Ning looked around the small courtyard. The memorial had clearly been placed here deliberately, in a quiet corner of the city where few people would see it.
Perhaps it had been erected by the human governments as part of their formal condemnation of the attack, and then quietly forgotten once the war began and nobody wanted to be reminded of how it had started. There were no flowers, no offerings, and nobody else in the courtyard at all.
He looked at the memorial for a long while.
Then he noticed something at its base, half hidden among the weeds.
It was a single small object, a little metal sculpture no larger than his thumb, shaped crudely into the form of a humanoid figure. It was old and tarnished, but it had clearly been placed there deliberately, tucked carefully against the base of the pillar where it would not be disturbed.
Somebody, at some point, had come here and left it.
