For the blessing of indifference might be spun on end, momentarily offering the grim option of curse, because one child’s gift can well be another’s hurt. Spare then a moment for the frightened beast named Snell, and all the cruel urges driv-ing him to lash out, to torment the brother he never wanted. He too thrives on in-difference, this squat, round-shouldered, swaggering tyrant before whom the wild dogs in the shanty town cowered in instinctive recognition that he was one of their own, and the meanest of the lot besides; while the boy, chest swelled with, power, continued on, trailing his intended victim with something in his soul that, went far beyond a simple beating this time, oh, yes. The thing inside, it spread black, hairy legs like a Spider, his hands transformed there at the end of his wrists, oh, spiders, yes, hook-taloned and fanged and onyx-eyed, and they could closs into bony fists if they so desired, or they could stab with venom-why not both!
He carried rocks as well. To wing at the lepers he passed, to laugh as they flinched or cried out in pain, and he rode their ineffectual curses all the way up the road.
While, all along the hillside, the sun had done its work, and the boy filled his bag with tinder-dry dung for this night’s hearthfire. Bent over like an old man, he roved this way and that. This bounty would please the woman-who-was-not-his-mother, who mothered him as a mother should-although, it must be said, lack. ing something essential, some maternal instinct to awaken cogent realization that her adopted son lived in grave danger-and as the sack bulked in his grip, he thought to pause and rest for a time, there, up on the summit of the hill. So that he could look out over the lake, watch the beautiful sails of the feluccas and fisher boats.
Set free his mind to wander oh, memories are made of moments such as this one.
And, alas, of the one soon to come.
But give him these moments of freedom, so precious for their rarity. Begrudge not this gift of indifference.
It could, alter all, very well be his last day of such freedom.
Down on the track at the base of the hill, Snell has spied his quarry. The spiders at the ends of his wrists opened and closed their terrible black legs. And like a monster that wrings goats’ necks for the pleasure of it, he clambers upward, eyes fixed on that small back and tousled head there at the edge of the ridge.
In a temple slowly drowning there sat a Trell entirely covered in drying, blackening blood, and in his soul there was enough compassion to encompass an entire world, yet he sat with eyes of stone. When it is all one can do to simply hold on, then to suffer is to weather a deluge no god can ease.