The muffled slap of bare feet echoed along the barren, stone grey walls of the darkened monastery. Stepping out of the gloom, a hooded figure paused in the semi-illuminated archway. Head bowed as if in prayer, eyes closed, mouth an undisturbed line, the monk paused his quest. All thought, all movement funneled down to his belted waist where it focused on the human skull cradled in his laced fingers.

He no longer needed to see the empty sockets of the skull worn smooth from the thousand pairs of hands that had carried this burden before him to remind him of his duty. Not since his fourteenth birthday, when he was first called, had he missed a single night of this sacred obligation.

Every half century a new brother was called to wander the catacombs from dusk to dawn and contemplate the sins and frailties of man. In a mystical union with all the brothers who had stood vigil before, he paused at each black archway to meditate upon man's first choice: to walk in the holy light symbolized by the golden glow of the brazier illuminating the unused stairways or to stumble into the darkness of the cold, smooth floor of the roughly hewn granite passages.

High above his right shoulder, light caressed his brown, horsehair robe, accentuating its uneven folds. After the prescribed twenty minutes, his sojourn began again. Each calloused foot trudged one step closer to the enveloping darkness. His silhouette flickered like a small flame against the stairway until it, too, was extinguished.