[Ortus occupies himself with his tentative attempt to pet Rio, allowing her butting head to be his guide as to how to proceed. She does not feel as he feared she might, uncertain of what her skin is even made of. His gaze flicks up at the mention of her unkind fate, and is softer when it falls. Relentless sentiment. It sounds like a thing the Marshal Crux might have said, rigid with contempt. It, too, does not feel as he expects it to.

There is something admirable in the concept when Viktor says it, even if delivered with one of his slight, weary smiles. Relentless, a word more often used for pursuit and for conflict, as if sentiment was, in its own way, some amalgam of both.]

There were two hundred and two youth of the Ninth House, infants to nineteen years of age. After the flu, but two remained. Myself, and an infant, both spared the disease by circumstance.

[He expects his voice to quake, for tears to well up in him from sternum to the top of his head, dissolving into the kind of helpless, silent weeping he is accustomed to. His words are, instead, hushed and steady as footfalls in a tomb.]

I suppose they did not imagine such a thing could be forgotten. [That is not why the House fell silent, but there are secrets that are not his to let slip; secrets he keeps willingly, for those they would harm.] Or perhaps it was merely not spoken of in my presence, for what I signified.

[He runs his thumb gently over the arch of Rio's head, examining her dark eyes, their lovely and complex depths.]

Fate is often unkind to those who least deserve such a thing.