Castle walls rise out of the darkness, out of the silent charcoal curtain that is the dawn. They are pitted and forlorn, no longer the bastions of protection and glory that they were. Under my fingers the stone is more rough than the callused skin of an old man and it leaves my skin cold, drawing dampness into my bones. It stretches away, disappearing into the black in every direction. The light is barely there, like a feeling that's difficult to get a grasp on. There is a temptation to hunker down here, to stow myself behind a narrow window and peek into the world as it appears with the details of a finished canvas. Or else I can follow the river that should lie just beyond. I won't have the cover of darkness, but perhaps the lack of scent and prints to follow will tilt the odds of escape in my favour just enough. How quickly the dream of the runaway becomes a nightmare, but I'd rather be living this version of freedom than decades in the “safety” of the camps.
If this fort of stone, built on blood and bone, could talk, you'd beg for deafness. Though I cannot hear the whispers of the ages, tales of lives lost and deaths of agony no-one should ever feel, they remain cloistered in the castle dungeons and echo around staircases of twisted rock. So much to say and no ears willing to hear, no soul willing to feel the torment that lies within. I am no different. I turn my head to the breeze and stand on flora barely weeks old. The past is a forbidden land and its people's trials are over. In future times, when gravity has mastered this place, humbled it to no more than pebble and crumb, we too will be in that hour-glass that is now. For tonight the old hearth, the place that once whole ox's turned will be my chamber before I trudge onward in the morn. Until then it is silence I wish to soak in, anything else portends to danger and I have markedly less interest in ideas of chivalry than those knights of old. This is the place the song told of, this is the trail of the runaways of Stevenson.
Spooky doesn't quite cover it and eerie is an understatement. In the shadow, cast by castle walls thicker than my arm is long, a chill creeps over the uncut grass. The scent of late fall is laden into those gusts that push impetuously against the sentinel stone. Every flutter of a leaf catches our attention, sparks our minds to turn faster, loosening their tenuous grip to the agreed upon version of “reality.” Before we leaf for the cover of the forest tree-line, walking with purpose through the dwindling light that remains, we bury a GPS chip. The radius is pitiful, but if we lay them like electronic breadcrumbs the other runaways will come, follow us to whatever is at the end of this journey.
The castle crumbles in slow motion, slower than the eye can detect even over a lifetime. Only the sun and the moon themselves witness the steady deterioration of these abandoned turrets and ramparts. This castle, once the life blood of the low-lying regions that stretch horizon-bound from these hill battlements, is where we stop for the night. Within walls that have defied eons our safety isn't guaranteed but enhanced and there is some protection from the driving rain that threatens to come. Cosied to the frigid walls we can at least forget the biting winds for a time. What is one night to a ancient house of nobility such as this? Is it even the same as a second in our lives? I don't know. What I do know is that tonight we are the lords, the ladies, the peasants and the knights. We are the masters of this castle for a blink of Old Man Time's eyes, a camera flash in the cosmos. We are the beneficiaries of builders so long ago they feel like unlucky characters of fiction, caricatures of history.
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