Grey Morning

The cold, hard blackness of the night draped the landscape in funeral colors. The mottled darkness of the very air cast all in formless, colorless black.

The world seemed silent, quiet, dead. There was no sound. There were no crickets chirping in the night, no animals of the forest going about their business in the thick undergrowth. It was as if the world had stopped, and it waited for the dawn. For there was an air of expectation, a feeling that the quiet would soon be broken- shattered by the shouts of foreign hordes as they stormed the lines of defenders.

Daniel stood hunched beneath his cloak for warmth. His legs ached from six days of marching, fighting, and then marching again. No matter how he stood, he could not ease the pain of his legs. He leaned against his spear, stood on one leg, then the other, no matter. And the ground was wet. It was sodden with three days of incessant rain that made the marches all that much more grueling. But there would be no more marching, no more trudging through mud that swallowed his legs almost to the knees. No more fighting the weariness and fatigue that competed with the growing fear that they could never march fast enough to escape the horror that followed.

He peered out from his place. His eyes strained to penetrate the blackness before him, but to no avail. He might as well have worn a thick wool hood over his eyes. There was simply no light. The moon wandered far above the heavy clouds that blanketed the lands in darkness.

Daniel’s thoughts turned away from the formless field before him and back to that night. It seemed so long ago, when he last sat at his home in the North reading his beloved books by the light of a single candle that sat in a simple wooden stand on his desk. He sat there often in days past, reading, writing, and thinking. It was his escape, his better place, his refuge.

Now, here in the south, he was soaked to the bone, and the chill simply would not leave his bones. He had no dry cloaks to pull on, no new boots to wear- no dry blanket to escape the cold. Even the floor of his tent was submerged in several inches of creeping, black mud.

Here in the open air, despite the cold, he found some solace from the bitter realities that plagued his world. He stood beneath the bare arms of an ancient tree, his vision cut off by the impenetrable darkness before him, and he could imagine he was anywhere. He thought often of his manor in the North. He imagined he was back there, looking over the wide fields during the black of night rather than here in the south. He closed his eyes, and the cold was suddenly distant, less biting. He thought of the warm, merry fire of his study, and the cold in his feet was a little less.

But opening his eyes again, it seemed the world was a little less formless, a little less mottled. He could see now the edge of the camp. He could just barely make out the shape of trees around him, and the shape of silent men sleeping or standing nearby. None of them moved. They sat huddled under soaked rags around what would have been campfires if anyone had been able to find the first piece of dry kindling. They were gray figures, scarcely recognizable in the darkness, and less so because of their lack of motion. They could have been carved in stone. They were cold, wet, bedraggled, and beaten.