So it ends.

[Bold: 10]

Should she have shown it mercy? Should she have spared it in its majesty as she might wish that someone would spare her? Would one act of kindness undo a lifetime of hunts? Would an act of gentleness here at the edge of her life somehow indicate that she had learned, that she was ready for change? Or would it be a promise unkept, a larder unfilled, a quest failed?

A priest might know. Robena knows how to hang the deer, cut the throat, drain the blood, flay the skin, remove the organs, sever the antlers, clean the body, and mount the remains on horseback for transportation. Does doing what she knows represent an unrepentant failure to change her ways? Perhaps. But she knows no other way to be. She has lived her life as a knight and to discard the rituals and skills she developed as a knight would be to face death as helpless as a newborn babe. The blood washes away in the pool the deer hoped to drink from. So it ends.

She does not know the rules or the rhyme of these faerie folk, the prophetic nymph whose colt moves with the grace of a unicorn, the enchantment that turns dead women to mist and stars. She knows now that her simple struggles now take place against a stranger background, playing in tune to a song she doesn't know the steps to even if she had the feet to dance. If she had her time again she might not have been a knight. Being a knight, all she can think to do in this moment is conduct herself as a knight ought. 

And if she can conduct herself as a knight ought then that, at least, will be change real and true. A sage, a prophet, a mystic she shall never be. But a knight? Perhaps she can manage that. If she is lucky she shall have a few more days to be so.