"Kren": Part Three (A Short Interlude)

 

Kren sat there for nearly half an hour, simply breathing, taking a sip now and then, cooling off. A thin line of sunlight intruding through the shuttered western window crept along the floor. He watched it with dull eyes until it reached the edge of the flagstone undergirding the threshold. It looked like a long pointing finger. He shook his head angrily and stood up.

“Fiddle-dee, fiddle-da,” he began. “The gold day is ending …”  

His voice tapered away into silence. He shook his head again, as if to clear it from cobwebs, and looked around the room wildly. The walls seemed to be pressing in around him like the sides of a grave. The Unrest, which had been growing inside him with the lengthening of autumn, and which he had sought to quell with the hard work of the fields, was still a stifling weight in his gut, right under his heart.

He stood a moment, wagging his heavy head like a stymied goat, beard sweeping to and fro across his chest, eyes squeezed shut. Then with a coughing snarl he sprang forward, seized his still half-drenched shirt where it hung, and slung it over his head as he stomped forward. He slammed the door after him with a bang that shook the dust from the rafters. In the empty room, the line of sunlight crept forward a little more.

[I apologize; I meant to write more, and I know where I'm headed, but the past few days have been draining. I don't know if it's my blood sugar or having the Rottweilers in the house or the change in weather or the ennui that sets in at the end of a month, but my energy has been really low. I didn't even have the power to truly express my admiration for the figure my brother John had made of Roth, a Morg from Goldfire. Above is a picture of the sculpt at an earlier stage. I hope he will not mind me showing it.]