October

Issue 37

    Raining again. Cold, drenching rain. It was a winter rain that drummed upon the roof with a soft roar, and seethed outside the walls in torrents that reminded one of glittering silver teeth. Inside the ancient, partially unsound room, the feeble fire struggled with the shadows cast by the rain clouds. It might have seemed an equally matched struggle, save for the fact that the rain was strong, the fire more tremulous. An obvious distinction to those observing both.
    It was Sir Reycott who sat, more or less sprawled, in that room. The room was awkwardly attached to the ramshackle inn of that village, which hardly deserved to be described as one. There may have been noise and chaos in it then, but where Reycott sat it was quiet.
    No. It wasn't quiet. There was the old man off in the corner, the one with dirty hair—known by all, having lived in that village all his life. And he was droning, as usual. He did so incessantly. It was something he never tired of doing, even when nobody listened; but Reycott, knight of the Order of Soccrest, was his preferred victim. He told him what to do; what he should not have done—what was wrong with everything; what should be done. No scrap of gossip was safe from him.
    It had come to the point where, after so many years of patiently enduring it, Reycott did not even notice or hear the old man anymore. In this kind of silence, then, which built walls around him, the knight was enclosed, and lost in valleys of thought.
    Knight? Or rather what was left of one? The dozen other knights who served under him in this branch of the order had fallen away from their oaths, himself included, though he knew of and thought of it not. They were slovenly...gluttonous...corrupted with laziness...excessive in cursing and misuse of beer. Yet they did no truly serious harm to anyone but themselves.