Stone Circle I have nothing left to prove, 'cause I have nothing left to lose

Backdated to the 18th or so :)

He travelled to Easthollow a broken man, yet he forbade his pain from surfacing. No one could know, and his measures were preventative; the raven sought to compose himself long before his eyes even graced the Stone Circle, so that when he finally crossed into the familiar, his inner wounds lay bound up in the pawsteps behind him, and he carried himself as proper and as put together as ever into the uncertainty that awaited him here, now that he returned with the heavy news of Keen.

Merrit still hadn't fully processed the reality of coming home without her - that she wasn't coming home at all, and when he made the effort to rally his mother and Arlette, those who would care the most, his breath sizzled out in a weary sigh. Later. For now, he took to roaming higher, toward the Stone Circle, in the quiet hour the night had to offer.

An ethereal glow flooded the horizon, pink and purple twilight against the overcast sky. They cast the stones in brilliant light, and Merrit wandered among them. These rocks, they did not mean much to him, they never had, yet tonight he found himself wanting their company. They did not ask him questions he didn't wish to answer, and they allowed him to ask his own.

He stopped before the stone he knew to be his father's, and he supposed this stone was Keen's as well. Cracked and broken, there were no bodies here, nothing to show for the ones this stone remembered except for the small trail of rocks which led away from the Circle into the vast unknown, a beacon to lead their lost ones home. Yet he knew these stones would hardly bring his family back, and with thoughts of his father and now of Keen so heavy on his mind, he eased to his haunches and simply let the questions fill him.