A single tear escaped her. She
said a silent prayer for her daughter.
And then she, too, was gone.
Mary walked on through the bitter night, the faltering torch she held
like a fretted candle in the depths of the dark. The rain had stopped,
and the ground frozen solid. Each footstep clumped painfully against
the hard, unyielding earth. Her mind was so numbed with pain and loss
that she found she could not even think. Time seemed to stop dead in
its tracks just to mock her.
She continued.
Passing without fear the Standing Stone, she regarded it now in blank
wonder, that she could ever have thought it more than a broken and
projecting bone of the lifeless earth. It fell behind her plodding
footsteps, an impotent slab of nothingness.
A wolf cried out in the distance, and she did not even care. Right
foot, left foot, followed one another in mindless, meaningless rhythm.
All was dead for her. Nothing lived, nothing moved, nothing breathed.
There was only this one last task to perform, and then oblivion.
At long, impossible length her weary footsteps took her along a
familiar path, past a silent dell wreathed in scrub oak and maple.
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