Ethel

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.

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.

“Ethel, are you awake?”

There was no reply, though the corn-haired girl muttered slightly and hugged the blanket around herself.