Together we sat round the table. The feast was upon us. Laughing and talking, spurred by the drink to converse with our neighbours, we divulged ever more of our past. Soon the gifts would come, and they would come in mountains, and then would begin the frenzy. All looked forward with expectation. All except for one. He sat there quite alone amidst the revelry and sipped his wine more slowly then the others. He spoke when spoken to, not to be rude, but he did not join in with rapacious stories of his own. He stayed still while the others ran.

And he wondered to himself how it could be that he had come upon these others, and whether their ways and his could ever be reconciled.

He doubted it.

And that was very well, for if anything he was becoming more distant, so that in years past he may have taken part in the orgy, but not now. Now it was too much to task, too foreign to accept, and he could not have beared to join in. He knew that soon he would excuse himself, and his life would be changed.

It was strength, and he had always wished for it, but now that it was here it did not bring any joy. It brought nothing at all. The irony was that the source of this triumph was the same as that which would mute such emotion and so keep him from enjoying his moment of victory.

Thus it was that while trying to endure the increasingly less polite conversation, the lechorous advance, that he felt nothing, only a sterile sense of necessity. He would soon leave. And it would all be over. There was no other choice to make.

- posted by Sigurd12/11/2004 08:52:00 PM