[Perhaps sitting down with someone, with another harbinger, whose despair and misery is just as wretched as his own, is not the best way for Liem to distract himself from his own predicament. As he takes John's invitation and settles carefully next to him, the tenor of the emotions rolling off of him mingle so freely with Liem's that he struggles to tell where his own black feelings end and John's begin. The distraction hardly seems worth the cost.

And yet, how could he leave the other man be, expecting him to weather his misery in solitude, when the extent of it is, to Liem of all people, so plainly obvious? He cannot. Even though John is no ally of his, he cannot turn a blind eye to the suffering before him, not when he feels it so keenly.]

I am weary of trials like this one.

[He observes it with a sigh, leaning back against the lumpy root wall behind him. For him, it is distressingly like the time he'd spent below the Regent's citadel, suffering on the floor as he fought to fend off the despair crawling through his body. That the experience is somehow similar for John despite their different allegiances is most strange, and not especially comforting.]

I'd thought my conviction steady — and yours too, for how swiftly you made your own choice. And yet, the Oracle demands its struggle.