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When she grew older, he would be something she could almost remember.
Memories of him came in glimpses. A flash of golden hair. A glimmer of eyes as blue and bright as the lake in summer. A sliver of a kind smile. A fragment of a warm touch. But the pieces never fit together properly.
Perhaps it was because he had appeared and disappeared so quickly. Perhaps it was because she was too busy trying to stitch back together the town that had been torn by fire and ruin to pay proper attention to him. Perhaps it was because she had not actually seen him as he lay in the shadow of the mountain, on the bloodstained snow, the breath leaving his body, the light leaving his eyes.
She wished she had been able to see him one last time. When she attended the grand burial with her father the figure in the golden coffin was not him. The cheeks were dull and waxy, the closed eyes sunken and dark, the skin stretched too tight over the bones. When she was a child she had never understood why her mother had kept the pieces of her favourite glass bird after it had fallen from the window sill, instead of buying a new sculpture. Standing there, looking at the corpse which had once been the prince, she understood.
As she stood there in the dark stone halls, lips pressed tightly together, tears making their silent track down her cold cheeks, she stared at the statues they had erected in memory of the last dwarves of Durin’s line. The three of them identical, the same strong heavy brows, the same strong chins, the same jewelled armour. It wasn’t fair she though, that they paint them so similar in death when they looked so different in life. But this injustice was never corrected and as the years went on the figures became consumed and distorted by the damp of the mountain. She never returned to his grave.
His death faded into the history and sorrow of his people and his memory faded from her life. When she grew older, he would be something she could almost remember when she awakened in the darkest hour of the night with a feeling of loss which comes from losing something you never quite had and a tightness in her chest, like a strong calloused hand closing around her heart.