Disclaimer: Anything you recognise belongs to the Tolkien Estate, New Line Cinema, or possibly Brian Herbert.
Ci-gît
In dawns of frost they march again. Down the long road from the citadel, not in song, or with accoutrements of metal jangling, but in a multitude of silent order. In their left hand each grasps the haft of a broken sword. The rime has advanced on their shoulders, fixing the stars of blood that show like red glass in the grey morning. Their banners are folded. Their feet are wrapped in cloth. The whisper of their passage is like the steady piling up of snow.
In our dream, or theirs, we stand at the side of the road: women, boys and grandsires, clad in black, throwing at their feet the thyme that perfumes the dead. They do not look at us. They cannot speak. They do not reach out with their frozen hands. They gaze ahead and walk ahead in perfect unison, toward the great plain and the mountain over which the sun never climbs.
We do what we can: sweep the flagstones clean of snow, raise mounds of stones, take stock of offices that were assumed too lightly. On the hilltop is a tree whose roots entangle graves. It has grown; if one day they would turn and see it, they would say, Here drinks a thousand of us. It is a long struggle to make it worthy of one. In life they might have been as flawed as we, but on their march they pass and find us wanting. We only know that we are given time; that after dreams stalled in ice we can wake to changing weather, and days marked out by tasks, and the autumn succeeding the spring.
One day, they will not march away. They will turn back to us, so that we may tend them, and wash the blood and frost from their faces. We may not warm them, but we will unfold their banners and see the emblems that they carried, and cover them, neighbour or outlander, with those emblems in their tomb. And there will be time, then, to hold a feast, to break cups and to bring new cups for the new wine, to celebrate inheritors and scattered households reformed.
This is what we do, since men first laid dwellings in a circle; for the dead have no place in the time they win, unless we find it.
