A person can get used to just about anything if it happens slow enough. — Robert Olmstead

It was in these wounded days the beginning of the man he would grow to be. He bore his pain and endured his wound as if a sign he too had been blooded by the madness that’d taken ahold of the land. He no longer shied from people, from the lone riders, from the reenslaved herded South. He no longer feared their presence on the roads and his conversion was believable to him. He had lived and did not die. He was breathing. Still, it was only the beginning and he was not old enough to know these changes, did not even know enough to think this way yet.

He had experienced the horror that leaves you calm and unafraid, but for her something inside was broken and he did not know if it could be mended. Her life, her horror, he could not tell.

Though he had never smelled the death of men before, he knew the smell as if it were a knowledge born into him.