A Shieldmaiden's Mourning.

One moment he was there, and the next he was gone, and I hadn’t even known it.

I had fought for him, done for him, cared for him as best I could for so long, it was a shocking kind of emptiness to know that… he is gone. The responsibility is over. The helplessness is over. The life…

I would love no one quite like him; I knew this with the same certainty that told me my heart was still beating, my lungs were still breathing. The man who had raised me, had turned me into the woman I saw in the mirror, was no more. To whom will I turn with my cares and my questions? There is no one, now, to talk with as we did. Weak though he had been, and tired and sapped of his strength, he had still always been the man that raised me… the first man I remembered loving me. My heart had swelled to see him when he was tall and strong. My heart had wept to see him tired and strained. And yet, he had always been there, his very presence a comfort, even when his mind was elsewhere.

It was not the Witch King’s blow that left me for dead there on that field; it was the breaking of my heart.