The sunlight beyond my closed eyelids paints the inside of my eyes red. Which day now? ... is it hours or days ... my horse finds his own meandering way, I cannot help him or guide him. The loose stones click against his hooves. We are climbing, swaying in the saddle, weaker than a newborn, slumped over my belly. Where the crow and the girl and the dunlander are I have no knowledge. Mayhap he can follow my trail ... I am too enfeebled to care.
I know I grasped the stone. I see my hands imprinted upon it, feel again the immediate reaction to its touch as my guts spewed out my own half-digested meal into the filth the stone poured out onto the field. The lush greeness of the Shire twisted and corrupted. I am trying to stand upright on the wet decayed wheat stems, slippy and putrescent. The filth drives the worms upward out of the tainted soil. They writhe in the sun becoming poisoned food for foolish birds. A harvest of famine for the shire...
'Fool .. fool ... fool...' the words drum out with every beat of my heart. I was a fool not to prepare, to believe one stone would be much as another. My horse slows further and finally halts. Its jerking forces me to open my eyes to a sliver. He tugs thick leaves from a thorn bush... and before I have chance to seal my eyes tight the pain implodes within me. I am falling .. slipping out of the saddle, doubled in pain and too feeble to prevent my ungainly fall.
My knees hit the stony ground with a painful jolt, but nothing competes with the agony of my belly. Scrambling forward I grasp handfuls of the leaves, stuffing their thick leathery bitterness into my mouth in a vain attempt to assuage the hunger before I am vomitting up the inedible green... I have no food with me.. no water. I am too weak to hunt. How long before I am scrabbling in the dust for beetles with my bare hands?
Oh my hands, my beautiful firm hands; shrunken and clawlike. The simple iron ring on my finger hangs loose. The famine stone has left me nothing but bone and flesh, stripping fat and muscle from me in an instant, feeding its insatiable need. I feel it gnawing me, finished with easy meat, working ever deeper, into sinew and mind. Leaving me a shell around ... nothing.
I push the thoughts away hard. I cannot go there again. The dreadful need of the stone, awakening the dreadful need in me. So cruel, the pitiless flaying of a man to uncover his own personal famine. My own void, my own need. The stone feasts upon it, and I am forced to acknowledge the famine in my life.
I crouch on my hands and knees by the thorn bush, careless of the hooves of my horse, and what moisture I have left in me, I weep out. Brought to this, such pain and emptiness. It is not food or drink that can take this need from me, there is not enough provision in the world to fill this lack.
I must find some shelter, to hide away from the world and the weather, try to regain my strength, though I do not know how. And find a way to fill this void - I cannot afford such weakness ... for all the pain of this stone, it has shown me my vulnerability. A bitter-won gift.
