I pick up the rose and I crush its petals going to myself wow this is an overwrought dramatic set up to a self-involved scene. These wankers are terrible and I have an entire people I am trying to represent... all they can really think about is filling heir pockets with more gold than they can carry. You can see the greed in their faces. ...Am I really so different? I want gold too but not for the same reasons. You see money can be exchanged for all sorts of services and not just goods...
I am not talking about a good time.
Good times seem very far away most of the time and like they are something for someone else. Someone else with the company of those whom they associate with as being their friends but would equally likely just as soon stab you in the back when fortune turns. Some friendship that is. It is a very shallow bond.
=== many years back ===
“Why am I treated so differently from the others?” The young boy had been upset again. “The other children in the village will not play with me. They say cat eyes go away, go play in the castle courtyard.”
The priest stroked his carefully shaved chin and thought.
“Do not go playing in the castle. They do mean you harm by saying such but these other children only do so through fear. They do not understand you.”
“They don’t?”
“Well, I won’t pretend to understand you perfectly well myself either but come inside the church and return to your studies. There are things in the Word of our ancients you can.”
“I’m sick of studying moarnekone! All I ever do is chores for the older priests and read scripture.”
“And what else, my acolyte?”
“And practice the psalms... joyfully.”
“...and?”
“...and prepare the meals from the donated foodstuffs that are for the poor folk in our village.”
The priest noted his disciple’s bruises and after the yellow eyed child went inside a change came over the old man. He seemed more
animated though it could have just been a trick of the moonlight and clingingly low hanging mists that particular dusk.
In the following weeks some of the children who had been bullying the cat eyes stopped coming around. There were also reports of pieces of young dismembered bodies found every few days... further away from the church in other neighborhoods and one very odd case of the brave who had been the largest of his peers in the bullying pack found in the street at dawn dead and entirely drained of blood. Something that *had* to be coIncidental and entirely unrelated.
Elders spoke of white fever and panthers in the forest and still other creatures being testy, however this is something they always did come fall and winter and was also not so unusual.
In time the rash of grisly maulings became a dim memory much like trapped miners in a collapsed mine or hunters being injured by razorbacks and wolves. A few more scars... It builds character.
We do not complain about the trials we are put through in this life. They are tests to prove our devotion toward Him. We must be thankful to Yutow for His many gifts He bestows upon us and His great sacrifice, perhaps the greatest gift of all.