Board Thread:Roleplaying/@comment-7262318-20190419215241/@comment-5543592-20190502152158

Smith circled the town, thinking back on childhood memories. It had been a while since he'd been home. Like all childhood home's his held good and bad memories, although both were made sweeter by nostalgia. If he went back today, would Bjorn and Erik still be there? What did they think of him now? He hated to waste his thoughts on them, on people who had tormented him, but it was hard to forget those who had created so much misery for him in his youth.

He went north, leaving town, climbed a hill, wanting his legs and arms to ache by the time he reached the top. The hillside was jagged, the grass coarse and the ground rough with stones and cracked earth.

Time softened everything. Would they clap him on the back, greet him as a boyhood friend? Say they had only been rough-housing, only playing. Why had they hated him so much? What had he done then that made him the perfect target? What was different about him now than he had been then?

The hill was steep, and the ground gave way to rocky crags, sharp plateaus of shale. His shoes scraped on the smooth incline, and he almost slipped. He caught a hand hold before he did so and pulled himself up over a vertical lip without much effort.

He looked down on Shor's Stone, the small grouping of thatched homes, and then the land beyond. The world was so much larger than anybody ever gave it credit, but Smith felt lonely and small on his hilltop. Shor's Stone was too much like Rorikstead, and he felt he'd gone nowhere. In the distance was the Throat of the World, the tallest mountain in the world. Smith now stood in its shadow, the same shadow he'd grown up in. Rorikstead was on the other side, perhaps equidistant from the mountain as Smith was now. And his father would be there, hammering out a horseshoe or a plow. Smith could picture himself with him now, so close yet so far. The world was small and Smith with it, yet when he stepped down off this hill he was would once again by a giant to it. It wasn't unfair, he had no compliants. But the solitude and the soft wind whistling in his ears made him contemplative.

He settled onto a knee and pressed his finger into the shale at his feet, the stone grinding, turning to powder against the strength of his finger. He traced the finger through it, carved it as if it was wax. SMITH WAS HERE, he wrote into it in big, blocky letters. He blew away the powder and stood. Perhaps someone else would climb up here one day and read it. Shale didn't erode except under the greatest pressure. It would be here, long after Smith was gone. Three words, hastily pressed into the stone on impulse, as hasty as Smith imagined his own creation was.

He turned from the view climbed back down the hill.