Stone Circle Churchyard

Merrit frowned. "No one told me I had to do anything," but in watching the others the boy concluded that moving on was the norm - and that, in turn, made dwelling on his father's disappearance unacceptable... didn't it?

Arlette continued to speak, and he listened, slowly catching each word and turning them over in his head. He had been careful to steer clear of his mother in the days that followed Stark's departure, and he had felt a self-imposed distance with her ever since. Truthfully, he didn't know how she was doing, not beyond the face she wore when he simply passed her by. She looked fine, and more often than not he caught her scent tangled up with the familiar smell of @Greyback - something he didn't know how to feel about, nor what to think of.

"I didn't think of asking her," and even with Arlette's pointed questions, he wasn't sure he really wanted to. There were fractures in his foundation he couldn't fix himself, and the thought of expressing his weakness to his mother made him feel silly and weak. He lowered his gaze, frowned, said no more on this.

But he raised a brow at Arlette, surprised at her words that followed. Merrit had never counted his sister capable of anger - not when he remembered the storming fury that had propelled him toward the borders, and nearly carried him into the fray. Was that the kind of anger Arlette had felt? The thought made his stomach turn, and he wondered what she would do if he told her he had been angry, too - because he imagined his anger had been much different than whatever hers had been. He hadn't sought out ways to fix his fury, only ways to feed it, and though he had never quite reached the point of satiating the burn in his heart, he had come awfully close. And he hadn't told anyone this, not Arlette, not Keen, certainly not Valette - and neither had he told anyone that somewhere inside the flame still burned, unquenched and hungry, and he still fed it -

Maybe he did have something to hide.

"Learning," he interrupts his thoughts with an answer, though a bitter taste lingers on his tongue. "I like learning. About language, nature, culture," and he thinks of Tulimaq again, and he glances outward, toward the land beyond Easthollow, and wonders, again, where he is, where he has gone to, "and I'd like to learn more."