Requiem
Home is the sailor, home from the sea
It was a beautiful day, indeed. For a sailor, the wind was where it ought to be and they were making good time. It was just the kind of day that made you feel that all was right with the world. The ship was truly beautiful, a product of fifty years of study and thousands of years of trial and ingenuity. She simply flowed from stem to stern, a delicate blend of comfort, stability and speed. She was a vessel fit for a king. And a king she carried. Caspian X, called the Seafarer.
They were homeward bound, from a wild goose chase of a journey, but they had succeeded in the end. Many searched and many found, but few actually ever saw, the Lion. Caspian had seen him and when he had finally returned to the ship, there was a calmness in his face that shot the Captain through with dread. The king had been ordered home.
Now, all was well, but still things were said. It was rumored amongst the crew that this wind that blew them towards Narnia was a wind of death. There were those who said all would be well, but they all knew, inside, that they were aboard what was a funeral barge.
The King was dying.
The Captain looked back towards the sail, pulling hard above him, sending the ship singing through the waves. If he could have willed it, he would have stopped the wind and stopped time, let it hang suspended in the air. But he could not and it would not have been right.
The King was dying.
For fifty years, he had reigned; the Captain had watched him grow from boyhood, to strong manhood, had seen the changing seasons in his face. His hair that had been touched with gold was now snowy white, though his thin hands still gripped the cold hilt of his sword. He was not old, he had only reached his sixth decade, yet he walked like a man of eighty.
The King was dying.
Death grew inside of him, winding its tendrils around his heart and lungs and squeezing the life from him the way the crab squeezed the life from it's pray. The death of his wife had brought him to his knees and the disappearance of his son had leveled him, but it was more than that, he had been dying for many years.
"Bring me home," Caspian had whispered when he had seen Aslan that final time and the distant stars were touching the sky. "Bring me home."
And though he had not spoken the rest of the sentence, the Captain knew what he meant. "Bring me home and there will I die."
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
~o*o~
This be the verse you 'grave for me:
Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
~Robert Lewis Stevenson
Author's Note: This is Rose's story alone. She thought it up and wrote the first paragraph and a half. I only took over when she had a mental block, but wrote according to her plan. She had often thought that Caspian was young to die as he was only supposed to have been in his sixties, so she postulates that he had some sort of terrible illness that could not be cured.
~Psyche
