He was gone, and that was that. She had done her best to save him, and it had not been enough. The Tremere Primogen had killed him... she wondered that she did not feel more anger, but she did not. It had been an accident, she was told. She did not remember the incident at all, though Cynthia told her she had been there. The whole event was so faraway from her mind. It was as if she was unable to feel anything about it at all.
They assured her it had been an accident. She acceded to this, uncomplainingly. She did not deign to ask for a blood price, though she would no doubt accept a boon if one were offered in atonement. She simply went on as though Bryon had never existed, and though she noted the puzzlement of others, the numbness surrounded her in darkness, as if she had entered a tunnel and gone so far within that the light behind and before her were lost in distance. Steadily, one foot after another, she plodded along.
Cynthia's reaction did not touch her, either. Cynthia was angry. She fumed at the desertion, as she saw it, of her sire. What right did Bryon have to go and let himself burn up like that, she'd ask angrily, not expecting an answer from Elizabeth, who did not give one. Cynthia was convinced it was not accident, but suicide; that Bryon had full opportunity to save himself, and chosen not to take it. Elizabeth did not have an opinion one way or the other on this question, only numb darkness and loss.
The dark figure stood looking into the mirror through the black gauze. The blonde woman walked past her, briskly moving from one room to another, and the wind of her passage stirred the dark clothing, but the figure did not move. She stood until minutes before dawn in that pose, moving no more than a statue carved of white marble and draped in black cloth. Her eyes could have been enameled on. Finally, as the grey skies preceded dawn, she went to her light-sealed bedroom. She lay down and became the statue once more.
Coda: Epitaph (by Lars) Every man kills the thing he loves. The blood that flowed from the fount had dried up long ago, and the journalist burned briefly and brightly. The emotions that lingered after death were not those of his ghost, but reflections that his passing caused in his immediate vicinity Very immediate. Most merely raised an eyebrow at the public spectacle. If he lived on, it was in a statue in the graveyard where he would have been buried. A seraph with wings of stone, pointless apart from its emission of frozen grandeur.