---
Following the trail of crumbs with a smile, he finds the child crouching beneath the winding stair.
They look at one another, and he feigns displeasure, folding his arms behind his back. Straight he stands, as tall as the columns that grapple with the canopy of sky that hangs overhead.
Sun and wind mingle and sweep through the hall, touching the locks of their hair: his dark, the child's fair.
There is jam across Elboron's face, and his small greedy hands clutch a pastry.
"I was hungry," the child whispers.
He smiles and plants himself down beside his son, gathering him up into arms that were meant (were born, she tells him at times) to cradle and lull.
"I am hungry too," he tells him, and the child breaks the pie neatly in half and gives it to him.
Nibbling on the day-old tart, he suddenly remembers himself a child like the one before him: beneath such a stair, but in a different city, hoarding instead a pocketful of ripened berries.
"I was hungry," he told his father, trying to find justification in the man's gaze. But all for naught, for punishment was given swiftly and without penance.
He still remembers the gleam in his father's eyes; the gray-glass flicker of steel that veiled nothing; no one.
Staring down at his son's flaxen head, he closes his eyes.
He finds he is still hungry; he fears he always will be.
---