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Salek sat in a deep concentration, lost in herself, unmovable by the outer world. A cool wind blew in through the open room and outside one could hear the wind chimes sing from the slow breeze that so carefully touched the different crystals in the beautiful morak-strings. The floor where Salek did her meditation was cold and the black squares that made out the floor in this one roomed temple were dull and gave the floor a false light of warmth. Salek shivered from the cool wind and thought silently to herself, "If only the sun would shine on these stonehard plates. Then they'd at least be warm." It was the first thought she had thought in several minutes, and suddenly she decided that it would be the thought to interrupt her meditation and she rose softly from the floor. She stared distantly in front of her at the big, clumsy statue of Kaldr - one of the thousands on saints - and tried to capture the soul of the room. There was silence.
In a small round cottage made out of straw, rock, dirt and anything else nature was offering sat a small, old man beside a fire and wrote down small, well-done letters on a yellow, crinkly paper. His arm trembled sometimes and made the letters hard to read, and every now and again he had to stop to cough away the eternal tickling he felt deep in his lungs, but he had decided to write and that was what he did, even if it went slowly. From within the house was reminded of a hole in the ground - very solid and kept the warm in - and indeed it was a good place to live, even if it was pretty dark inside. On the outside the wind was howling. It was colder and more biting than that at Kaldr's temple, but it didn't seem to bother the old man. Suddenly he heard something outside the door and he twitched involountarily. Silently he approached the door and put a big pot filled with dirt against the big wooden door, which traditionally opens inwards. Silently he stood there and listened, hidden behind the door. There were only one window in the house and it was blocked with two small wooden doors so that the wind wouldn't get in. Glass for the window was scarse in the lands, and that's why it had quickly become an honor to have beautifully decorated wooden doors on one's windows. This man was a skillful carpenter and had therefore the best wooden doors in town. But this changed in only a minute, for now the man heard that someone was banging on the window and tried to get it open by force.
Paniced he forgot to sneak around silently and he rushed fast to the table with the yellow paper and made a couple of empty pots fall over that made a horribly loud noise. He wanted to hide. He took the paper and tried to get to the door to try to run away, but when he looked up from the table he saw that the walls were beginning to collapse and the window was broke open, the wooden doors smashed broken. The man staggered terrified a few steps backwards and fell backwards without taking his eyes off the big man in black who had broken the window and was now in the process of making the window hole larger so that he could enter. The old man shook of fear and he felt like a wild animal in that instant when it gets captured. And then he looked up at the ceiling. It was the last thing he would see; the different parts of the roof was falling down to the ground, the house breaking into pieces and becoming nothing more than a pile of dirt, stone and straw. Stones and dirt blinded him before everything collapsed, and darkness and the icy cold wind were the only things remaining.
Salek had an unpleasant feeling that something had happend and she couldn't continue her calm watching of the statue Kaldr. The frozen smile of Kaldr didn't seem like the divine smile that used to calm her anymore and the unpleasant feeling spread all the way down to her toes. The grey temple of stone, the grey, shiny statue, the chime outside.. nothing could bring her peace back. She shook her head and convinced herself that it was just the wind that had made her unbalanced. She bowed humbly to the statue and started walking towards the exit, mumbling that next time she'd better remember to bring a blanket.
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