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Merada's Grief

Thick fog, not unusual in the valley, had rolled in not long after dusk, and it was of a thicker, denser quality than usual, and it crept its wispy fingers in through any gap or crevice in the buildings. It was a strange, clammy night that kept the priest awake much later than he normally would. He sat near the fire, ears strained for a noise that might have been out of the ordinary in this otherwise quiet part of the country.

So it was that the priest was still up when he heard the sound of hooves on the gravelled road leading to the graveyard. He knew the strange cadence of the hoofbeats well: it belonged to the particular black horse that belonged to a woman who had lived - if you could call it that - nearby. Recently, the animal had found itself a new master, and after the ransacking of the place which the priest hadn't dared to think much about, was rarely seen in the area.

The priest shook himself as he took up the lantern he kept on the mantlepiece and wrapped his cloak tightly around himself as he reached the door and stepped out into the night. Stood on the edge of the raised decking at the front of the modest temple, he raised the lantern higher and caught the red shine of the uncanny steed's eyes. For a moment, there was only the night pressing in, the curling fog and the sound of the horse. Now was not the time for the living, the priest always felt; and even moreso on a moonless night such as this.

On this night, the ominous beast carried two upon her. One, a man wearing dark armour, his face concealed by a lower face mask, and the other a smaller figure sat in front of the man, bundled in furs. The man, the priest noted; seemed just as capable of fading into the gloom and fog as his mount.

"We need your services, priest." said the armoured man.

He had the Heartlands accent, the priest noted suspiciously. He held the lantern a little higher again, noting the stranger's use of 'we'.

"Yes, and in my experience the only kinds of people to need a priest at this time are murderers and fiends. So which are you?" the priest challenged.

"Then add a third kind."

The voice was so faint at first that the priest didn't realise where it came from, not until the armoured man's gaze drifted down to the bundle of white furs on the horse in front of him. As the furs shifted, a woman's face became visible. She was of middling age, with a weathered complexion reddened by tears. The priest's heart softened, and his tone changed when he saw the grief in her expression.

"Because I need my sons and husband buried." she said.

"I see, I'm sorry." the priest murmured.

His gaze flicked up to the armoured man once more, but there was no indication that the stranger had any bad intentions for the woman, and the priest decided that somehow, he was related to her. The priest let the pair dismount, though the armoured man handled the woman such care the priest wondered if he thought she was made of glass. As the armoured man bent to listen to the woman, the priest briefly saw black lines on the skin of the armoured man's face, though it was such a brief glimse that he couldn't tell if they were tattooed or merely painted on.

"Where are the um… departed?" the priest ventured, wondering if he had in fact fallen asleep by the fire a while ago.

He took a quick step back toward the temple door when the armoured man waved his arm and a purple light shone through the fog. Readying himself to fight a foul necromancer of something of that ilk, the priest found himself yet again somewhat ashamed of himself when all that happened was that three bodies appeared on the ground in front of him. Two of them were children, no more than eleven winters old, and the third a man around the same age as what the priest now realised was a grieving mother. She held out her hands to the priest, beseeching him for grave-rites.

"We came from the Heartlands." she said: "And we were abducted by bandits."

"You're a long way from the Heartlands." the priest said, sympathetically. "When do you need them buried?"

"The morning will do." replied the woman, her gaze locked on the faces of her children.

The priest followed her gaze and saw the mortal wounds that the bandits had clearly delivered to their children and he grimly noted that it was a small mercy that the children would have died quickly and without too much suffering. He rolled up his sleeves as the woman turned her head away, and the armoured man murmured something to her. The woman nodded and looked back at the priest.

"Please, take good care of them. They were all I had left."

The priest nodded, but his gaze drifted across to the armoured man. It was impossible to tell his features beneath the black, metal-reinforced mask, but his strange amethyst-coloured eyes were fixed on the woman. Briefly, the armoured man glanced up. Just as the priest opened his mouth to ask the woman if she really was alone, the armoured man lifted a finger to his mask in a shushing gesture. In response, the priest nodded weakly.

The woman turned around as the armoured man handed her a coinpurse and gently pointed her in the direction of the inn. It was unspoken kindness, the priest thought. She had no idea who this man was to her. As she disappeared into the fog, torch giving her some vision in the chill night air, the armoured man stared down at the corpses. Was this the armoured man's time to grieve, the priest wondered? If so…

"You'll have to forgive me, but my worker is in bed at this time. Would you be able to assist me?" he asked.

"… Yes, I'll help." the armoured man agreed.

There was a pain-filled care in the way the armoured man lifted the bodies of the children. A murmur so gentle that the priest couldn't hear what was said, but he'd seen enough grieving relatives to know its intent. The priest bowed his head and uttered not a word of comfort to the armoured man. It would have been empty words, clearly. He stood watch as the priest carried out the rites, washing their bodies clean before wrapping them in shrouds. Any costs, the armoured man wordlessly covered, and he dug the graves without complaint as the priest dozed.

As dawn arrived and the fog of the night began to lighten, the priest sat near a brazier with his cloak wrapped around him for warmth.

"I'm done." the armoured man said, shovel propped up against a low drystone wall.

The woman was stood by the three graves, wrapped in the white-fur cloak that was much too large for her, staring dully at the open graves with their contents already carefully placed within.

It wasn't quite day yet as the priest stifled a yawn, then stepped up to perform his duty in committing the dead to their rest. And as the first morning sunlight cut over the tops of the snow-covered mountains, the armoured man was gone, leaving the priest and the fur-cloaked woman in the graveyard. Tears had rolled down her face during the committal, but now that it was over, the woman was stoic once again.

"If you don't mind my asking, dear, did you know him?" the priest ventured.

"No, I don't think so." she replied, softly. "But he said I reminded him of his daughter, and he wouldn't have been able to leave me there."

Spurred by some internal monologue now, the woman added: "I was running from the bandits across a frozen lake. They were gaining on me, but then they were all pulled under the ice."

"They fell through?" the priest ventured, in a kindly way.

"No!" she snapped, sudden fire lighting her eyes: "He pulled them under! I saw his hand reach up and he pulled them down!"

The priest sat bolt upright as clammy fear crawled down his spine and he gripped the amulet around his neck tightly. "My child, he was under the ice?"

"That's what I said." she agreed, wrath fading as quickly as it had arrived.

She imitated the movement of a hand rising seamlessly through an unseen surface, her gaze locked on the temporary markers for the three new graves. Briefly, she hugged her arms, her gaze distant.

The priest swallowed hard and realised that his mouth was dry. But he knew when to be quiet and he listened as she talked, though the priest's dread was unfathomable. Eventually, he put his hand on her shoulder. He went to speak and the woman sat up a little more, the life returning to her eyes as she uttered a sudden thought.

"You know, my mother said my father was born greedy." she said.

"Wanting more than what a bandit or a farmer's life could give him. I think I'll look for him. My mother always told me, if my father goes missing, I need to look for the trouble. He'll be in the middle of it somewhere."

The priest chuckled and gestured in the direction of the town, nestled amongst the towering pines of the valley.

"My child, trouble finds its way here, one way or another. Why, just two months ago some den of murderers was burned out just past that rise in the ground. I can't say that I regret that it was destroyed, but not a single one of the soldiers attacking it survived. There is a werewolf in the jail, and rumours of a talking dog outside the town."

The woman smiled thinly as she straightened up, work-roughened fingers stroking the soft white fur of her cloak. "And a strange masked man wrapping a farmer's daughter in a fine cloak and taking her to a graveyard in the dead of night so she can bury her family?"

"Yes… that too." the priest conceded.

The woman had already walked up the path by the time he replied, and she was unseen now behind the veil of fog, leaving the priest alone in the graveyard with three new graves.

If it hadn't been for those, the priest might almost have thought it had all been a peculiar dream. From somewhere in the high peaks of the mountains that surrounded the valley, a dragon roared. At such a great distance it had lost much of its power and as the wind carried the sound away it seemed not unlike a gull circling above a harbour.

"Ah yes," the priest sighed: "How could I forget about the dragons?"

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