I'd known that something had gone badly wrong during the battle. Erthë had been badly wounded, but I hadn't seen Shadow get gruesomly injured, too. If only I'd seen, if only I'd noticed...I could have saved her. But it seems lightning does not strike twice. The Gods decided that today was the day she died, and no man or beast could keep them from claiming her for their realm.

No. Oh, no. The scene I come upon is one of abect misery, and my posture reflects it. I hold my head low, my back arched and hollowed. I know I will see a body, but that doesn't prepare me for the reality of it. There she is, the Blackbird, gone. My head hangs lower, and a single tear slides free from my eyes. She's gone. Forever.

She is in a better place - that's what I reassure myself with. I believe in the afterlife, because my humans did and because the alternative - that there's nothing but oblivion - is too terrifying to contemplate. I choose to picture Shadow, young and rejuvenated, dancing through paradise. As a result, I grieve not for her, as such - although I am deeply saddened by her death - but for her daughter. Shadow is gone, safe, happy. Erthë is alone. Not in the true sense of the world, because she has her father and me, but alone in a way that I fully sympathise with. I know as well as anybody that no other living thing can compensate for the loss of a mother.

Oh, how stupid I'd been to think that just because there's no humans around, Erthë would get to keep her mother until she was good and ready! How idiotic of me not to consider the simple flaw in all living flesh - that we are all fallible, that we are all walking sacks of meat just waiting to be reclaimed by the earth! That we all die, one day, try as we might to rage against the inevitable.

I force myself to notice the others. I recognise some - Erthë obviously, Maren from the Throat, and golden Thranduil who greeted us in the Basin that time. There is also a spotted stallion I do not know, and I give him a wide berth as I approach the filly and the dead black mare. I blink away my tears and try to look strong, for her. She can't see her Uncle Badger cry. I don't deserve to cry, when I did not know Shadow half as well as Erthë did. "Oh, Erthë," I greet, forcing a smile into life on my lips. It's as false as the grin of a clown, and just as easily torn aside, but I feel like I need to do it, for her. "I'm here for you, you know that?" It's all I can say, all I can summon up. I want to offer her a home in the Throat with me, but I know she'll want to be with her father. I have no right to take her from him, when he is probably grieving as much as I am. So I hold my tongue, and offer what I can - I extend my muzzle and try to touch it to the filly's ice-cold shoulder, to try and reassure her that she will never be alone.