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Old 10-08-2006, 03:47 PM   #107
Anguirel
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Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: The 1590s
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The Giant's Circle

The ringing out of the horn, the horn Gurth had ridden for and striven for, actually threw him, for some moments, into a paralysis equal to that of his winded and luckless animal.

When his eyes finally broke out of their fixed passage, activity came at the price of purpose. It was perhaps the effect of seeing Sorn's farmstead, where he had been treated so kindly, and so...vilely, where he had existed as an admired idiot and dwelt in comfort, that destroyed Gurth's faculty for decision. He began to walk, and to look about him, almost at random, threading an unsteady, lone way behind the ramshackle building.

And then he saw a man ahead.

Kill it. It is a man. It threatens the girl. It threatens the master.

It is the master. Gurth saw neither a stranger of the wild, intentions mysterious but to be thwarted, nor any of the lackeys who had mocked him. No Osfrid, no Scyld.

Something higher and lower. The tall - but to Gurth, to Helm, so small, so thin, so vulnerable! - figure of one who had been, in his way, a great man despite the pettiness of his wealth. One whose mind had dreamed grandly, whose hand had acted squalidly.

But one who carried a spark inside him that called out to Gurth, that viscerally implored him to throw himself down and acknowledge mastery.

"Sorn," Gurth said quietly.

The Lord of the Manor looked dreadful. He had been drinking, Gurth could see, of late; he could perceive wounds left by mead that had formerly stricken him low. He had not drunk in all his time among the outlaws, had distanced himself, and now regarded victims of intemperance with a surprisingly lofty pity.

Sorn's profile was sharper and thinner, more lined. His eyes were large and seemed verging on raw red, the red of a chicken that has been cooked, but only a very little. The red of Grendel's lolling, spasm-ridden, dying tongue.

"Sorn," Gurth repeated. "My name is Helm, now."

His former master seemed not yet to have taken in his presence. He was in a semi-trance, like that which had fallen upon Gurth moments before; but the giant could not speculate whether such a vacant stare was brought on by stagnant memory, by the indifference of despair, or by helplessness. Brightness absent everywhere else shone in the man's long hands, and Gurth perceived that he was armed, gripping two knives like the arms of comforters, of parents.

But Sorn was on his own land. He had been Master, and there was something in him that yet mastered.

Gurth scarcely knew what he did as he lurched down and knelt before Sorn, his axe rolling from his hands and sliding away.

Somewhere not so far away, Grendel died.

Last edited by Anguirel; 10-31-2006 at 09:32 AM.
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