She rebuffs the gentle prompting, and he is briefly angry. Or, perhaps not briefly; he is deeply, simmeringly, persistently angry, but he is briefly less certain he wants to keep a handle on it. Something very like impatience flickers in his face, an edge to the distance.

The pressure is still building. He increasingly does not care for this game.

"He is," he agrees, present-tense for reasons he does not care to examine. A saint is eternal; call it an honor for the dignified dead.

He does not look at Augustine's corrupted face. But the pull towards it is there in his mind, like magnetism.

"Perhaps it's a slideshow of our significant dead," he says, because it's far gentler than his other theory. "But towards what understanding, I couldn't say."