Without care or consideration, they raise the post, batton the trap. Good people those carpenters I'm told, ordinary people.
I listen to the sussurant voices of soldiers, guards, their idly content chatter reverberates through the wall, though their words are dulled beyond my hearing. Brave guards, noble guards, I'm told. Good people who kill at the command of their lord and master.
Good people it would seem. The same soldiers who, with rope and poleaxe, slew my lover in the village square only yesterday, though she'd committed no evil. All she knew was love.
Shortly the priest will visit me. Oh good, gentle priest. He'll offer me salvation, bid me beg forgiveness for my evil when no harm I've caused or done. Only love. Only ever love.
Is this world really so foetid? So bleak? So empty of compassion that no-one can see that all I've done is love?
I cringe as I feel the broken-glass fragments of my grieving heart grate together in my breast. I am broken, that much is sure, and I no longer want to live. To swing, in the morning, from their gallows will almost be a relief. For certain I'll not sleep tonight; not because of fear, but of the ghastly death-cries of my equine lover that clutch at my very sanity.
My only regret is that I'll be a spectacle, a 'lesson' if you will. Such a cruel fate, when now, having lost everything, all that matters to me is that no-one else is wronged this way.
And so, my one hope is this: I write this note, and hide it in a crevice here, that one day, perhaps, it will escape and people might understand what a barbaric age this was.
I glance around at the hard stone walls. This fortress is so strong, and surely must stand for many years to come. I hope that one day, people will know, and understand, that it is never wrong to love.
I fantasise strangely of how my tiny note might someday be read by, well, a historian perhaps. An archaeologist? Heh, in my cynical state I imagine my note being found far off in the future in some enlightened age as yet unimagined by man. An age when love is accepted in all its forms, when men shall read my note and wonder in amazement at how brutal and callous their ancestors once were. Maybe even into some far flung age such as the twentieth century, when surely all trace of mankind's barbaric past will have been relegated to history and fiction.
Yes, perhaps even the twentieth century, when certainly men will reel with morbid awe at the horrors of hate and hypocrisy that civilisation once knew in this long forgotten age.
I prepare myself for the grave, and pray that my hope is not in vain.