I never understood the clerics’ obsession with introspection, nor the crackpot notion that one’s spirit could be laid bare by an ink-stained page and an honest hand. Still, when the girl with the sun-bleached hair and the cross-stitched tabard told me hers had healed by writing the truth in the margins, I agreed. It was out of boredom, mostly, and the hope that her advice might quiet the shivers that come to me each time the frigid winds whisper my name.
So here it is, sun-dappled and mute: my ledger of days. I write because she asked, and because I am running out of ways to fill my evenings that do not taste of regret. Maybe there is nobility in such candor. Maybe there is only rot, fermented and sealed tight behind my teeth.
What do I say to the empty page except that I survived another sunrise? Not much of particular note. I managed to “requisition” a homestead of my own a few moons ago, wrested from a sickly man whose protest carried no more strength than his frame. I will not incriminate myself in my own musings; we will say only that he was as ramshackle and worn as the shack I procured. I doubt any will toss a fuss.
The building itself is not too bad, if one can disregard any claim to structural integrity. The roof is a suggestion more than a reality. Collapsed beams. Massive boulders thrust through from above, as if the mountain itself were reclaiming the space by force. I have wedged planks, stacked stone, even lashed an old sail across the northern gap, but each dawn finds the draft undiminished and my bones just as brittle from the cold as they were the night before. Sometimes I hear mice nesting in the thatch overhead, or the skitter of something less innocent through the other assorted wreckage.
The previous owner left behind a collection of liquors in various stages of evaporation. I have sampled all but the most suspect among them. Several bottles I keep on display, for the aesthetic of it, as if ordering my vices in a neat row might trick the gods into believing I intend to master them. Despite it all, it is mine now, and no one in their right mind would be in much hurry to evict me. I suppose that makes me a squatter with delusions of gentry, but a man’s home is his mausoleum, after all.
Evening now. The ink sits sluggish in the bottle, the kind that leaves greasy smears on my fingers and blots in the margins. A windstorm rattles the loose stones somewhere along the southern face of the hut. The logs protest each gust, groaning like a dying ox, and I find comfort in the old bastard’s complaints. A silent house would mean something worse had taken root.
I light the lantern left behind, expecting the wick to hiss and die as it always does. It catches this time, and the walls flicker into an amber mimicry of warmth. It reminds me of the old cave systems in the Alterac Mountains where we once sought refuge. Moss clung to the stone in filmy layers, sapping warmth from your very step, and every echo was a dare. I used to love that sense — the hunger of the mountain, the way the darkness threatened to draw the marrow straight out of your bones. It is a stupid thing to miss, but of the thousand faces I have warred against, none ever leered so close as the memory of my own silhouette painted on a tunnel wall by torchlight.
It is possible, I think, to grow addicted to fear. To the purity of it. The way it drowns every other voice.
That is what I tell myself, anyhow, when the wind keeps me from sleep and my hands shake too hard to pour. Reflecting on the past, penning my thoughts to parchment, knowing tomorrow will bring precisely the same — all of it is just an exercise in futility.