With my brain too burdened to think straight, I came back here today, my mausoleum, for answers.

I'm not unlike a weary warrior, forgotten in a forgotten war, drunk and bruised, hobbling along a one-time battlefield, years later. It has greened over, with little trace of the camaraderie shared here, the useless blood shed, the heroism of my noble friends of whom I have lost the trace. I too, am just a dead image of the dashing young idealist, hardened by the carnage of war, neglected in the carnage of peace.

You wouldn't know it though.

No, this place is less than the reflection of what it was then. Very few traces of what took place here, my transformation, and that of others. And what of the soldier? What does a soldier, who didn't die for his cause and didn't win outright do with this newfound peace?

The soldier begs. Settles for whatever piece of meat is thrown his way, and if it's still not enough, he'll drink himself into believing that things are good, until the effect wears off. He tries to find something, anything that will replace the void, and so long as the meat and the drinks last him until his dying day, when he realizes that he screwed everything up, should have risen to the occasion and won the day, instead will die with the regret and shame of the irreparable loss.

Though no soldier, I know what it's like now to live in a time of great peace, a time that should make me happy to be alive, and yet know that the peace was born from a loss too great to endure, that the cause for which I fought, for the one love that I hold so dear that I would die to defend, cannot be recaptured in this feeble state, nor of anything can it be asked after the evils I committed. Yes, 'tis very much indeed like a forgiven, yet surviving losing soldier.....

Faithlessly departed,
Eriol Gaurhoth