Shattered Tears
Tears were always a sign of weakness, even tears of happiness or of relief were signs of the fragile; when you cannot control your emotions and they bubble over and out through the eyes, soaking everything in their path, you can do nothing to stop them, no matter how much your befuddled mind tries to cease it. The heart pounds rhythmically, as it always does, the breath comes out in even sheets, as if nothing were different in the world. You can always depend on that fact, that even when you feel yourself spinning out of control, your body remains the same; as your head whirls and twists, and your heart shatters into tiny pieces, and little pearls of salty water emerge from your sad eyes, your body functions and remains as it was before the weakness came. Before everything changed.
He sat there, motionless, for hours; he couldn't quite remember when it was he'd even sat down. His eyes remained on the horizon, tears silently falling down without pause. The body on the ground before him remained lifeless, even when he prayed for it to all be a bad dream.
He prayed and wished and hoped that it was all some sort of mistake, a mean joke. He willed his friend, his cousin, to come back to life, to be filled with breath again. All around him was death and silence; bodies crumbled to the ground, swords busted and broken beside their previous owners. The stench of blood and gore was all he could smell.
As the sun rose over the mountains and cast an eerie glow around him, he wiped his eyes and stood up from the cold ground. His limbs were stiff, his throat tight, his eyes swollen; his helmet was clutched in his right hand, a sword in the other. He looked down on the ground at the lifeless body which had once been so full of joy and optimism and he cursed the gods.
How could this have happened. He'd been so sure it would all turn out all right in the end, as most things did eventually.
Spending all night sitting on the ground beside the body of your cousin was not something most did, but there was no alternative in his mind; he wouldn't have it any other way. Sobs echoed around him in the silence of the fields and he realized it was just him, only him, amongst all the burned corpses, the fallen men.
Something caught in his throat, another onset of tears, and he could bare it no longer. Swallowing and nodding at his departed friend, he put his helmet on, hoisted his sword and began to walk away.
There would come a day when he would feel better, there would come a day when he could think of his friend without grieving, and there would come a day when a smile would be on his face once more.
But that day was just as far off as the life he had once led, in a home where he felt safe and protected, in a home that was no more.