No...no! Longstride! My son, stay with me! Open your eyes! Please!
You alicorns of the Eternal Herd, stewards of our dead, spare my colt! He has done nothing to deserve this! Take his foolish mother instead!
Longstride...Longstride, my son. Why didn't I die in your place? Did not my words bring this to pass? Did not my arrows sting them to act?
Away from me, Steel Point! All your years of loyal service for what? To fail my son in his time of need? Out of my sight or my arrows will find you as surely as they will find every vile scum involved in this treachery. Go to my manor and warn them if you must. Let them run. The fear and despair of the chase will make them suffer before I pass my judgment on their service. Go now, I end your service to me this instant!
That terrible night out in the storm was the last time I ever saw Lady Ash Frost. The first time I saw her tears and the first time I saw all her weapons fail her. Her ranger training let her track them through the mud and rocks. Her eyes pointed them out in the dark and rain. Her greatbow, the True Frost Shot fired as true as ever before. Her frost-laced arrows left them as blackened, frostbitten corpses. But the last of these vile snakes realized that he would not be able to spirit Longstride away to Ophidus. With the same knife he likely cut herbs with, he dealt the cruelest blow the Empire could manage against Lady Ash Frost.
I fled to the manor, prepared to plead for her maidservants. Yet, she never returned. It took days until I recieved word of her fateful raid on the Imperial Capital, and the shot that supposedly grazed the Emperor himself. Only a week later, Lord Moon Rage destroyed himself, his array team, and a contingent of ursans in a terrible battle to the west.
I lay these words now, on the tomb built in Lady Ash Frost's honor. She had asked me to record what pearls of wisdom she might spotaneously say during her exploits, but know that what wisdom is to be gleaned from her life comes not from her declarations, but her fate. Lady Ash Frost provoked all around her in hopes of improving with each contest. She was ready for the humiliation of being proven wrong, ready to console herself by knowing how strong the Legion was with so many warriors even better than her. I pray that no more of our noble legionnaires come upon the realization that she had in those final moments. That the only thing worse than being punished for your pride is to watch another suffer for it instead.