It had begun not long after he had learned that she had no procrustus. Tikan, who hardly knew Sielle or her history, and whose sleeves were ever streaked with his heart’s blood, had started taking her as a blank canvas on which to project his own idea of her. And this idea was, insidiously, an abstraction he made out of her. To him, she was becoming the living symbol of his cause. Despite her flesh and her mind and words—rather, due to these—he began seeing her as a mere ideal of humanity, a fleshless world-soul containing in her the essences of each living person. A spirited, thinking person
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