![]() She only knew this as a place where a warm, soft, and laughing person had played with her and had giggled in glee as they rolled on the sweetly smelling grass. The child, Elise, was not of an age to understand the permanency of their loss. He had come here to find some hint of a memory of brighter days when there had been three of them, and they had gamboled happily across these same slopes. The pounding in the back of his skull began to ease after a time, and he sighed at the release. His hands hung limply over his knees, and his chest ached with the weight of his agony. His head throbbed as he reaped the rewards of his recent excesses, which a long sleepless night had done little to ease. The man tipped his head back to catch the warmth of the midday sun on his face and breathed deeply of the cool, fresh breezes that brought the brushy tang of heather to him from across the moors. On a blanket spread near his feet a girl of two or more plucked listlessly at the woolen hair of a doll. ![]() He was seated on a large, square-hewn block of stone that had tumbled from the jumbled ruins behind him. ![]() ![]() ![]() THE MAN WAS RELATIVELY YOUNG, perhaps five or so years past a score and ten, yet the lines of fatigue and recent deprivation were accentuated by the stubble of a beard that roughened his cheeks and chin and which seemed to age the handsome face. ![]()
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