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She comes on a breath of wind, pulsing with hurt, uttering sweet goodbyes, her hound crying as Haldir had, the dulcet tones hauntingly beautiful. You cannot help but wonder if she is the only one that had ever said such things when he was alive, the only one to have shared her love, in the time before it was too late to appreciate all that he was, and if that disconnection from those he had always served, protected and provided for had ever been a reason for his distance. You wonder, too, if he had ever known of your own affections and gratitudes, shown in the way you yourself serve, in the delicate petals that you had given to his flower crown in the middle of spring, with a girl who laughed like rain, who came only to leave again, and if it had ever been the same for anyone else—there but unspoken.
You had never known the paths of destruction that he had followed, the tendrils of war that still warped his heart until the moment it stopped; had only ever felt the presence of something dark within him when he had towered over you, a girl full of summer and youth, the day you had climbed in to the mountain's shadow, to understand the difference in him that kept him away. Perhaps the why had never mattered.
Only that it was.
The next to come, to delve into the trappings of decay and loss, the death of an era, is but a girl, a child—she glances to Erebos, offering him a trinket, apologies that could never touch the emptiness that the Reaper has left inside of him. You force a smile for her anyways, pressing your limbs closer to the prince, a constant presence meant to soothe, your slim body attempting to shield his from some of the rain. Looking at the lemon-drop of a girl makes you curious of what, if anything, she, and the rest of those too young to have known him, will remember of him as they grow, and if anyone would bother to teach them of all that he has done.
‘I can’t leave him here,’
You flinch as he says it, as he looks to you, all crumbling heart and aching, trembling soul. You want to give him an answer, to save him of the suffering it is to lose something (pieces of his heart), someone (to be alone), but there is nothing and you know it. There had been nothing when it had been your daughter that had been taken from you, your brother that you had found, long after he had drawn his last breath. Heat floods your cheeks and your eyes sting as you blink, refusing to cry, for once not wanting to be the one that breaks when he is already destroyed.
You had carried the same sentiment as him, not wanting to leave them, unable to do anything else when hunger and sleeplessness had forced you away from the corpse of your brother, unable to bring your daughter back to the mountains where she would always belong, with you.
And yet it seems too simple a thing to just bury a king as you had buried her, to return him to the earth without ceremony, a slight to all that this one has done for everyone that he has protected over the years; too barbaric to burn his corpse and leave only ash where there once had been a man. You finally look to the others, their heads hanging, their faces wet with rain or tears, and it is likely both, and they are silent. Silent in the face of a single question, perhaps because of the finality of the task at hand, as if doing anything now will only make his death more real, and undeniable.
“We could make him a tomb; seal him within the mountains, so that he may always be a part of them, a part of the Basin.” It is almost a whisper as it breaks suddenly from you, quivering, your watery eyes flickering in an attempt to meet your stricken lion-heart’s, unsure of how he will take the suggestion, unsure of how he can take any more talk of death, any reminder of the abrupt tragedy that remains right in front of him.
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