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Battlefields

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I dreamed, thought, remembered. Memories used to rise like wraiths in the night, and I could not escape them.

For fifteen years, I have remembered the dark forests, the brooding mountains, the blue mists and the purple heather. I have thought of stone and slate, of valleys filled with fog and ferns. Sprays of blood. Sobbing. Clear and lovely ponds rimmed with ice at twilight; pebbles with mantles of moss, green and soft. Teetering on the edge of starvation during those terrible winters. The bone-deep ache of homesickness through the long years. Clay pitchers of mead, foreign and strange. The call of birds, bubbling sweetly through the petal-pink dawn.

No more.

Your friends arrived as the north wind blew down from the distant mountains; with the flurries of twisting snowflakes and tumbling, iron-tinted clouds. They returned your horse and weapons, and they gave your sister back her pendant. Your sister, Lancelot: your sister, who slept for fifteen years with her face turned towards the west, pillows propped against her back lest she accidentally turn away from you in the night.

No more.

Your brave parting words sustained your mother – do not be afraid. I will return – but I knew better. I knew Britannia. I knew her horrors, her beauties, her dangers. I feared for you as no one else could, with every fibre of my scarred and war-torn heart. My worries kept me awake at night, the cold sweat casting a sickly sheen over my face and legs. I remembered woads, and mud, and blood; I awoke with the rank stench of fear in my nostrils.

No more.

You are never coming home. I have nothing left to fear, to remember. I need no longer lose sleep, to turn my face to the west wind and pray, to fiercely pray and beg the gods to watch over you. They did not, in the end. They left me with ashes, two swords and a weary horse, and a gaping emptiness inside my chest.

I dream of battlefields no more, my son.

No more.