“— Everything in a person should be beautiful,” Alier mused, watching the corpse’s body disappear into the brambles. “Especially the brains… ” I just uttered a tiny gasp, covering my mouth with a lace handkerchief. The sun was shining. The brambles were fading. Bees buzzed. And only a thin, whitish wisp of smoke rising from the octocomb (octokoloser) suggested that not so long ago the local pastoral was not really pastoral at all…,”