Apologue Two

In the dark, crouching on top of the washing machine with our hands around our knees we wonder - not for the first time - where it all went wrong. Not for the first time - not for the last, either - we fail to find a satisfying answer. It was, is and will continue to be a long process of gradual decay. All we can pin down is the time Marcus Margraves, the fighting dwarf, dislocated his shoulder in a drunken brawl. After that he stopped fighting, though he remained a dwarf. No other change in our little world was as definable. All we could say was that things were better 'before' and different 'now'. We briefly debated whether Marcus's injury was a turning point, or even the cause but eventually decide - not for the first time - that it was symptomatic of the larger downward spiral.