[hider=Old and Unsatisfied]
As I toil away at numbers and figures my hands look like someone else's.  These are the hands of an old man.  The hands of someone fit to do little more than pull at a blanket and shake involuntarily.  Where has the strength gone?  Where are the veins near to bursting through the skin.  The hard calloused knuckles.  The cracked fingernails, dirt and blood still worked in deep, almost impossible to keep clean.  What are these thin pink appendages growing from them?  They cannot be my fingers.  They are too small.  Too soft.  Too clean.

These cannot be the hands that waved along reinforcements as I ducked under the wild fire of Orcish hordes gibbering at the moon as they rushed our encampments.  Certainly these hands could never choke the life out of a traitor.  They're not fit to scrabble up embankments, to dig and scratch at the dirt furiously that I might find some meager cover.  These hands look inexperienced.  Surely they've never been coated in the blood of my brothers, holding flaps of skin against leaking innards while we wait for medical evacuation.  These dainty little hands have never dutifully closed the eyes of a fellow Guardsman for the final time.  They've never signaled a firing line to execute deserters.

Each night stretches on, the minutes ticking by at a snail's pace yet somehow the hours rushing.  I need to rest.  I am not the man I once was.  I no longer rise with a start from my bed and hurry on my way to make the Emperor's will manifest.  These days the rising is a process all it's own, particularly on the nights when I have been unable to find myself the release of slumber.  Those nights grow more and more common.

I lay in bed or recline behind my desk and ponder where I have failed that the Emperor deems I must continue on.  I have done so much and ventured so far but still my work is not done.
[/hider]