As she watched it whacking and pounding it's way downhill like a runaway battering ram, suddenly the entire slope below her gave way with a huge roar, sending up the billowing wave of an immense rising dust cloud as the slope below her began to disintegrate and collapse in a great tilting-over cascade of grinding and smashing rock.
Helpless to stop what she had unleashed, Si'Wren watched in fear and dismay as her horse neighed in terror and reared and galloped away. In the distance, thousands of frightened, fleeing pure white birds arose above the treetops to blacken the sky with their furiously beating wings and filled the air with the sounds of their distant squawking cries.
The short-lived avalanche seemed to be over almost as soon as it had begun. When all was still again, the towering, choking dust clouds took some time to clear. When she could finally see again, peering over the swirling dust clouds, she discovered that the collapse had utterly buried the body and all the ground round about it under an immense mass of broken shale and great flat broken slabs of slate, together with myriad smaller rocks.
She managed to climb carefully down without falling and hurting herself, and was even able to retrieve her horse. Loyal to her, he had only tried to run at first, but no more than a little ways off, after which he had stopped and turned, remaining curious enough to linger and watch.
However, he was understandably a bit more skittish and agitated than usual, and although she approached him without much difficulty, she had to resort to calming him by holding and stroking his head and breathing on his nostrils. He tossed his head frequently at first, swaying her bodily on her feet whole arm-lengths this way and that by the power of his head alone as she sought to hold on and calm him down. But she persisted, trusting him not to harm her, and when she had quieted him sufficiently, she finally took hold of his halter and walked him over beside the landslide.
One look had already informed her that no savage beast, no matter how enormous, would ever dig down through that mass of broken rock and great tilted slabs of flat slate to violate it's sanctity.
She knelt there, and prayed to the Invisible God, beseeching him to welcome this lost soul into whatever comfort or rest he might be pleased to grant.
Fitly was she garbed in black, the better to meet this unforseen hour.
She remained kneeling there throughout the entire morning, bowing often, weeping in fits and starts, as she pondered the events that had led her to grieve over this common foot soldier, whom she had never known. This, so soon after losing Habrunt.
This poor man had obviously secretly admired and imitated Si'Wren's beliefs, what little he could learn of her without arousing the suspicion of his comrades-at-arms, without her ever even knowing of it, and for only this, upon being finally discovered or found out somehow in the matter, he had been miserably and wretchedly set upon without her knowing of that either.