Man, God, Stone
Samuel Minier
Five nights since his wife's murder. Four since he had taken to his knees before the statue.
Occasionally a breath would pulse through him, like ripples from a pebble's fall into a pond. Beyond this he had not moved. The pain that had ground at his knees, clawed through his spine, trembled his neck - it had slipped away sometime in the third night like a ghost. His aching had been hollowed out, ordered away by the statue's marbleized stare.
No pain. No peace. Nothing but the all-consuming gaze, and the legend. Kneel before His Carved Image, and you will be told what you cannot know.
No one had knelt in generations, but the village's grief for his wife had inspired a throng. At first. One by one though, agony and doubt teetered them back to their homes. Their anguish cooled to embarrassed sympathy for a half-mad widower who sat almost naked in the rain before a pretty piece of folklore. His fervent brother – the first
to join, the last to leave - now stalked through the common square with disordered menace and hoarse vengeance cries.
He knew of the town's pity, his brother's grandstanding. These things existed in the same way as did the pain – as entities, real unto themselves but quite distinct and distant from him. At best, he could briefly glimpse them across the canyons of reality now separating him from all other things.
All but one.
Vines had grown wild over the great crowning mane, the sheathed swords. His parched eyes traced, for the thousandth time, their path along the folds of chiseled robe gathering around hunched muscles, and the tree-trunk wrists ending in palms hovering eternally expectant over massive sword hilts.
Such is I, he thought. My hand will wait over my own sword even as the rain and the snow seek to rust us, even as the winds tear out my hair and the sun chars away my face. I will turn to stone, waiting for my sign –
The statue moved.
Even a half-blink would have lost the feat, but he was faithful, a rock of patience, and so as a sickle moon cast its wan light down, he saw a grinding right hand descend and close upon a stone hilt, and the left hand passively roll over to expose it's creeper-veined wrist.
This was all.
The awkward, clunking world fell back upon him – the cold night air, a multitude of aches greeting him like lost family. Still, these sensations could not penetrate the numbing vision before him. Such a subtle gesture, and yet it's meaning ...
This was his answer? What he had sought? His truth?
High above, great stone eyes unflinchingly surveyed all before them.
His exhalation cast doubt and compassion away. His chest tightened, his heart constricted. Hardened.
Then he drew his own sword and went in search of his left-handed brother.
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