Writing Warriors

Greetings. This is my first time participating in Weekend Writing Warriors. I look forward to sampling everyone's writing. Below are the first eight sentences of my dark fantasy SNOW ROSES.

I grew used to papa's death the way summer dwindles into winter; silently, laboriously, without hope.
I do not know when the funeral was held. I do not know how many foreign dignitaries attended or how the common folk mourned the loss of their ruler. I imagine I was invited --expected to attend in somber black silk, suffering silently by my stepmother's side. I imagine that my handmaidens pleaded with me to allow them to dress me but I never heard them. I paced across the intricate weave of my chamber's rug, losing myself in it's elaborate swirls, trying to conceive some kind of consistent pattern. My eyes grew raw and tender around the rims and I slept little and ate only when coerced. My already slight form and pale skin became a rattle of bones and a ghostly pallor.