Annotated Chapter 12 Page 19
Revealed at last: the outcome of Sparrow doing research on Beings while Patrick was also reading about mice.
The choice of the Mouse as the Being killed by Nazis is an obvious homage to Maus, the benchmark-setting, award-demolishing Holocaust graphic memoir.
There’s fanfiction about the Mouse Being, if you’re in the mood for some extra sad-but-good worldbuilding here.
Sparrow: The only record of a Being ever dying is from a Nazi experiment. The record of everything they tested on the poor thing is buried in some archive somewhere, but you can find this much online: It was kept without a Master.
Nobody was allowed to visit it alone. If anybody tried to make a Contract with it, the order was to shoot them instantly.
Given what we’ve seen happen to a Being whose Master won’t take her into fights or give her a whole lot of orders . . .
. . . what would happen if a Being was forced to spend years on end with no Master at all?
