This is installment (week) 5. To read the previous installments of "Eclipse of Souls", click here.

... For an hour he sat there, furiously entranced in the flurry of words that sped from the pages and into his ever-questioning mind. His whole surroundings melted into obscurity, so much so that he failed to notice that by the time he had read enough, it was long past the time he was supposed to be back at work. There were too many questions, too many unanswered queries, and it all bewildered him. He knew that what the history books said were not accurate, but to what extent he failed to notice.

For what he vaguely recalled of what now became the distant past, he remembered the days when people were happy, unbound to their duties as Comrades in an all too unconfortably equal world. He remembered the smell of the brightly coloured trees in the air of spring, now reduced to mere gray ashes in a forlorn and hostile territory. There were the birds too, with their songs reverberating in the clear blue sky as children played joyfully on swings that hung beneath the branches. It was when the wind was a welcome feeling rustling the leaves as the trees waved in a dance, when the sun scorched the dry earth and the heat was almost unbearable. For now the clouds obscured the rays of the sun, and winter never seemed to end.

He hated himself for reminiscing.

He hated himself for having evoked the memories of which he had blocked out so effectively that he hadn't realised until now how much he had missed. Every moment that passed was now a reminder of how different life was before.

He did realise, however, that what the tides of time had effaced from the ink in the books, there was bound to be locked somewhere in the minds of the people around him, in the souls of those who lived the past, and the hearts of those who were determined never to let those memories go. And he didn't have to wait for long to find the person he needed.

Written on Thursday, May 6 at 6:07 PM