[ Xenk nods, gaze distant despite his best efforts. Edgin is clearly going through his own thing here. His wife dead, his child saved -- this was not a memory from his current life, but the old one. If that truly was the case. Xenk cannot say.

But Thay feels important the way the Gold Court feels important. A part of him he could never remove, for all that the memory claws cruelly at his psyche with pain he had never experienced before. For all his toils in his life, the tests and the difficulty that came with growing up under Szass Tam—his father's tutelage, it had never felt like this.

It was different. No less horrifying, to an outsider, but to Xenk, this had been all he knew. But now... ]

I ran.

[ The words fall from his lips as though drawn from him with a scalpel, like he's pulling on an open wound that bleeds freely even with his extended life. The fear he felt, the desperation... it was unlike anything he'd ever felt. His forehead burns where the mark feels almost recent, but he simply grimaces and keeps going, believing it to be a simple headache. ]

I ran for my life, and watched countless others die around me. Eventually it seems, the monsters ceased chasing me... but the memory was unclear as to how I survived.