Mayerling gives a small inclination of his head in recognition of the personal struggle that must have entailed. Mayerling's philosophical musings, about vampires and himself as part of them, makes the idea a familiar one, if still a sad one. What shall be the testament and legacy of a whole species? He can only hope for more than violence and bloodshed and horrors of the night, yet that is far from their grasp and beyond his control, beyond any one person's control. Even, he suspects, the Sacred Ancestor's.

"Our lives here diverge from them at home," Mayerling says, "It opens a panoply of existences even beyond Trench. One future may be known but not all of them." Not lives in Trench, not lives anywhere else someone may go besides Trench and their home. "We can rest, the future remaining unknowable in its totality."