1. “No one leaves these woods alive.”
“I know,” he said, unfazed. “I wasn’t planning on leaving.”
2. Children only have two kinds of silence: Asleep and Up To Something.
3. There are no true pets here, every animal works to a specific purpose as decreed in the holy writ. Every spring those that fail the tests are fed to those that don’t and by this tempering, the strength of the whole improves. The War made them weak, but the Word will make them strong again.
4. She was fine until the ghosts started following her to work.
5. That isn’t how the story ends, but he’s told it often enough to know that no one wants to hear the truth. So he tells them lies and they applaud and buy him supper and the dead go unavenged.
~*~*~*~