Horseriver leans his forehead against Jedao's a second, an echo of the moment of connection, stars fill the dark sky, seen from a raft in the middle of the lake. Years before he understood loneliness.

"I remember the first time I woke in the body of a child. Holytree was an abandoned was an abandoned waste by then..." The twisted trees, knotted with cysts from which ooze sap like blood; the trees, glorious above and around, the heart of the world beating and joy from that life (both are there, he doesn't know which cuts deepest).

He blinks, the room is full of light around them. "By then, every one who had been there was dead, by battle or accident or age - those few who had escaped the massacre. Save one." The familiar ironic twist to the words. "The resistance went ill, there were many deaths in quick succession, and then I found myself - all of my selves - in one far too young to fight. There was no experience, no history, to hold a self against my mind." He'd ate him and he doesn't think anything's left. "They thought me mad... they couldn't begin to fathom the truth to that." He looks toward the wall. "They locked him away, I spent most of that life in darkness. The next death - perhaps it was the break in the continuity of faces, perhaps the time simply forced me to realize what it was to be alone."