Sketches: 1-B: The Knight and His Daughter, continued

No mere mortal has the answer to all things, why they happen, when they will happen, for whose amusement or edification they happen.  The knight had merely a feeling, a scent carried through the winds, a bad odor of a bad day, which passed through the flowers and around the pleasant things until it was uncertain.

Kunjels do not know all things in advance, but have a...sense...perhaps.  It is difficult to try and explain it, but most of the seers and sages are of kunjel blood in Trithofar.  It is this sense.

But what happened to the knight's daughter, how an arrow alone and from some strange angle found its way down from the hells and down from the heavens and struck his daughter, who sat not an arm's length from his own body.  The arrow found the soft flesh between her shoulder and her collar bones, burrowed its head into her, and found her heart.  If her father had known it was coming, if the Protector had whispered only louder into his ear, he would have merely leaned forward and the arrow would have struck his armor and deflected, or found the expendable meat of his arm.

His daughter seemed tired and she slumped, and when he tried to look down at her, the end of the arrow bristled against his cheek, as though the girl had put something behind her ear, a stiff flower perhaps.  He almost laughed.

But her weight carried away his mirth.  It was as though she pulled away from him, and before he could gather strength or rage in his arms, the girl fell from the back of the japal and was lost.

It was then, now that she was far down below him, near the huge, padded feet of the japal, he saw the arrow.  He saw his heart there die.  He smelled blood.  The rage took him, made all things numb.  He leapt from the japal and landed beside the girl.  He took her head in his hand and attempted to revive her with shouts and tears and grinding teeth.  If her soul resided there still in the limp and lifeless body, she was surely frightened away by the roars of her father, who could not speak to her in any plainer language than that of a dying heart, the broken shards of a parent's soul who holds a lifeless child.

The thought of being under attack never occurred to the knight.  It was only the one arrow that found his daughter.  Another did not follow.  Nor did there follow a shout of an enemy warrior, or the cries of enemy mounts.  The arrow had fallen like a lightning bolt, lost and alone and without a storm even to come after.

And as the night fell, the knight's eyes adjusted.  He pushed the japal aside and looked far into the distance, over the rolling fields and hills of grass until his eyes spotted, barely visible, a trace of heat, a brief odor.  Someone stood and watched him die.  Someone had shot that arrow....