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That kind of response was embarrassing, and you wanted to do nothing more than put it behind you. But when she roused you from sleep the next day, and the day after that, you recoiled again. If anything, you were getting worse, not better. On the fourth day, she did not attempt to rouse you, and as you dressed yourself for the day, you tried to figure out why you were so thoroughly unmanned by the sight of those eyes. You had seen depictions of Strangers and Witches since you were a child, all of them with the blanked eyes, and they had never bothered you as they bothered other children. One of the reasons that you had been pushed towards joining the Inquisition in the first place was because it was obvious to the Testers that you had the nerve for it. And within a month of becoming a Half-Brother, you wound up participating in a Hunt that bagged a Stranger – one that was far enough gone that he was no longer able to speak. Seeing those glowing, beaming eyes was … unsettling to be sure, and afterwards, there had been some nightmares, but the eyes never played into those. In fact, if you remember, you never saw that Stranger in your nightmares – you just heard him.
All of those early nightmares played out similarly. You were in a house, a large house, all by yourself. It looked the interior of the house was light by moonlight, but all of the windows were shuttered up tight. You wanted to get out, but every door you went through would lead to another room – and the times that you tried to go back into a room that you left, you would find that there was a locked door behind you, even when there had been no door between the rooms just a moment before. And off in the distance, you could hear that Stranger. He was trapped in here as well, and it was only a matter of time before one of you ran into the other, trying to get out. Sometimes it sounded like he was a floor above you or below you, other times, it sounded as if he was right in the room with you. But no matter what, you never saw him.
Those nightmares eventually passed, and once you were sent to Nauretania, where you found that tracking and disposing of Strangers was preferable to your other responsibilities there, no new nightmares were forthcoming. You really didn’t need any though, as your waking hours were nightmarish enough. Once a Stranger has progressed past the point where curative custody could fix them, Strangers as basically just animals. No sense of right or wrong, or of honor, or of sportsmanship. If they are in a Frenzy, they will destroy just about everything they can in their territory. If they have a bout of Growth Hunger, then they will leave their territory, looking for things with a compatible Form to eat. Similarly, if they are in a Rut, then they will search for things with a compatible Form to breed with. As terrible as these behaviors might be, they are mindless, reflexive. Nothing more to them can be ascribed.
