Stone Circle Exitlude

On the day of her father's funeral, Astrid's nose is cold. The tips of her ears swell with the windchill, and she holds herself tight; shoulders rigid.
On the day of her father's funeral, she is not the first to come to his side. She did not remember leaving him. She remembers Tauris, Skáld, her brothers, the figures moving in slow motion through the hours that pass. She remembers, yes, she remembers the coldness of the den; mamma and her tired eyes. Kristjan's anguish. How Ujurak had tried so hard alongside her to — help.
She remembers finding somewhere else to sleep.
On the day of her father's funeral, Astrid wakes up from a dream that she had been drowning, and her lungs feel no less clogged with water when she wakes. She says nothing to anyone; not to Tauris, not to her brothers or mamma or Skáld or Tauris's kids or Fig; a black veil of mourning draped heavy over eyes much too young to do so.
She tried.
She tried.
She tried.
On the day of her father's funeral, she comes alone. Anyone who dares try to touch her is met with a rough show of teeth, not a shred of tolerance left within a tired little body. She comes softly, sluggishly, and at first she sees all of those who she felt did not deserve to be here, those who did not understand what it was like. Swiftlet who gnaws loudly, who had been only a short blip in her father's life; Ulfhild and Bjorn who had not known him the way she did. She wished she could be alone with him, her and her brothers and mamma, for she had tried to fix it she had tried she tried and now he was gone gone gone and they did not understand—
How does a child prepare a eulogy?
On the day of her father's funeral, as she stares blankly at the looming stone that would now mark his eternal home, hotblooded tears fall into the soil and she wonders if he can still feel them flood his cold skin as they seep into the dirt.