A tongue of flame extended, licking the memory of hands, enveloping thoughts and blowing them to dust. The smoldering remnants of a house, bricks and blackened posts curling in on the corpse of a humble carpenter’s home, a spider curled up upon itself.
It was the home of a 53-year-old human male, Kenith Orchards. He was once a bright and boisterous youth; ever ready to laugh and drink. But life began weighed on him I think, not necessarily what had happened but the emptiness of it all. He never married, to self-assured and flighty—I think—to stick to an e'lehondren, a life bonded, a wife. His drinking had changed sometime around his 34 year, April I think. He no longer raised his cup to be social but sorrowful, lonely, and quiet. But even with his life, an unfinished story, there were his bones—black in ash—cruelly cut by a soldier’s sword.
He deserved better than to be thrown to the dogs, he may have not been a good man, but he was never evil . . . it is perhaps pointless to think of now, however. His agony will be forgotten by those who were around him, but I took solace in that I would remember, and some part of the world will not forget; he has finished his race. My marathon is still ever beginning.
I rocked off my knees and brushed off the ash, soot, and embers, I stared into that night wondering why it is I bother. I knew and know that answer all too easily: to cease to care is to cease to live, a problem when you’re like me, and fail to die. I made my way down the well-torn trail through the high grass, the occasional shrub or stump always broke up the monotony.
They used to say the grass once grew as high as the trees. The children would all gather around to ask me if it was true, I can still hear my voice echo back to them with laughter hidden behind my eyes, "No, the trees were taller then."
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With nothing but the crackling flame, and quiet mid-day breeze carrying over sparks and ash—the remnants of the small township—I doubted I would hear those words cheerfully spoken anytime soon.
I broke off onto the main road and turned right on a well-remembered route, past what was left of Agatha’s old home and the loom that was ever-spinning there not even 70 years past. Behind the ancient willow, where the young had had their trysts hidden beneath its boughs and just to the right of the rock little Hagiar had once proudly pronounced his own. I shook away the memories and slid aside the sheet and beads in the door way on my final visit of what I still call home.
What once was small burrow had been extended for rooms outside the hill, the original cave now put aside and painfully forgotten, a room long since locked-off in the hill. My eyes began to wet as I moved the locks to that forsaken room aside, one by one, click, snick, chunk, click, snick, chunk, squeal, chunk, click, snick, chunk, and I arduously pulled away that last lock and entered a room that was sparsely decorated. I remember what was there, left exactly where everything had been left to lay, deteriorating over the 40 years of abandonment. The room of someone who loved me, who knew me, and now knew no more. Stiffly walking over rugs mostly rotted away on cold stone, feeling the eyes of lost memories watching me, I picked up the portrait of my long dead e'lehondren and left as swiftly as I could, bolting a single note to the hard oak, I slowly closed the door, and with shuddering breaths verging on sobs, looked up and force myself onward. Beginning to breath evenly, I took some alchemist fire not yet lit and spread on my house’s wooden frame. There is nothing left here now, nothing to keep me. A sharp strike to flint and steel and the powder trail leapt to work, burning all but the remembrance of my beautiful beloved away. The flames flowed over what I had the pleasure of calling for 217 years, a home.
It was cruel that that day was bright and gay, even as a massacre—pain and suffering—had spread over those plains. With no-where to walk, but a need to run, I had left