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Once night came, I was lost in my writings and remembrances, and so my lust for justice faded.

There was a time when I would have ripped his entrails out through his navel for less.

There was a time, indeed, when the mere sight of me would have sent him running home to his mother with shit in his deerskin breeches.

Sabian Alth, the village tomfool. I never thought it would come to this.

Once, I talked to God.

Not praying, no...I never had much of a stomach for it. My conversation was face to face, and I realized I knew him far better than I ever imagined.

But first things first. To understand what has become of me and why my every breath is filled with regret and dogged fatigue, we must go back to my mum, with her determination and pathetic resolve to be my shelter in the storm of life. I must bear down and remember the hovel we called home and the endless night of the city in which it lay. I must describe the last day I ever saw her.



The sun never came out in Gramat. That was a given, from as far back as anyone could remember. Some of the cloisters said that the city was cursed, but you didn't need to be a clergyman or worship a deity for that little bit of information to be painfully obvious. The place stank of rage and depreciation. There were riots in the streets, frozen corpses piled like potatoes in alleys, and screams of levity, pleasure, and agony echoing nonstop through the piss-ridden dirt tracks and finely cobbled avenues at every junction.

I sat at the one window our home allowed, and watched the clouds that never moved and never lightened. There was only dark, billowing gray, promising rain and ice and snow.

In the street I glimpsed movements beneath a swaddled mass of blankets and canvas sacks. There was a spike of some sort protruding from the jumbled pile, and a pool of blood slowly spread out in a pattern that my young mind found both intriguing and alarming; it was iridescent and endless in the depth of its color, but it widened so quickly that I knew death was surely a singular heartbeat away.

A crone, an old woman resigned to her place as a social pariah, died silently in the middle of the city with no one to mourn her.
It's a silly riddle, to think of how something as trivial as sunlight can affect an emotional clime, how an unending barrage of gloomy overcast can alter the way in which someone perceives their gift of life. I've heard of mariners who go mad after too many months at sea, or miners who, deprived of the restorative powers of the land above, turn on one another and commit violence. Violence by its nature is a reflection of hidden passions and overt emotions. Could it be that the reason the citizens of the finest cesspool in the world killed each other in such numbers had everything to do with a repressed desire to simply see the sun? Given a few years, I would have thought deeply about such a subject. As it was, the rain and the pall of depressing dirty sky were all I had ever seen, and so the thought of some elusive beautiful orb lifting away the haze of dull rage that had seized the city never even entered my head.

There is something, however, about seeing death at a young age that will change you.