Hallen shakes her head, seeming spent, her voice cracking and dry from the tears.  "Alright."  She stands up, turns to face the goblin down.  "Go on, then."  She glares at Quinta too.  "Just end me.  I have nothing left."<br/><br/>She looks at Fiera and Alphonse now, as if in her mind she's split the party in two-- on one hand, the child of war and the savage, as different in guise and upbringing as night is to day, yet still so keen to spill blood.  On the other, a nomad halfling and an elven crafter, their own history so unlike her own.<br/><br/>"I lost my husband twice already... once to that--<i>thing</i>-- and drink and rage.  I've lost him again to a monster I brought to his door.  Seventeen years of marriage..." she says, her mouth tightening once more at a twinge of memory, "four children.  Cahal was to be married in the spring himself."  She shakes her head now, refusing to yield to the sorrow again.<br/><br/>"I go to the heavy cloth*," she says, "one way or the other."  She begins walking, a path askew from the road into the farm, where the black sand shows in bare patches among stray sea-oats and creeping palmetto scrub.  Off in the distance stand a few banyan trees and several skeletal pines litter the open ground, and then a mile farther is nothing but a lush sprawl of mangrove, palm, blackgum and water-ash... the swampy lowland jungle known as 'The Deep".<br/><br/>The four of them have time to<br/><br/>*A common name for the garb of nuns and monks, though culturally may be a reference to burial at sea.