A Quarter of Night

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Jolstraer
Posts: 388
Joined: Fri Nov 14, 2008 12:34 am
Location: Behind the business-end of Three Feet O'Steel

A Quarter of Night

Postby Jolstraer » Sun Dec 11, 2011 2:20 am

For a quarter of the night yet, she had not slept. The only sound of her waking was the slow and studious whisk of the stone against the blade, as she sat cooped up in the civilized confines of the apartment she had taken. She sat with her back against the far wall, head just below the window sill and with a heavy trunk between her and the door. The trunk itself was not hers - furnished by the lovely Crosses who lived and tended the shop downstairs. It was filled with the necessities of home, linens and bedclothes of modest but sturdy mending. The sound the trunk had made sliding along the floor must have been quite the racket, but neither of her keepers had minded in the least, or in the least had not admonished her.

And thus she sat, in smallclothes and a sleeveless shirt, watching the door and the walls nervously as she sharpened the sword that had once called her belly its scabbard. The noise of the city kept her awake; it was not a time of festival, or of parade or battle. It was simply the quiet hum and murmur of a city settling in for the night. The tall candle that flickered light about her room was one of very few still lit in Old Town, the shadows the better illumination for the current business conducted throughout. It...weighed on here, as surely as a stone across the shoulders, that omnipresent, living, breathing...thing that was the mob asleep.

Her pack was very neatly undone beside the trunk, however all of the things withdrawn for it were in close enough proximity as to be re-packed in a hurry. Her ink set was carefully shut and nestled atop a scant sheaf of papers, its contents a mix of prepared inks and powdered herbs. The leather scrip that lay next to it was packed carefully with dried herbs for use in salves and concoctions of necessity.

To this day her hands still shook when she opened it.

The place was stifling, even with the window open. Sweat made her smallclothes stick to her skin despite the cold air permeating the room. Maybe it was the candle, giving off so much heat in such a small place. Perhaps. That candle, sitting there and flickering its light over the walls, the furniture, the trunk, her pack, the book that sat there in its worn binding, the damned blade...

The book! Light, both grief and glory writhed within her at that thought. Her emotions were...frayed, as they had been for weeks now. The stone stopped its repentant path along the blade, set down by hand that was cold. Her eyes fell to the hand, and the faded ink that slithered around the wrist, and up.

Blade rested on knees, as she allowed her eyes to wander over names and places etched on her skin, burned onto her memory. Falkirk, brought down by her own hand when the sickness took him at Corin's Crossing. Andorhal, where the nightmare began for all. A song, its print woven in and around so many other names of things now turned to dust and ash. And there, scattered among them all were the puckered remains of self-wrought absolution that had not yielded fruit. Carved into the aging flesh were the Symbol of the Light, or the proud crest of Lordaeron, or three letters that caused her now such a well of grief.

Jol.

She had to let go. She had to push aside the faded facet that was a life she had long since been taken from, from a happiness and wholeness that could be mimicked but not returned. It was an enviable madness, the Light-blasted clutch of Hope. Hope that no matter all the wrongs in the Nether, all of the twists of fate and the mad cackles of irony, that in the end, peace would win out. Peace, and contentment.

"Sooch things're nae mean' fer mortal men," she uttered, the first sounds coming from a throat that had wailed itself raw mere hours before. Eyes that stung with lack of sleep and an abundance of use fluttered. No more tears fell - Light, could there be any left? The sword returned home to its sheath, one made of leather and bound in iron. It would finds its embrace in flesh soon enough. But not yet.

The book. Sword set aside for a time of need, her hands wrapped around the worn wood-and-leather covering that protected its internals as the man who had born it wore a shield - undaunted by time and as implacable as the mountain. She had held it and read its words and the faith held within, tracing fingertips over the added scribbles of a man who had stoicly showed no outward sign of faith - in fact, at times, an outward lack of faith - yet had born a deep and humbling strength in it.

A man who, as it was found out, gave every coin that ever crossed his fingertips to the poor and downtrodden, only keeping the few meager pieces it took to keep his amusement at bay. The man who had walked the streets of Old Town with the hunkering movement of a landslide and the baleful glare of a devil, but had on occasion taken the time to tumble and play with the children around the block as they acted out their own fanciful adventures in the shadow of the folk they saw as heroes.

A man who...a man who...a man who...She could have led herself on and on through the tales and the memories, bitterly clinging to what she did not want to feel. A man who...

Was dead.

And that was the fact she realized now. He was, as their people held hope, with his forefathers. With brothers he had fought long and hard beside, only to watch them fall, one by one. And there he would be, until Light's End, waiting.

Somehow, some way, she would reach him there. But not yet.
"I left my home where the dead never rose
But the streets of gold i've yet to find
And at the end of the day all you can do is pray
Without hope well you might as well be blind, yeah be blind
Tomorrow comes a day too soon"

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