It had been Ink who had drawn out the original tree that represented Czar in their colors. That sturdy trunk with many roots. The seventeen branches represented the survivors. In the original drawing there had been eighteen branches. The crowd were the children they had tried to save--Steele has tried to save. The skulls rolling in the roots represented the men and women they had killed in order to survive--or the ones they killed to exact vengeance for those children who had never left their prison.