🍁Nine Ancient Obelisks

Ushumgallu sat in front of a brazier, over which a small pot of bone and cartilage broth was simmering, steam rising from under the lid, thick and fragrant. The young man blew out the fire and reached for the pot, but immediately pulled his hand back, having burned himself. "That's why you don't break any records," Ushumgallu thought angrily, and, ignoring the pain, took the pot off the fire with his bare hands. He still had about three handfuls of croutons left – enough to avoid eating plain broth. His hands sifted through the croutons – he tossed them in one by one, his thoughts swirling in his head, not neatly organized, as the current intellectuals would say, but piling up on each other in an ugly heap. In two days, he had learned to wield a weapon, set a couple of records, and begun to understand politics – there had been more events than in the past two years. Ushumgallu tried to draw some kind of general conclusion, but the mixed jumble of surprise, regret, and inflated ambitions found no place on the mountain of thoughts and broke down into a multitude of individual memories and emotions. Sometimes the young man felt that there was no life as such – there were only separate days, and those that lay too long at the bottom of memory simply dissolved, like croutons that had been left too long in the broth. And the broth had already cooled down. After finishing his dinner of broth and croutons, Ushumgallu goes to sleep.