I

Drizzle dampens her blue-grey robes and makes

the dark curls adhere to the back of her

neck, clinging to her form like a second

garment.  She gazes across the lake,

trying to part the curtain, peering through

the mists, searching for the proper passage.

She thinks back, recalling too many lives

pulled apart by strife and the wars of faith,

of so many who were young together

now fallen.  She thinks on all those whose ends

she has witnessed, all the mortality,

those memories which will ever haunt her.

And now, sodden and near-sobbing on the

shores of neglected water, she wonders

if she acted fairly and justly, or

if perhaps just this once, in honour of

most extraordinary circumstances,

the easy path and the right coincide.

Her path was never a simple one, nor

a road free of brambles or ditches, and

yet every step echoed with certain

assurance that this choice was the correct

one, that nothing else would do.  But now, with

the world around her feet, she does wonder.

Could she have done something differently,

and spared her fellows all this pain?  Was there

another way, one she did not see, one

that did not end with total and complete

destruction, chaos, annihilation

of her way of life, and of all she knows?

Or did things come to pass precisely as

they were meant to?  Did she play the part which

her Lady intended, faithfully and

true to the design?  Fatalistic, she

can only conclude this final truth, that

what could have happened did, to the right end.

Drawing steel into her veins, she seizes

the blade by the hilt, gripping it with the

focused intensity of her kind and

the determination of a fighter. 

The king who carried the weapon does not

move to stop her, can not summon the strength.

Or perhaps he can not summon the will,

knowing as she does what must be done.  So

in small hands, she lifts the legendary

sword above her head and swings it in a

circle, with the unsaid prayer: -Take it back,

Lady, and give us our souls in return.-

The noble sword falls into the lake with

not so much a splash as a shimmer.  She

stumbles backwards, falling next to her

troubled kinsman, staring at the silver

ripples amid the murky blue.  –It is

done- she breathes.  –At last, we are free of it.-

But with those fading ringlets go the last

vestiges of her world and ways.  It will

all fall into the mists, as she does now,

lost and forgotten, truth fading to myth

and disappearing into shadow.  –We

few, we who know- she whispers –all are lost-.