Those two flashes of green will haunt her for the rest of her life. They will invade her dreams and make her sweat, much like they always did to him.
The lord falls before the boy but the boy falls all the same.
There's the initial shock of this can't be happening, no no no, this couldn't happen. Oh but it did.
A scream of protest rips itself from her throat and every cell in her body is on fire as she runs to him. No one else moves and it's just him and her, one alive and one dead.
She begs him to wake up, please please please, but his eyes don't flutter open and his chest doesn't rise. He's frozen like that forever, a perpetual winter.
Even though the bad guy is dead, he still won. Their hero is gone. The boy with courage in his heart and goodness in his blood is gone.
She keeps begging him, tears falling on his center, but he gives her a resounding decline with his stillness.
The boy who lived is now the boy who died.