The question hung in the warm air above the stone bench, vibrating with a terrible, seductive weight that seemed to slip past every defense Noll had built since the night he died.
How long has it been since you held a warm cup in your own two hands?
Inside the crystalline core of the blue quartz, the phantom itch returned. It was an old torment, one that visited him in the dead hours between midnight and dawn when the fire had banked down to embers and the hall grew still. In the silence of the masonry, his mind would reach out for limbs that were no longer there. He would feel the ghostly press of his knuckles against a rough wooden tabletop, the remembered weight of a deck of tallow-greased cards slipping between thumb and forefinger, the sharp sting of cold rain on the back of a wrist, or the simple, unthinking miracle of wiping a speck of dust from his own cheek.
He had spent weeks telling himself that stone was enough. He had told himself that being a fortress was grander than being a battered player in a patched coat. But a fortress could not lean its elbows on a tavern windowsill. A fortress could not reach out to catch a falling bowl. A fortress could only sit in the dirt and watch the living walk past its doors.
