How Full the Graves (Late May 3010) - [Eowyn]
Oct 3, 2018 17:57:10 GMT -5
Post by Adelais on Oct 3, 2018 17:57:10 GMT -5
How full the graves were to bear the newly dead.
The sun had long disappeared from overhead, though even its light was solemn upon the evermind. Night had come quietly, stars pale and faint beyond the clouds. It was the torches behind, high upon the wall of Edoras that waved their orangey glow through the evening dim. Long, perhaps, the burial mounds had been empty of all others, yet Adelais still sat in the dirt, a bottle of honey-mead half gone in her hand. The wind whipped through the mounds, bending the grasses and simbelmynë as it passed with baleful moans. Fresh were the graves she sat before, small wood-carved horses set before three, and the smell of rosemary and myrrh upon the slew of others. They had been friends once; the same way the graves beyond held those she once could call family. She should have been with them, buried there. Runa, too—though, her friend yet teetered on the brink of loss and might yet join the others.
Adelais had not had the heart to go in to visit Runa at the Healing Hall, though word had spread throughout the hill city that Captain Ceolmund had been in a foul mood, haunting his wife’s bedside as she slipped into and out of consciousness, fending off the infection in her wounds and poison alike. Frightening, many had uttered. Adelais, though, could understand; Faramund had been taken from her as well, and they had never had the chance to be bound in the way Runa and the captain had been. And their baby…
Adelais grimaced, lifting the bottle once more to her lips. It was just a bandage wrapped from her ankle to her thigh that she sported, keeping the stitches earned from a warg’s claw covered and clean. She was not supposed to be straining its use yet, and she knew Swithin would be cross she had limped her way out to the graves. Almost as cross as Adelais felt to be left alive.
The last, as she always was. She looked up toward the sky, the stringy clouds making haste over the dark, black-blue canopy overhead. Her eyes and cheeks were pink and hot, sticky and wet with tears. “Am I just not good enough for you?” She called out, her words slow and faintly slurred. “Just going to take everyone away!? Why not me? Why not leave Runa alone and take me?”
With a heave and a sob, the woman lobbed the half-drunk bottle of mead toward the graves and watched as it rolled, spilling out the golden liquid upon the freshly tilled dirt. The young woman hanged her head, shoulders shuddering with each desperate gasp.
How full the graves were.
The sun had long disappeared from overhead, though even its light was solemn upon the evermind. Night had come quietly, stars pale and faint beyond the clouds. It was the torches behind, high upon the wall of Edoras that waved their orangey glow through the evening dim. Long, perhaps, the burial mounds had been empty of all others, yet Adelais still sat in the dirt, a bottle of honey-mead half gone in her hand. The wind whipped through the mounds, bending the grasses and simbelmynë as it passed with baleful moans. Fresh were the graves she sat before, small wood-carved horses set before three, and the smell of rosemary and myrrh upon the slew of others. They had been friends once; the same way the graves beyond held those she once could call family. She should have been with them, buried there. Runa, too—though, her friend yet teetered on the brink of loss and might yet join the others.
Adelais had not had the heart to go in to visit Runa at the Healing Hall, though word had spread throughout the hill city that Captain Ceolmund had been in a foul mood, haunting his wife’s bedside as she slipped into and out of consciousness, fending off the infection in her wounds and poison alike. Frightening, many had uttered. Adelais, though, could understand; Faramund had been taken from her as well, and they had never had the chance to be bound in the way Runa and the captain had been. And their baby…
Adelais grimaced, lifting the bottle once more to her lips. It was just a bandage wrapped from her ankle to her thigh that she sported, keeping the stitches earned from a warg’s claw covered and clean. She was not supposed to be straining its use yet, and she knew Swithin would be cross she had limped her way out to the graves. Almost as cross as Adelais felt to be left alive.
The last, as she always was. She looked up toward the sky, the stringy clouds making haste over the dark, black-blue canopy overhead. Her eyes and cheeks were pink and hot, sticky and wet with tears. “Am I just not good enough for you?” She called out, her words slow and faintly slurred. “Just going to take everyone away!? Why not me? Why not leave Runa alone and take me?”
With a heave and a sob, the woman lobbed the half-drunk bottle of mead toward the graves and watched as it rolled, spilling out the golden liquid upon the freshly tilled dirt. The young woman hanged her head, shoulders shuddering with each desperate gasp.
How full the graves were.