A stack of papers, unbound and well worn, sat on the table, opened to a page with the heavy scrawling of a human hand marked upon its pages. A stout inkwell and a narrow twig apparently had been the tools used in this marking.

The floor was covered loosely in wood planks, edging to a ring of stones in the far corner of the room, upon which sat the meager fire and its stone chimney. A small pot rested near the flame, with some liquid in it, now having no chance at being a warm beverage or meal. A thick wooden spoon rested in the pot, appearing as if it had been completely forgotten and dismissed.

There was no bed, in the common sense of the human term, to be found. Instead there was a slightly elevated set of stone and wood, upon which was fabric filled with some form of animal fur or down. The same could be said of what seemed to be a blanket, unevenly filled with some form of insulation. Both the bed and its blankets seemed to have been roughly stitched together from various remnants of cloth, from various different garments.

At last, however, here was the sign of life. The sole sign, in all this small view of a world, was a grimy shadow sitting low in the corner of the cottage, though it made no moves, made no sounds. Indeed it was hard to appraise this shape as a life, other than the fact that it had the body of what usually housed a life. This was a lanky figure, cloaked in shadow. One leg was bent at the knee, its foot resting upon the floor, the other was set straight out away from the body, the foot slightly bent out. An arm lay--without effort--in the lap of this presence, while the other arm rested, at the crook, upon the knee of the bent leg. It was in this arm, this hand, that there was the sign of living life.

The hand possessed long, tapered fingers; with fingernails well worn and dirtied with use. There were small white lines in the fingernails, indicating some type of deficiency in this figure; in fact, the entire view of the main seemed to cry out on a number of problems, from the gaunt and drawn face, the bone-etched hands, to the flaccid and brittle hair. The picture of this human seemed to indicate that there was either no sustenance to be found, or that this human had given up on the ongoing effort of life.