How many times had I here the past few years in the twilight shadows. Just another souless silhouette in the background, watching the festive fires roar and the gay children, boys and girls both, running and screaming with excited joy as they chased one another around the bonfires with wooden weapons of all descriptions.
The drunken boisterousness and rough housing of the men, and the flirtatiously encouraging shrieks of the women?
Such sounds of merryment could easily be mistaken for screams of terror.
The memories of terror i have witnessed strikes fervent rage within my heart towards an enemy that had assailed and fled like cowards in another time, in another place long since charred by the flames now immulated in these festive bonfires that spit ash and sparks high into the night sky as though deliberately trying to conjure up memories of another life lived in torment.

In memory, there once stood a fine thatched taigh, where within there lived the gentlest family, in both intent and spirt. In rumination it is now in flames in my mind, and the childrens slaughtered remains lay within to be found come morning, blackened and a sight no longer gentle to behold.
In mid battle a blood stained father and husband stands over a brave but fallen wife and mother with sword still in dead hand. her beauty now stained with tragedy just as her clothes and palid skin are stained with the loving blood that once blushed her cheeks pink with love and lust and boiled her veins with the passion to die in attempting to save her children.
Fight this gallant enraged soul would, although now familyless, fight on he would, only to fall to the surrmounting numbers of his foe falling upon him and dismembering his honourable, twitching corpse like one of the many animals butchered to celebrate this time of festivities.

Should i fling myself upon this celebratory pyre in honour of my guilt for surviving when my son perished and my daughter was kidnapped, or maybe thrust this sword of the enemy i now hold deep into my own chest and watch the black blood of a dead heart paint lurid patterns of pain upon an unholy earth already stained with mortal sin of men long vanished into the darkness of the past?

Instead, i turn my back on the revelries and dig the fine viking blade I aquired from the mighty warrior leader so many years ago in Belgium into the soil of my new home and idley in deep contemplation I make my way down to the rivers edge where the dark foreboding silhouette of the decrepit viking ship looms above me in potential majestic and powerful pose.
As I gaze upon the great boat with the moon shimmered waters outlining its demonic form, I realise even more now how vital it could be in the future to at least attempt to restore this destroyer of families and innocense.