Yllfa

I envied Waelden for his ability to sleep. My mind was still more active than I wished as the small hours approached, but he slept as if he hadn’t a care. That was not true. After speaking with him of Isa, he had much to ponder.

It had been another rainy day. Not cold exactly, but the sort of day it was good to be helping out in the kitchen rather than the fields. And that is what both Bronaa and Ethel had been doing until recently. 

Under Yllfa’s careful watch, Bronaa had been making a syrup to ease winter ailments. The autumn was slowly progressing, and the chill months ahead often saw more of the older folk in particular laid low with chest and head pains, and with stubborn coughs. It could lead to the death of weaker folk, both old and young. 

Hild climbed the stairs at the back of the ‘Roaring Dragon’ and headed to the door of Bronaa’s room.

“Ethel is here” she stated, as she knocked on the wood and entered.

The following words were called loud and relentlessly into the darkness of midnight many, many years ago, in the time of the Long Winter, T.A 2759. Ice and snow fell from the sky upon the woman scorned; the moon veiled by the blackest of clouds and the whitest of mist, and her voice the harbinger of doom and ruin upon the world and her lover, the one who had left her in the cold as she lay in childbirth, screaming of thirst, of hunger, and of pain.

I am tired. I grow frailer by the day.

Not devastatingly so. Nay, the weakening moves in small steps. But something I find normal one day, may be more exhausting the next; may be undoable the following week. 

There was an ominous aura of melancholy on the streets of Bancross in the days after the battle. The worried faces and itching sword-arms had been quietly replaced by tear-filled eyes, hunched backs and feet dragging on the ground behind them. While our dead could be counted in a handful, the pained and wounded were more plentiful; some with missing limbs, while others got away with only deep cuts and bruises. The east-borne enemy had not fared as well.

We said farewell to our kinsmen last night with the lighting of pyres in the center of the village near the mead-hall. I knew some of the fallen by name and face, but not intimately. I feel selfish for being thankful for this. Others are heartbroken. And while I have had my share of being broken with grief, I still can't muster a good reason why I should not suffer as they do.

Foolish thoughts, I know.