[ IP ] Miranda Castle , Belgium

He can still hear the screams, five hundred years to the day. Of course, to him it was but a moment ago. For years, the countryside had been in turmoil: peasants had formed uprisings and turned the tools of farmers into weapons to create mobs around the castle, demanding alms for the starving. They were hacked to death by swordsmen in response. He watched. He always watched. 
 
 The blood seeped into the ground and was forgotten, like the tides swept along the beach and out again, but he never forgot. The visions of death and slaughter formed in his mind more vividly than anything else; neither his love for his wife nor children could distract him from these pervading intrusions. The screams pierced his mind and seeped into everything he did. He could not eat, sleep, or have sex without at least once hearing the shrill shrieks of women and the lower but still pathetic cries of men about to be killed. 
 
 In the darkness, one often feels that there is no escape. For him, it is true. He'll be hearing those screams forever, as will many who enter the castle; when vines cover it and it collapses and settles in the long millenniums to dust, he will still hear those cries in a time outside of time.
