[Kransha]

Idruil’s horse skidded to a halt, braying ferociously as earth and lumps of grassy mulch sprayed up in swift torrents beneath the hooves of Ecthelion. As the horse reared forward, maneuvering into a stop, the man wedged firmly into the saddle threw himself off, swinging his legs up nimbly and landing with uncharacteristic, catlike agility, upon the cold, hard earth. His feet flew beneath him as he followed the trail and the sounds of life over the crest of a sloping hill and onto the other side, beneath a wispy shroud of gloom that lay, floating as a heavenly buoy in the sky above.

What he saw on the other side of the hill, followed closely behind by Aelimur and Roryn, was something that stopped him most abruptly. Though he’d always known that his eyes could barely see the road before him, the dulled letters on the upright stone that Maen knelt beside stood out to him, blazing as if they were aflame. Idruil’s pace slowed weakly as he moved towards Maen and Ferethor. Looking keenly upon the two, he quickly bent over to inspect the grave, just to confirm, and then stood again, looking down at Maen. Though his wits were merely as dull as they always were, he tried to manufacture some consolation for the woman before him, whose purpose had been so twisted by the deceased fiend who lay in the ground she knelt upon. Slowly, as she finished and a cold silence surrounded them all, he spoke.

“Lady Il Galoth…Maen” he corrected himself soberly, “…Do not despair…The deed you set out to do is done, even if it was time’s hand that dealt the blow that was rightfully yours…Guriel is dead, and he left a legacy here, as it says there on that stone, a legacy of hate…But you don’t have to take it with you into the future. You can leave it here, with Guriel, and make a new and better one for yourself. Guriel’s death here was not his victory. It was, as he said, his legacy that he left. Let Guriel lie where he is and move on. His death need not dictate that paths of others’ lives.”

He finished on a wholly philosophical note, his voice ringing in solemnity as it faded and died in his throat. He took a step back, his hand inadvertantly flitting to his sword. He had never used it, not at any leg of the journey. His rough-hewn fingers caressed the cool, chipped metal, antiquated in age, and ran along the jagged section of the halved crossguard, broken on the hilt as his broad blade hung in its withered scabbard. When he'd joined this adventure, he'd been considering how many voracious fiends he would at last get to cut down with the ruined weapon, but now he no longer cared. His hand dropped limp from the sword as he moved back, walking past Roryn and Aelimur, the last two to arrive.