And Thou No Breath At All

POV: Martin

Tears streamed unbidden down his cheeks, his face in left hand, as his right clung to a handful of freshly turned earth. After eighty years, she was gone, gone beyond recall or healing, and his heart was utterly shattered. He knelt there by her grave and wept.

Grief is a strange thing. It makes one so terribly tired. Whatever strength he had left was taken by the sobs he could not control. Rain drizzled down as if the heavens themselves shared in his pain. Soaked through to the bone, he would probably some nasty illness. He cared not.

His beloved daughter was dead. Einan. Einan, dead. The words sounded wrong, they didn't belong together, didn't belong near each other. The two concepts were utterly alien. Einan, so full of life and love and beauty. Dead. The words repeated themselves in his head over and over again. This must be some nightmare, some hideous, foul, cursed spell. This simply could not be real, could not be true. It was too awful to be real, too terrible to be true. No, no, no. It must be some heinous lie, some hoax, some horrid trick played by an imp with a bad sense of humour. This was too cruel, too, too cruel.

Wiping the tears away with the back of his hand, he glared hatefully at the sight before him. There was her grave. Grave. Graves, where the corpses of the dead reside. Before they buried it, he had seen her body: lifeless, joyless, empty, and cold. How? How could this be so? His eyes must be lying to him. He ought to pluck them out for playing such a prank as this.

As if from another world, the words of the poem broke through the fog and forced themselves in amidst his thoughts.

"When from Love's shining circle the Gems drop away, when true hearts lie withered, and fond ones are flown, who would inhabit this bleak world alone?"

He let out a strangled scream and a curse and a shout, and the tears returned once more.


Some time later, he knew not how long, he heard a voice and felt a hand placed softly on his shoulder.

"Grandfather?"

He couldn't move. Couldn't turn his head. Even the tears were gone now. Only his grief remained. Cloth rustled as his granddaughter knelt beside him, her own voice cracking in sorrow.

"Grandfather, look at me."

Blinking the rainwater from his eyes, he stared at the sodden ground beneath him as if in a daze. She spoke again:

"We do not mourn as those who are without assurance."

"No," he replied. "No. But we still mourn."

She hugged him and the tears came again.


A/N: The title is, of course, a reference to King Lear: "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?"

The poem quoted is "The Last Rose of Summer," by Thomas Moore.

The granddaughter's comforting sentence is 1st Thessalonians, Chapter 4, Verse 13.

I haven't given up on Knight of the Vial; the hope is to post the completed story within the next fortnight.