behind them and somewhere in the streets still being rebuilt the work of survival continued as it always had — without ceremony, without pause, because the living had no choice but to keep going.
That was, in the end, what Thal had always understood about mortals.
They kept going.
It was the bravest thing he had ever seen anyone do.