He ran his fingertips along the length of the mark when she showed him. He didn't touch it directly, but next to it, from her shoulder all the way down to her hip. "You're lucky you survived a hit like that," he said quietly. He'd seen lesser swings kill bigger people, men and women alike. The Land Runners must have had better facilities and knowledge than he'd even guessed at. He let his hand linger at the small of her back before he withdrew, mindful of her personal space, and slowly shook his head. "I don't see why anyone in this town would look at you negatively. The more I even think about it, the more ridiculous it seems." He closed his eyes and frowned faintly. "Your entire family seems interesting. Brave in their own ways. They should be leaders, not scraping fringe-dwellers."<br/><br/>Carson felt sleep tugging at him, and he didn't do much to resist it. He might have said more, or tried to, but all that would have managed to come out would be a garbled mumble. As rest claimed him he slipped into dreams, hazy and half-formed, memories of the past blending with more recent thoughts. His father, taking a narrow sword to the stomach. His mother with a skull tattoo branded across her face. A river, winding and toxic, eating into the dirt like acid across steel. He found himself standing at the edge of a great precipice, staring down into the dark, alone--no, not alone, someone stood back to back with him, gazing into the shadows--out of the shadows came faces, though, faces without bodies. No. Skulls. Skulls without jaw bones. Skulls with flames that burned in the pits of their eyes, a sickly fire that held no warmth. He reached up to ward off the skulls and the fire leapt to his hand, burning his flesh as easily as it would paper. On instinct he reached for his hatchet and with a grunt brought it slamming down across his arm, cutting away the fire, a blinding spark of not-pain--<br/><br/>He woke up suddenly, moving from deep dream to full awareness over the span of perhaps half a second. He stayed where he was, unmoving, flexing each finger to ensure that both hands were present. Satisfied that he had not, in fact, been forced to remove his own burning limb, he rolled onto his back and sat up, lifting his hand to inspect it himself. The scrapes his heedless digging had brought on were a bit sore, but he wasn't on fire. What a bizarre dream, he thought to himself. The majority of it had already begun to fade, as such things tend to do. He ran a hand through his hair and got up entirely, walking on silent feet back to the living room to retrieve his belt and boots. The sun had barely begun to rise, but he still felt inclined to wash up after a dream like that.<br/><br/>He built the fire again and let it burn hot and slow while he retrieved a bucket of water from the lake and relieved himself. Once he'd heated the bucket over the flames, he took it to the side of the Wood House, where there were no windows, and went about wiping himself down with a washrag and small pinches of powdered soap. He stripped nude and cleaned everything he could, then dumped the rest of the water over himself to rinse. He pulled his clothes back on, including a clean shirt, and went to sit next to the fire with a small, sharp knife to shave away the stubble he'd accrued. By then the sun was rising in full, and the troubling dream was no more than memories.