[Lyra Greenleaf]

Pio's post - October 31st

Assiram was up most of the night, thinking. He had gathered a good-sized pile of twigs and small branches and sat near the small fire feeding the flames. Occasionally he would pick up the stick he was using for his poker and stir up the wood and embers sending orange sparks into the sky. ‘They look just like the pieces of gold we were supposed to find at the Shire Rats’ hole.’ He gave a disgruntled laugh and spat into the fire. ‘And just like them, our hopes for any riches winked away and disappeared.’ He was in a philosophical mood, rare for him who lived a mostly immediate life.

He hadn’t really wanted to come to the Shire. He hated those little vermin with a passion. In his mind they had displaced the real Men who should be living in the area, taken up land and space that didn’t rightly belong to them. Put the folk like him out of their due place; made his life a hardscrabble one. The thought that he was lazy to the core except in the pursuit of immediate pleasure did not figure into his equation, nor did the fact that he would no more be prone to the hard work of the land as would his cronies.

His cronies! What a worthless lot he’d been saddled with! He poked viciously at the embers sending up showers of sparks. ‘Be better off had they never come,’ he thought to himself. Why split the monies with them, when he could do the job just as well and by himself.

He looked over to where they lay, snoring under the fading stars, and considered what he might do.

[ October 19, 2003: Message edited by: piosenniel ]