(Scars do not appear to be cause of death –shock ... - Bad Request

then he collapsed. The life ran out of him and into mine. As he fell to the
black stones a crawling sensation ran up the back of my skull. I shivered, and
knew the incarnation was no more. There was no storm of memory, no
torrent of images. He yielded, and I drank him in with no difficulty.
"Farewell..." I murmured.
I sat down, and opened my pack.
Chapter 115
As I held up the sphere up this time and examined it, the memories of the
first of my incarnations stirred within me. It wasn't an insistent or driving
force - it was calm, like the thoughts of a man walking across a great
distance to speak to a friend he hadn't seen in ages.
His presence in my mind was a comfort, and through the vague fog of his
memories the sphere seemed to now stand in a different light - not ugly, or
hideous, but as something precious, like a newborn child. The sphere was
the repository of my last moments, before I had met Ravel on the Gray
Waste and asked the impossible of her.
I now knew why I asked her. And I now knew that all I needed to do was
touch the surface of the sphere with both hands and feel regret, and the
stone would open itself to me...
I clasped the stone, and allowed the regrets to well up.
The sphere wrinkled in my hands, its skin peeling away into tears and
turning into a rain of bronze that encircled me. With each droplet, each
fragment that entered my body, a new memory stirred: a lost love, a
forgotten pain, an ache of loss. With them came the great pressure of
regret: regret of careless actions, the regret of suffering, regret of war,
regret of death.
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