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Leadem, Christopher

"Highland Ballad"


Feeling suffocated, frothing with rage at his helplessness, he threw
aside the covers and rose to pace about the room as if a cage.
Because the question that truly galled him was not Why
, but Why now? If such a reversal had come when he was younger, with
his future still ahead of him, he might have seen some justice to it.
He would have known there was a difference between good and evil, and
all that this knowledge implied. He would have believed in something.
He could not lie, and say the knowledge would have changed him much.
But at least he would have known, as his daughter's plight had shown
him, that real people were the victims of his blind aggression, people
whose only crimes were not weakness and naivet?, but kindness and
compassion.
But he had not know, or so he told himself. His life had run on,
untaught and unobstructed, a raging beast crushing everything in its
path. And now, just as surely, that killing momentum would hurl him
from the brink of its dark height---down, down into the yawning abyss.
Of what lay at the bottom, he dared not even think.


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