Hanna's rescue of Kjell

Hanna’s rescue of Kjell is a life-saving act defined by an unbearable cost: Hanna saved her son by ending his life. The narrative gives the choice little procedural detail, instead revealing its lasting weight through her guilt, her sleepwalking plea for forgiveness, and Rozurial’s response to her distress.

The Choice and Its Context

Before this episode, Hanna had helped Camille D’Artigo escape Hyto’s lair. She tended Camille’s wounds and helped her cope with what the dragon had done to her during the torture sessions. Camille later told Rozurial and the others that Hanna had also saved her own son by ending his life. The account describes this as a choice for which there had been no other option, while making clear that its necessity did not spare Hanna the pain of remembering it.

Guilt Returns in Sleep

The consequences surface when Hanna sleepwalks through the studio with its front door wide open. Unaware of Rozurial, she paces blindly and murmurs an appeal to Kjell to forgive her and understand why she acted as she did. Her tearful, strained expression makes the guilt legible even before Rozurial understands her words. He recognizes that regret has driven her from bed into a waking dream: the past is not being recounted calmly but returning involuntarily, in speech and movement.

Rozurial responds without waking or startling her. He lowers his blade, removes his duster, approaches quietly, and puts an arm around her shoulders. She settles at his touch; he leads her to his room and tucks her into bed, where she falls into a deep sleep. That night, he stays beside her holding her hand. The scene shifts attention from the terrible act itself to the care that follows its return in memory.

Rozurial as Witness

Rozurial understands Hanna’s distress through what Camille previously shared, but his compassion is also shaped by his own history. On waking, he sometimes needs a moment to recognize himself and recall the centuries that have made him who he is. His dreams return either to childhood, before Dredge destroyed his family, or to the loving marriage he had with Fraale. He remembers becoming an incubus and curses Zeus and Hera. His repeated return to loss gives him a point of connection with Hanna rather than a solution to her guilt.

As he sits with her, Rozurial sees that she has lost her husband, children, and home, and has followed her conscience to a land far from where she began. He recognizes a likeness between them: both have lost those they loved and carry memories of torture and family death. His response does not erase Hanna’s choice or absolve her on Kjell’s behalf; it offers presence and tenderness to someone whose remorse has left her alone with the past.

Trauma Beyond the Act

The story places Hanna’s sleepwalking alongside other returns of painful memory without making them consequences of her decision. Elsewhere, Delilah D’Artigo passes the place where Hyto captured her and feels unwelcome memories rise. Smoky and the men have cut down the trees Hyto’s father blasted and planted rose bushes in their place; the idea was Trillian’s, an attempt to replace bad memories with something prettier. At first the change does not comfort Delilah, but the roses’ spicy scent makes her pause, close her eyes, and breathe before she continues toward Birchwater Pond calmer. The contrast distinguishes Hanna’s unresolved guilt from a landscape altered in the hope of easing remembrance, while emphasizing how the aftermath of violence persists in both bodies and places.