She had taken the train to Holm three days before the anniversary of his death. She’d only known he was gone fourteen years, nine months and three days, but coming for his actual death instead of its reporting made more sense, and besides, this was when she could get off work. She needed to see the place he died, to set foot on the same ground he’d been standing on in his last moments. She needed to, sometime, and had put it off all those years. She figured fifteen was as good of a number as any.

She was thirty-five, and unmarried. She was unmarried, because she was meant to marry Jonathan. They would have been married June 9; he was supposed to have been back three months before that. But the war dragged on, and he wasn’t even back by September 9. It was September 12 that her suspicions were confirmed.

She blamed him at first. Screamed at the wall where his picture still hung in her apartment. Blamed him for not coming back when he was supposed to. Yelled at him for not coming back at all.

Then she blamed the Powers that Be. But not God – oh, no, she prayed every day, although she wasn’t quite sure what for at that point; just knelt in the chapel for hours and hours in front of the cross, rocking on her heels, letting the tears stream down her cheeks there when she wouldn’t anywhere else. No, the Powers that Be on Earth: the government that sent their soldiers to war, the government they were fighting against, the commander that sent her Jon to the battlefield that day. Sent him to his death the day he was meant to get married.

But now, now all that was left was to blame herself. It was her own fault for caring so much.

She repeated this to herself as she stood on Holm’s edge, looking out across the fields, so peaceful now under a blanket of rye. There had been blood and bodies covering these fields once. The golden light from the sky cast a haze on everything.

It was her own fault. She’d thought this no small number of times. But here, as she stood on the edge of the battlefield that had claimed him; it was as desolate as ever. There was no longer any sign of the destruction that had followed in the wake of the two armies, aside from a plaque beneath a regal-looking statue that could have been any soldier who had never seen a battle. No one could emerge from such a scene as proud as that statue. No one.

If they emerged at all. Jon had emerged from plenty of other battles.

She stepped a foot off of the packed-dirt road into the gangly grasses that covered the expanse dedicated to the mockery of her misery.

She stepped into intolerable pain. She almost shrieked, but convinced herself that the agony was purely mental. She continued along going nowhere, because there wasn’t really anywhere else to go. Out into the field where the soldiers passed.

She kept holding in her screams, although she supposed it didn’t matter. No one would hear her, she realized as shte twisted in a slow circle, taking in the scene that had haunted her for so long. Even though she’d never set foot or eye upon it until now.

She couldn’t see the town. The horizon seemed higher than it should be; perhaps that was why she couldn’t see Holm. She must be standing in some sort of bowl formation of the landscape. Odd; the land had seemed almost perfectly flat from the edge of the fields. Perhaps she’d come further than she thought. She must have. Perhaps the monotony of color had hidden the true nature of the field.

The pain was becoming intolerable. She had to keep moving.

She could’ve sworn she felt a hand grasping at her ankle. But there was no shot fired. There were no moaning voices pleading for a nurse, or just someone to comfort them in their last moments. No enemy troops taking her hostage, pushing her along. She reassured herself that this was all her imagination.

The horizon, with its setting sun, was not a nearly-blood shade, not any more so than any other evening. The ground always reflected the shades so. She kept walking, and it was purely of her own accord, not because of the gun shoved between her shoulder blades. She’d get out of this depression soon enough, if she just kept going. It was not being able to see another soul. That was it. It was the shades falling alongside twilight, when pieces of the sun fell away.

It was the shades coming down where he lay for his last breath…

Please, don’t desert me again…