“I had a family once,” muttered the old man through his gruff and straggled beard, in the tone bearing the remnants of a great tragedy that ripped out a piece of him, strewn across the desert and left to dry. The low ambient glow of red coals in the fire pit slightly glinted on his two dark pools, but no light escaped the wretched void of his soul, deep in thought and remembrance. A flash of smooth faces, fair hair, and laughter shone but a candle, down the bottomless pit, gracing his world with the only light left.

He would sit until sunrise and never move so long as nothing disturbed him. Sitting in the dark, his content lay not within happiness, but bleeding from the wounds rubbed upon his wrists from the rusty iron shackles of regretful agony. Tetanus grew and infected his jaw, he never spoke, except what could be hummed out past the pain.