“Grief is like a whirlpool. Some people would be sucked in, never to reemerge, while others would eventually be able to swim away. Whether a person is one or the other, however, would only be known after they fell into it.” - Old folk saying.

Grünhildr jolted upright from her sleep in a daze, her face pale and streaked with cold sweat. She vaguely recalled dreaming of something terrible that it was already good that she had not woken up screaming because of it. Even then, once her brain started to work again, she immediately recognized that she was far from in her best shape by any definition. Her mind was still in a daze, her sight somewhat blurry, and she felt as if the world was spinning around her. All of which were familiar feelings to the woman.

The dazed mine and the headache it came with was due to drinking too much, not something she did often, but had done before on occasion. It would go away after a while so she paid it little heed. The blurry sight and the spinning feeling, however, she knew was the result of smoking too much of the mix of poison – as she often jokingly called it – she preferred to stuff her pipe with.

She had not done that more than once in her youth before, and even that once was an accident that made her swear off doing so ever again.

Fortunately the dim lighting of the tent helped alleviate her headache some. The way everything reeked like a mix of the herbal smoke and alcohol told her indirectly just how much she had been abusing the substances of late. It was not like her usual behavior to do that sort of thing, and for a bit, she actually forgot why she had done so.

At least until she got up and laid eyes on Salicia’s unmoving form on top of the bed the two of them had shared over the past decades of them being together, then she remembered as all the memories rushed back in a painful jolt all at once into her mind.

That Salicia was dead.

Had been dead for a couple of days by then, for that matter.

The way her body laid still on their bed, lightly illuminated by the dim lighting the two of them had personally chosen and bought for their tent because they liked how it gave a more romantic feel to the nights they spent in it, was like a bludgeon to the face for Grünhildr. It was a painful mix of happy memories paired with the knowledge that her other half would no longer be there with her to make more such memories.

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Grünhildr almost stumbled as she took a couple steps closer to the bed – she had fallen asleep sprawled on the floor a few steps away from the bed – as the painful realization made her wish that she had just remained forgetful for a moment. In her stressful depression, her hand reached for a waterskin nearby, removed the cork that sealed it, and chugged down several mouthfuls of its content without a second thought.

It was ale, but a relatively weak one rather than the strong dwarven ale she preferred. Almost like drinking water, really. Must have been Elfriede that put it there since Grün’s own stash only had the hard stuff and while Salicia didn’t drink as often or as much, she too preferred the stronger stuff. Then again, it was probably Elfriede’s way of caring for Grünhildr, making sure she didn’t drink herself to death that way.

Grünhildr sighed as she sat down on the side of the bed. On the one hand, she was happy that her old friend – probably the other closest person to her other than Salicia amongst those of the company – still cared enough for her to bother doing so. On the other hand, she felt that she really could do with drowning herself in alcohol at the moment, if only to forget about her grief for a moment.

When her hand accidentally brushed against Salicia’s cold body, the depression redoubled on Grünhildr’s psyche, and subconsciously she brought out her smoking pipe and hastily stuffed it with way more dried herbs than what she would have usually used for a relaxing smoke. Like the captain she had a habit of smoking to relax herself. It was not something she usually did often, and definitely nowhere near often enough to the point that the smell lingered around her like it did presently, but she could care less at the moment.

The packed-up dried and shredded herbs caught fire easily and quickly started to turn into embers as Grünhildr inhaled the resultant smoke through the pipe. It had a rather harsh, acrid taste on her tongue and made her feel like coughing when she kept drawing it into her lungs, but at the same time, it calmed her down somewhat, which was an effect of the smoke from the herbs that made them popular amongst smokers.

She herself used a somewhat stronger mix using some of the herbs the captain liked – something tailored for his kind, not for human, with a stronger effect and taste to them – since her own mixed-blooded heritage made it so that the stuff meant for regular humans made for too light a hit. She allowed the soothing feeling to permeate through her as she exhaled the smoke from her lungs and inhaled again from her pipe.

It was not that she did not cry over her long-time partner’s demise, but her tears had run dry after the past two days, the only signs of her crying being the streaks of dried tears that were still visible on her face. Just like that, she sat beside Salicia’s body, silently smoking her pipe while at times chugging down a waterskin of alcohol.

Grünhildr stayed that way until late in the night – or perhaps it was the morning? She did not now nor did she care at that time – she herself fell asleep on the side of the bed in a rather awkward posture, the pipe, still with some smoldering, smoking herb in it, dangling from her hand, while an open waterskin spilled its content on the floor where it fell.