So. I don't know how I feel about this. But it still made me cry the morning after I finished it, so I think it must not be too trashy.

Illeandir
Ellowyne

Not sure if anyone else has asked to see it, but anyway, there aren't any book spoilers involved.

***

The raiders came up over the Ediyam Eirl, drunk with the cold fires of bloodlust. They were far from their usual scavenging grounds, but it was late summer and the days were long.

Far off under the grey sky, small and distinct in the treeless fields of the Raesir, a dark rift of motion forged steadily westwards. They saw it and turned their noses to it like hounds, teeth bared in fierce growls of laughter — fresh quarry. Before the lurking sun descended halfway from its peak, they had overtaken him.

He was a lone man, the pale light glancing off his white hair, his face furrowed with the lines of life. His keen eyes, undimmed with whatever count of years rested upon his narrow shoulders, surveyed them quietly as they swarmed in a ring about him. "Do you know who I am?" he asked.

The wry, strangely dispassionate tone gave none of them pause. A howl of nays answered him. "Nor do we care!"

Not a word did the man speak in answer, though his shoulders twitched in a shrug as wry as the tone, and his eyes continued their steady assessment of the numbers surrounding him.

The quietness and total indifference checked them at last. Confusion, the forerunner of uncertainty, rippled through their ranks. "Old man," shouted one of them, insolence carrying in the designation, "look about you! You are outnumbered."

The traveler's brows shot up in surprise, as though at some remarkable stupidity. "That much anyone with eyes can see," he returned.

"Be you blind and witless? We are the etethimi, the ravagers, and we have not come for parley or sup! Do you not know what you face, old man? Have you no fear?"

The man laughed. Hitherto his face had only shown the dry ghost of humor, as though life were grown too heavy to laugh any longer, but now he laughed aloud, albeit briefly, without scorn or bitterness. "I have seen wars, devastation, kings, and darkness, without finding cause for fear. Now after a century and more on this earth, I am to begin to fear the face of man? I think not."

"If you think you can prevail against the thirty of us, you be sore mistaken," growled a second spokesman, as dissatisfied jeers began to rise up from the shifting band. They were after sport, not this outright disregard, and the man's calm was thwarting their bloodlust into anger.

"I don't expect to," was the dry reply. A small, thin measure of rope dangled from his hand; as the uproar grew, he shrugged loose the stave strapped behind him, and in a movement of shoulder-corded strain, had bent and strung his bow. "I daresay you would all appreciate knowing that you've slain Jedediah Crayes. But I shouldn't go noising it about, you know; the law doesn't take kindly to the killing of its living legends."

The men, so raucous moments ago, fell into a heavy silence.

"You — Jedediah Crayes?" one ventured at last. There was more mockery in his Fearnish-thick accent than doubt. The mockery caught amongst them, and they all laughed derisively. One hurled a stone, and though he spun aside, it caught him above the eye and blood spurted down his lean, withered cheek.

"You, a witless, frail old fool!"

"A wind could blow through thy husk of a face!"

"We are not children to be cozened!"

They all had a word to say, and all of them were lost in the crescendoeing tumult of everyone's words.

"I am the greatest person in the world."

Jedediah Crayes waited silently, three arrows in his fingers, the bow loosely at the ready. It was better to rely on instinct and reflexes, he had long ascertained, slow though the reflexes might be, than to strain his waning strength by nocking before the time.

The breaking point came in their frenzy, but he had marked it long before it happened; the ways of a mob were merely another language to read. He was already lifting the bow as they surged forward, and twice, with the speed of long practice, he fired into the closing thicket. There was no time for the third. He drove it like a dagger into one raging face, letting it splinter, and hurled the bow away. The shrill cries of pain echoed and swelled with the roars of anger about him.

"Some of us were born to bear the face of evil with ease."

The mob grew hungrier. He was quick between their bodies, a water eel that thirty hands could not grasp all at once, but not quick enough. His instincts, so ready to gauge the the temper of a man, the mood of a crowd, and the balance of a fight, had never once betrayed him, and they were telling him that he could not win this.

And so, barring intervention of a higher ilk — it was never wise to rule those out — he would not.

"I'm not, as I hope you're aware, actually invincible."

The mob grew tighter, like a clenching fist, pinning him on every side in harsh anticipation. Berethar would have been able to see the humanity beneath them. It had never been easy for Jedediah Crayes to do the same.

He caught his foot on a corpse and stumbled. The mob was looking for it, like wolves waiting till the falter to spring upon their prey, and because he knew they were wolves, he wrenched himself up before he knew he had fallen; and they closed in harder, angry, denied. But they also smelled triumph on the air.

The swift reaction had cost him. He was breathing hard and ragged now, and there was no opportunity to recollect. Sword in one hand, knife in the other, he battled on, and death visited in his wake, but not so lightly as before. A blunt blow landed on his shoulder, another knocked against his ribs.

And yet the keen eyes held no panic or despair. Only that same steady indifference.

He was tired.

"I don't have any friends, and you're certainly not one of them."

The sky was grey. A small band of marauders, twenty-two in number, converged upon their lone victim. He fought with a strange grace and purpose that seemed to speak of something just beneath human sight, something vast in breadth and terribly deep. An old man, with white hair and weariness in his eyes.

A spear-butt struck him behind the head, and he fell. Up he staggered again, the grace still prevailing in his dazed and tottering movements. Another spear came, drove upward into his lungs and hurled him back to the rough grass, the lean, lithe body folding on itself in sudden slightness.

The world spun away, swifter and swifter, and he watched it fade; but a burden lifted from him, and though he had never grudged the weight, to feel it depart was a strangely welcome release.

So — it ends.

I am coming, Master.

***

When Jedediah Crayes died, he was 137 years old. With a legaeësse for a grandfather, he might have lived longer still, but he never knew how to slow down. Nothing could stop him from the work he loved best; he would not even retire from the Legean Association, as most had by the time they were seventy or eighty. His eyesight, always so piercing, stayed with him to the end, a fitting metaphor for his foundational grasp of truth. His mother, in indubitable foresight, had named him "Jedeh Ediya," or translated from Fearnish, "One who walks in truth".

Jedediah Crayes outlived all his close friends, even his "surrogate grandsons". The losses did not break him -- Jedediah Crayes was made of unusual resilience in the face of hardship and evil -- but they drained him. He had loved deeply, matter-of-factly, and loyally, the very thing that he had tried to avoid and had denied for so many years. He was weary of life.

Jedediah Crayes never in his life feared the face of man. Nor did he fear death, as many times as he faced it in his long and dangerous life. He knew that his life was in the hands of one who knew when his time was finished.

"For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.But if I live on in the flesh, this will mean fruit from my labor; yet what I shall choose I cannot tell. For I am hard-pressed between the two, having a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better." - Philippians 1:21-13