The hill breathed beneath the evening wind like the breast of some sleeping thing. Long grasses rolled across its slopes in darkening waves, an endless green sea drowning slowly beneath the dusk-bloodied amber of the setting sun. The last warmth of day lingered heavily upon the earth, but beneath it crept another scent already rising from the world below, a promise of cold wind, distant rain, leaves beginning their slow surrender to autumn, their proud green moist with life, changing slowly into gold rustling parchments, whispering with the stories of the spring and summer.

Far away, almost swallowed by the gathering dusk, fairy bells chimed softly, their melody poignant, bringing fear into the ears of the few who recognised this ominous portent; others mistook it for the song of the blackbird.

The wind moved through the hilltop in long sighing breaths, stirring cloaks, hair, the heads of dying grasses. It seemed to circle the mourners restlessly, as though searching among them for someone no longer there.

At the crown of the hill the mourners gathered around a grave that held no body.

There should have been one.

The earth had been freshly turned. Black soil still clung wetly to the edges of the mound-pit, and the grass around it lay flattened beneath the heavy boots of those who had carried the dead there before dawn. Yet no corpse rested upon the bier. No pale hands folded over stillness. No face prepared for farewell.

Instead, a sword stood driven upright into the earth, its blade catching the last red-gold rays of sunset so fiercely it seemed aflame.

Beside it rested Miren’s empty armour.

And from the hollow steel the roses poured. Not gently, not as ivy overtakes forgotten stone. They burst from the armour as though forced upward by a living heart still beating beneath the metal. Thick tangles of thorned stems spilled through the gaps in the cuirass. Crimson blossoms thrust themselves from the joints of the gauntlets and flowered violently through the ribs. Roses crowded the gorget and climbed from the open visor in such abundance that the helmet appeared to retch with them.

Blood-red and summer-rich, impossible.

The fragrance spread thickly through the evening air, sweet as ripened fruit, heavy as fresh blood. No one among the gathered touched the blooms.

Fresh graves did not flower.

Not in the dying days of summer. Not on the edge of autumn, when the earth turns inward toward decay and slumber. Yet these roses bloomed with feverish life, as though the season itself had paused to mourn her passing.

The old women standing among the mourners crossed themselves in silence.

For the old songs had always spoken of such things.

When maidens died carrying too much sorrow, lilies sometimes rose from their graves. When lovers perished unjustly, birches rooted where their hearts had ceased their beating. And when women of fierce spirit and tragic devotion were claimed before their hour, the earth answered with wild roses.

Their thorns held pain, their blossoms held memory. So the stories said. And now the stories bloomed alive before them.

Miren had not perished into the grave. The land itself refused claiming the one who passed before her time.

She had been a woman in the full blaze of life, a noble warrior, a lady with a heart of fire and gold, a rider of the Northern Moors. Beautiful in the way of the sun after a storm shining upon the steel of the victorious and the fallen. Men had followed her into hopeless battles because she carried victory in her voice. Children had run laughing beside her horse along the banks of the Vista River, weaving flowers into its silver mane. Rulers of both human and non-human realms had distrusted her because lesser souls always fear those burning too brightly.

And now she was not there. Dead, and yet, even in death, free, unclaimed by a grave.

The last rose of summer.

The thought passed silently among the mourners, though none dared speak it aloud.

For Miren had always seemed made of summer things, of golden afternoons, burning with midday sun fields, wine-filled laughter of revels, unbearable sunlight before a storm. Looking upon the roses erupting from her empty armour, it seemed impossible that autumn had not merely followed her death, but rather had entered the world because of it. She lingered in the wind moving through the grass, her presence evoked by the warm scent of sunlit earth, and by the flight of swallows cutting the sky with their swift wings, by the reddening sky held the fire that had once sparkled behind her eyes.

Around the grave stood all those who had loved her differently; each understanding too late what she had truly been or could have been to them.

Nearest the sword stood the woman who had ridden beside Miren for half her life. Age had silvered strands of her dark, cropped hair long before its time, and the years of war had written themselves into her body and face without mercy. Yet there was still graceful prowess dwelling in her long, battle-hardened, muscly limbs, a trace of stiffness in the left hand resting against her cloak, an old wound taking its toll, and the fine pale scars crossing her left cheek with a bone-white kiss on her sunburnt copper skin. She stood upright still, but with the weary discipline of one who remains standing only because of the memory of all those who have fallen.

She watched the sunset burn across the blade’s bright edge and thought how cruelly alike they were, the dying sun and the dead warrior. Both magnificent precisely because they did not remain for long, blazing bright, but then giving way to darkness, light dissolving into an endless night.

And yet she lived still, she who was twice Miren’s age.

She had expected death in a hundred different forms across a hundred battlefields, every time seeing a raven, wondering if it would be the one who will feast upon her motionless body. With each day, each spring passing she felt age settling in her bones, she felt descending into winter of her life, cold and chill creeping on her even in the warmest of the summer days, ice prickling her hands and legs when she asked too much of them, she felt the soft promise of death lingering around her, her own passing she would greet with arms open, without surprise.

Instead, it had passed over her entirely and taken Miren. Her Miren. Her Sun.

The fire-filled girl who possessed the blazing certainty of youth, whose laughter would startle birds from trees. Miren, who rode as though the world itself belonged to her, the green meadows, green hills and forests dark, blue skies and grey seas, and misty mountains black. Carrying a terrible brightness possessed only by those who have not yet learned they are mortal, she seemed divine.

Gazing with her dark eyes upon the empty armour flowering with impossible roses, the older woman felt a stabbing ache in her chest, right under her left breast. After all, the young were not meant to become legends before the old had become ghosts.

The intoxicating scent of roses thickened around her with every passing moment. Crushed petals. Warm earth. Sweetness already beginning to rot with sweetness toward pungent decay beneath the cooling air of evening. The smell of summer dying.

She wondered suddenly, with a piercing, dagger-like clarity, whether that was what love had always smelled like. Not as springtime, full of hope and beginnings, filled with new blossoms, but as the final rose blooming too late in the year, heavy with fragrance before frost will cut her last moments, her last bloom.

For years, she had mistaken the shape of her devotion. She had named it loyalty at first. A bond filled with well-earned admiration, a sort of fellowship that can be forged only in war. Only now, taking in the heavy scent of the roses blooming where Miren’s body ought to have lain, did she recognize the truth.

Love.

The realization entered her softly as a knife slipping between ribs, the ache in her chest turning unbearable, squeezing a choked gasp from her lips.

And like the miracle before her, it had come late, too late.

Yet some wounded part of her could not entirely believe Miren gone entirely. The wind touched her cheek with familiar gentleness. The grasses bowed and rose in waves like breath beneath blankets. Above them, the first evening star appeared, pale and watchful. The world was still too full of Miren. Longing for death, she hoped to find life in the traces of her that she vowed to protect and guard, till her last breath would mingle with the rotten sweet scent of the dying sun.

Not far from the grave stood the man who had once called Miren his enemy.

A proud human, born among kingdoms that taught fear of the Not-Human from the cradle, lullabies of his people filled with fear and suspicion, planting seeds of hatred into soft hearts of the babes towards the Other Folk, the fae-born, the ancient peoples lingering beyond forests and shorelines. Yet beside him stood the woman to whom he gave his heart to, wrapped in mourning-dark silks.

A lady of Free People, one who humanity calls a siren. She used to be one, before falling in love with a mortal man who gave her his heart. A siren of the deep sea waters, one of those whose voices could draw on desires and memories from the hearts of men like tides drawing ships toward shore, leading them to their demise. Yet his heart moved her, too pure and too hot with devotion to be devoured, it could scorch her tongue with fire of love. For his sake, she had surrendered that voice, giving away her power by birthright, binding herself forever to silence so she might remain beside him on land in the mortal world.

Once, before their paths had crossed, he had believed Miren hated creatures like her, seeing her as one of his main enemies. The songs of men had painted Miren as a warrior of human realms, a rider beneath iron banners, a slayer of anything and anyone who brought fear into human hearts. Believing those stories was easier than seeking the truth of Miren’s motivations and deeds. But truth had revealed itself upon the battlefield where the fate of humanity weighed against the freedom of the Free People. He still remembered fire spreading beneath the night sky, human armies driving the fae folk toward annihilation beneath angry cries of righteousness and holy war. And he remembered his voiceless wife cornered amid slaughter, she, without her voice, rendered powerless, he not close enough to come to her rescue. Just when he thought that he would lose the keeper of his heart, Miren stood before her, like a living shield blazing with righteous fury. She wielded a blade, raised not against the Not-Human, but against her own kind, her eyes filled with fire that rendered her more inhuman than any fae folk.

She had held the line alone long enough for the Free People to escape the fields of would-be massacre. Long enough for mercy to survive where hatred would not, and for the allied forces to arrive, driving away the remnants of mindless cruelty.

But there was a price to be paid, one she bore with her own life.

Now the sombre man stood before the flowering grave, unable to reconcile the legends with the woman he had witnessed dying. Beside him, his silent wife lowered her silver gaze toward the roses erupting with crimson force from the empty armour. Something ancient moved briefly through her expression then, not surprise, but recognition. Among the Free People, such things were remembered, things about the souls, how some of them returned to the sea and to trees, and some, the most beloved and most sorrowful alike, flowered back into the living earth. The wind stirred softly through the blood-red blooms.

The siren closed her eyes.

And though no voice remained to her use, grief still seemed to sing through the evening air, filling her silver eyes with pearly tears.

Beyond them stood an old soldier who occupied himself more with observing the land rather than the mourners. He had long ago learned not to look too closely at grief, not to poison his heart with bitter pain it always brought. Grief became dangerous when given faces. He preferred to watch the world around, the undulating grass, the birds circling above, the slow bruising of the sky before nightfall, the circle of life unfolding. He watched burials of too many heroes to romanticize glory in death anymore. Youth always imagined victory as something golden: banners flapping in sunlight, songs echoing through great halls, names surviving long after flesh failed. But the old soldier knew what heroism truly brought. Tears. Empty seats near the fireside. Burned villages. Mothers bending over closed coffins, or the ones waiting endlessly for the return of those lost. Fresh graves dug before the dead had even grown cold.

The world fed upon heroes greedily, always demanding more and more, heedless of the price to be paid. That was exactly why he had survived for so long, for he never once played at being a hero. He fought when necessary, obeyed when convenient, and never offered the world more of himself than survival required. Some men of similar disposition and hardened hearts called him practical. Others, sometimes no more courageous, called him a coward behind his back. Yet he had lived among the fields of the dead, a shadow moving among old and fresh graves. He looked now upon the impossible roses blooming through the armour of a girl scarcely old enough to deserve such songs, and something inside him shifted with quiet violence.

For Miren had done the one thing he never had, she had paid the full price willingly. Not seeking glory, nor fame, bleeding not for empty titles and quarrelling kingdoms, but because, at the end, she had chosen staying true to herself, and to the people, over hollow survival.

The old soldier lowered his eyes toward the darkening earth. For the first time in many years, cynicism no longer felt like wisdom to him, instead, it filled him with bitter exhaustion.

The earth always endured.

That was both its cruelty and mercy. He found he no longer wished to spend what remained of his life feeding young souls into it. By dawn, he decided, he would lay down his sword forever.

Among them moved the poet in grave silence, his gestures muffled by an invisible veil of thoughts, gathering sorrow into rhythms, bringing the dead into life again, before the last light had even faded. He felt what most of the gathered could not–that Miren no longer belonged wholly to those assembled upon the hill. By winter her story would travel farther than any armies, human or fae ones.

He would make sure of it, singing of the empty grave of the knight whose empty armour bloomed with roses.

Of the sun-drenched, lionhearted, fire-filled woman who died defending those her homeland feared. Of the warrior whose soul entered the roots of the earth beside The Hills of Memory, usually strewn with light blue of forget-me-nots and dark blue of cornflowers, not the blood red of dying suns.

The sun descended lower. Its final rays burned through the roses until their petals seemed wet with living flame. The mourners waited in reverent silence for the last edge of light to disappear beyond the world. Only then could the rites begin.

At last, the woman nearest the grave knelt beside the flower-filled armour. Carefully, she reached toward the blooms. The thorns pierced her fingers painfully, drawing bright beads of blood, but she did not recoil. Slowly, reverently, she gathered the roses one by one and began weaving them into a crown.

A queen had arrived upon the hill at dusk, young still, uncertain beneath the cumbersome inheritance reeking of old grievances, and yet with flowers of fragile-petaled hope awaiting her. The people parted before her in silence as she approached the grave where no body lay.

The woman warrior rose with slow dignity, her hands stiff, but sure, only her lips trembling. Without speaking, she placed the crown of blood-red roses upon the young queen’s brow.

A blessing and a warning, the young queen accepted it with a bow, surprising the gathered; her eyes shone, yet not with tears–determination filled them to the brim. Although young, she would remember, and she would let this moment mark the days of her rule. She longed for light, not of war fires, but of golden sun and merry bonfires, and she would not let the price paid go to waste.

Then something moved beyond the hill.

A horse wandered through the deepening dusk below them, pale as smoke against the darkening fields. No rider sat upon its back. Its shape flickered strangely, half-memory and half-moonlight, yet many among the mourners recognized the proud arch of its neck, the silver mane, the springy gait.

Mareth.

Miren’s horse.

At the sound of its name the spirit-beast lifted its head.

For one suspended moment the dying sunlight passed through it entirely, turning it gold.

Then it faded into the evening. And with it vanished the sword and the armour. The last bright remnants of steel and war, leaving only the rose bush remained upon the hill, heavy with impossible crimson blooms beneath the first emerging stars.