[That - is actually, and suddenly, a new perspective. Beckett blinks, silent for a long moment - a tense and brittle silence that speaks of his surprise, the sometimes still confusing feeling of convictions of decades and centuries becoming however slightly unhinged. Much about his perceptions of reality has been altered in the last weeks, months, the last year since the onset of Gehenna, but this is a different stone being turned. He's always thought himself a creature of more than reasonable-knowledge. To be challenged on it so deeply is... possibly a little like being challenged on the nature of the sun and moon.]

I've never... [It is not easy for Beckett of the Mnemosyne to admit that he has never thought of something.] We speak of Man and Beast at war within our nature, but I don't think we have ever questioned the meaning of Man. I don't know if this is an echo, or some shell, or - I don't know. [He does know. Something is still fighting inside him, has never stopped fighting. Something has kept him from letting the beast take his mind even when the beast had been the only part of him that still wanted to live.]

But the game - the Jyhad wasn't about ambition, not truly. For some, maybe, but for most it was simply the only way we knew how to exist. Others have set schemes in place before us, and we danced to the tune they had left behind, or still on strings we couldn't see. We were... paralyzed. Stuck in the pattern.