The Sun is Falling

Children of the House of Hurin lived on tales as much as on food; for a family whose purpose lay in sworn trust to a line of kings which only madmen and idealists did not think exist, words were as important as sustenance.  Faramir took to them with a verve that defied comparison.  Long before he could speak, he would tell stories with the rhythm and inflection of words.  Boromir remembered hearing, through his mother’s closed door, the burble of wordless stories and Finduilas’s husky musical laugh.

Delighted.  She sounded delighted.  Sometimes he would try to make her laugh like that, but even before Faramir’s birth had left her ill and dragged the bitter homesickness up from the depths of her to choke her breath, she had never been so free with him.  She looked at him and saw his father.  He tried, at six, hollow and ringing with Ecthelion’s death, to remember when he figured this out, and wondered if he should have felt anything save numb to realize he couldn’t recall a time when he hadn’t known.

Perhaps that was why the tales had never taken hold of him as he had his brother.  Hearing them, he wondered what had made the kings so great; wondered what taxes they had levied, and how they had spent them; wondered how they had administered justice, by what gently inexorable march of precedence they had kept the ponderous progress of society spiraling forward, rather than simply circling.  He wondered why the women waited at home, singing mournful songs, rather than using their wits and hands to help themselves or their lost loved ones.

Gifts, Part II

Faramir sings the wrong laments.  He is thirteen; he is angry and alone, and standing upwind of the battlefield's bountiful crop of pyres, he sings some ancient lay in the tongue of long-dead Kings, whose language ebbs and swells like the sea over which they came on ships with sails like the wings of gulls.  Faramir is thirteen, angry and alone, and he sings the wrong laments in a voice whose piercing beauty hasn't yet begun to crack.

It's late May - early summer, the vast plains of eastern Gondor blushing green-gold blending into the silver-violet haze of sage, the high desert of no-man's land where Vanka's people's skins of brown and grey and green lend them an advantage unattainable to even the stealthiest of Rangers.  The air, musical with fat swift-winged bees, had smelled of grasses, warm earth, and far-off rain.  Now that flies had replaced the bees, the field reeked of blood, shit and fear, and roasting meat.  Soon it would smell of burning meat.  War lent no time to bury the dead in un-tilled soil, sun-baked in Gondor's dry summers.

When the monsoons of August and September came, when their mother was alive and their father sane, the water ran off the russet soil in rivulets, curling into hollows, etching out gullies and shooting, sudden and lethal, down the arroyos of years and centuries gone by.  The monsoons seldom come now; and when they do, often, their violence robs the earth of the good they once brought, hail battering to death even the hardy roots of sage and gorse and long golden grasses, winds twisting the limbs of olive trees past what even their gnarled strength could bear.

The Sun is Falling

Home

After his mother died, Denethor II's heir moved into his grandfather's rooms.  Ages past, the spire's architect had built the suite narrow and long, its east-facing windows occupying the vast majority of their exterior wall.  Back then, few wanted it for the drafts that skirled in through those huge windows.  After the stirrings in the East began, fewer yet wished to live under the eye of Sauron.  They had never been meant for a Steward, or his heir.

Boromir, whom the orcs call Varahai, Red-Tail, after the great hawk that to them is omen of an honourable death, sleeps ill without those windows to the east....when he's home, when he's on leave.  It isn't often.

Sometimes as a child he would come to his grandfather in the dead of night, afraid or simply restless.  It was there he learned not to fear ghosts, for they are simply people without bodies, and there that he slept soundly curled into Ecthelion's strong old arms with the warm dry voice speaking like a river of he knew not what.  That absence aches still, but with the sort of pain that reminds him he's alive.

He didn't know if the narrow bed is the same one Ecthelion had used.  Four years had passed between Ecthelion's death and Finduilas's and what domestic rearrangements had happened he'd never inquired but at least it was a narrow bed, which neither devoured space nor tacitly rebuked him for his solitude.  Even so it sees little use on his rare, brief stays at home.  Its firm mattress feels too soft under a body used to nothing between it and the earth but a worn cloak.  He sleeps in shifts anyway, a couple hours' rest followed by another hour awake and working on things that could be done in silence, but those short shifts aren't worth taking someplace so plush.

He sleeps in the window-seat, stretched like the statue of a dead king on his coffin, on a pillow little wider than his broad shoulders.  Faramir shudders whenever he thinks of it; Faramir does not think it healthy to dream in such clear view of Mordor.

The eye watches you, he says.  Eventually, once, Boromir answers, with a little smile: I watch the eye.


After that, Faramir lets the subject lie.

Blue Streak

BECAUSE CLIMBING CARADHRAS IN DECEMBER WAS AN AWESOME IDEA.

To Err is Human

To err is human, and requires only as much forgiveness as the harm done.

Trophies

The goblin is dying. One of Legolas's elegant arrows has pierced its gut, and the wound tore further in its vain effort to save its...sister? Friend? Lover? Either way its bony grey fingers clutch helplessly at the wound's lips, as if, should the scraps of ragged flesh align, it might be whole again.


It? He, she, they...when did the rest of the Fellowship get to him, in this brief harried November, to make him think this poor soul it?


It...they, he, it's hard to tell on so gaunt and wiry an armoured figure, the dying goblin...his lips move, soundlessly, as he lies face-up on the stone and his tribesman's corpse. The dead goblin's body is cloven near in half. He remembers that cut. She'd been trying to get to Merry with the wicked little knife now glittering beside her hand.


Stones scrape under his boots as he kneel beside them. He doesn't mind; no sense in startling the dying, he thinks, taking up the knife. Firelight bleeds from its edges. It's very sharp. 

Heartbeats

"I never checked."

Arwen stirs a little, in the cool spring air warmed with their lovemaking.  Dusk drapes its shadows over their long forms entangled in silk sheets the colour of mist; Elessar, the king, Strider, her Aragorn, her husband, had bought them for her, as a tactile memory of her home, and she hadn't the heart to tell him that to elfin eyes they bore no semblance.  For all he had learned since the great Council fifteen years past, he still would not understand that each thread of those sheets held, in the love and care of their choosing, something far more precious.

One More Time

And then, after that, once again...

                 ...and again

Scrimshaw

Most people give first of things; some time, a cup of coffee, a shiny stone.  Perhaps along the way, they begin to give themselves. All Jareth has is his kingdom.  It is not his to give, but he its.  For Sarah, though, it will give him himself - and so, worthless as he is on his own, it is himself he gives her.

He gives her all of him. Never has he been one to offer with measure or with reservation.  He gives himself not in hope of any return, but because she is Sarah, and he is Jareth, and that is what he does.

And when there is no more to give, still he gives her what is left.  She finds him at the last, curled at the side of a dusty road with the dessicated lacework of last year's hydrangeas bowing over him.  She finds him where he has lain since the spiders swelled with autumn, colours sun-leached.  The wind has worn him down to his fine bird-bones with her name writ upon them like scrimshaw, Sarah, Sarah, Say-rah, turning the words in his mouth like river-rocks and honey.

She strokes his tangled pale hair and scoops the bundle of bird-bones into her arms.  Then she carries him home on sturdy bare feet.  It is cool in her house, save in the dusty sunbeams; he moves for the first time, hiding his face in the sage-green linen of her dress.  He shivers as she turns to descend a flight of stairs and shushes him, gently, nuzzling into his hair and plants a kiss upon his temple, and with a click she closes the iron cuffs around his spun glass wrists and leaves him there, in the dark, in the damp, in the dust.

The last gift the Goblin King offers his beloved is the peace of solitude, to tend to her own needs.

Crocuses

Death's doorstep bloomed white with crocuses. He had expected to die, of course. It is not man's lot to live forever. Neither did it surprise him to die in failure. In forty years (no, forty-one, somewhere in the violent dark of Moria) he'd paid little thought to himself, but at least now he knew his mettle – tarnished, base and brittle.

But he had not expected crocuses.

His Brother's Heroes

All the myths and legends are of luminous elves and fair-complexioned Numenorians - one of myriad silent snubs offered a quiet boy with olive skin, but in Faramir, whose world pooled like still water in his brother's strong dark hands, its thistle-claws found no hold. Let the storytellers keep their pale elven saviours. His brother's heroes were olive-gold like him, or dark brown like their Easterling great-grandmother (and, while some were fair, that bore no more comment than that the Anduin was wet.) His brother's heroes were not just kings wielding big swords all tangled in their own names, but farmers bearing plows and goatherds with their crooks, were bookish children with no tool save wits and kindness, were floury-handed baker women who rescued themselves and need no "-ine" to their "hero" and would have rolled their plain brown eyes at the languishing elf-princesses.

His brother stopped telling those stories, over the years. Later, Faramir couldn't bring himself to say "as we grew up" after Boromir gave up his own childhood in story after story, in all the hard lessons and the words of comfort their father never gave, in years - started far too young - as their people's shield.

Rant/Lament

Apparently, you aren't supposed to be human.

If there are elves, please be an elf; they are so very lovely

and quite untouched by mortal foibles such as passion;

Or be a hobbit – after all, it's easy to forgo temptations such as power

when all you really want is to go home and tend your garden;

But don't be human, please, or if you must,

be the special kind of human, with elf blood somewhere up your family tree,

with two hundred years life expectancy

(so you can spend the better part of half a century running away from responsibility;)

Just, for god's sake, don't be an ordinary human,

worn out from forty years carrying the world on your back,

keeping it turning, with broken ribs and bloody elbow grease;

this makes it very hard to say no to power, not for its own sake, certainly not for yours,

but for your people's -

For the tired women keeping their chapped noses to the grindstone, fishing and farming,

buying and selling, weaving and spinning and dyeing, working stone and steel and working

to keep their world working while the men are off at war, working

through their sorrow for their men who are off at war;

For your brother, a sweet kid (of thirty-five) who only wants your father's love,

For the strong, tired women's men who fight and die at your command,

For your grandfather, who wore himself to old yellow parchment

For their sake, alone, until the wind wafted him away -

Just don't you fucking dare be human, because humans fail sometimes, and that, it would appear,

is unforgivable.

Ashes to Ashes

Armies do this.

He's sixteen and a half, rooting purposefully through the settlement's destruction. Even through the black silk drawn over the lower half of his face, the acrid air chokes him. There's nothing left here, not even screaming.

Shadows

Peregrine Took is no good at sneaking. Maybe it's the big fuzzy feet, or maybe it's the worried little sniffles between attempts to hold his breath. Either way, Boromir keeps scrounging for kindling under the sad icy scraps of old snow, offering Pippin the small mercy of choice in whether to speak of whatever has him so much on edge, or simply to slip away and pretend he's stayed in camp with the rest of the party.

The not-quite-silence stretches. His own boots scuff on the rocks as he crouches to gather another bundle of moss and furze and offer a brief,equally arid thought of thanks to whatever powers might be that the mountainside hasn't thawed in a very long time. A leathery sound tells him Pippin's doing the nervous-foot-scuff thing.

A Use for Hobbits

He sleeps in short shifts, folded under his cloak like a soldier laid out for burial. The reassuring familiarity of cold earth bears him up; cold earth and stone; the floor of a cave, he knows in waking moments – knows too that the entrance is just a smidgen narrower than the span of his outstretched arms, that Strider can stretch out full-length across the cave but couldn't if he were much taller, that the crevice at the back doesn't extend any further than the light of a candle and that the crevice in question is just wide enough to hold the two older hobbits in a sort of granite cradle.

He knows it's snowing. The air has that whispering hush to it. He knows it must be cold, though for his own part he hasn't been warm since he lost Osgiliath.

He knows he's a very long way from home.

All of this rests at a level close to the subconscious – mental muscle-memory, perhaps. It certainly doesn't account for Legolas urgently nudging his arm and whispering “Wake up. Wake up,” and then, after the half-second it takes to accomplish that, before he can make a sound, “Shhh.”

She

He walked in on her bathing in the river, which, given their respective personalities, wouldn't have been either as romantic or as creepy (depending upon one's perspective) as it sounded, even if Merry and Pippin hadn't done so first and stood there with their mouths hanging open, waiting for something to fly in. Boromir flipped their cloaks over their heads and picked them up by the scruff, one in each hand, without breaking stride – and not a second too soon, to judge by the gruff bellow of “Oy! Hobbits!” from the water fast disappearing behind a screen of trees.

What Doesn't Kill You

“He loved her so very much,” said Faramir the idealist, staring sadly enraptured at his mother's portrait hanging over the cold cavern of a fireplace in Denethor's study.

Strange, the things the mind divulges, left unsupervised – like a very old person, rummaging aimlessly through a wardrobe that's bigger on the inside, pulling out dusty assortments of mis-memories. It has been at least six months since that conversation.

He'd looked down at the upturned oval of his brother's face, and remembered how they had fought, until the very end. Their mother died the week of his tenth birthday; back then, their fighting had seemed a fact of nature, frightening certainly but neither right nor wrong, like the bone-shatter crack of trees in deep winter. Giants' voices, snapping overhead.

Gifts - Pt. I

For his eleventh birthday, with some portion of the monies their father gave him or his sixteenth, his elder brother buys him a horse from Rohan – as if it is not enough simply to be there, the young general fresh back from a hard campaign with (somehow – he had always had a talent for miracles) stories to enrapture a child whose interests lay primarily between books' covers. As if it is not enough simply to love the second son, the extra child – as if it is not enough to stride in with the northeast wind of spring at his back and swoop up in strong arms warm as the wind is cold a boy few others even notice and wish him, quietly, in a voice so imbued with affection that the words glow softly golden in the boy's mind, “Happy birthday, little one.”

Nobody's Children

Sarah had been coming to the Labyrinth for over half a decade by the day on which she found its king, with a freshly stitched cut on his right cheek, playing with a wished-away child -

- widdershins thirteen times around her room, colourful walls pinwheeling together, and dizzily through the mirror; forget which way is up (the dizziness helps) and hop twice to the left, because it's Tuesday (maybe) and play skip-rope with the ceiling fan, then out through the skylight into the long dimly-lit gold stone hatcheries of the False Alarms.

The Steward's Sons - Body Type Comparison

If Faramir thinks about clothes any harder he may actually turn into a pair of trousers.

Boromir Ref. Sketches

He was a rather unfortunate-looking twelve-year-old.

The Winter King

Not all, or even most, of the great maze of the Labyrinth is in the world. Perhaps the best example of this is the Wide Tract of Rottenness, which looks like a dump in the form of a ring, some five miles wide at its broadest point, encircling the Goblin City. It is a mess, maybe even the quintessential mess, but the path through the Tract doesn't twist and contradict itself and go off on crazy angles. It's just a path.

The problem here is the Junk Ladies. They're probably not all ladies, or even women, but that's beside the point. Sooner or later, they all call themselves Agnes, anyway. Some taxonomists argue that they are a type of goblin; others say no, the Agnessi should, in fact, be classified as a sort of highly evolved hermit crab.

Laddie

He wasn't expecting her to call him “laddie.” He knew that, save for Merry and Pippin, he was the youngest in their group; and he was used to it. After all, for years, he had always been the youngest.

Youngest to kill – sickeningly unperturbed save for the cold knot creeping from the pit of his stomach up his spine, a pudgy eleven-year-old glistening red with an Eastron bandit's blood.

Youngest to give mercy to a comrade – twice in one week, twelve years old and kneeling in the golden sunlight that failed to make anything whole. Once for a squire younger than himself; once for a knight of forty-five, whom all the boys had thought invincible.

Three

I.
Hoggle came with the kingdom (when it had barely become a kingdom at all,) with a greater baggage of guilt, sorrow, longing and helpless rage than should have fit within a pubescent dwarf. He stood sullenly stone-faced at Grita's funeral – a boy who lied as easily and badly as he sang, who wept to get out of trouble and was scared of toads, dry-eyed at his mother's death.

The Sky Has Claws

Creaking in the New Year's cold, the old man peered into the crevice between book-cases. In its depth lurk a few forgotten nibs, much darkness, innumerable dust bunnies, and a recalcitrant grandson. In his younger days, he thinks, he might have discerned more than the hint of a form, solid and stubborn in the shadows.

Jareth Sculpt: Part III

Jareth Sculpt: Part II

One of my favourite portions of this sculpt; the scars on his back, souvenir of the ritual scarification through which he shaped the wild magic-vortex and the wasteland it created into the kingdom of the Labyrinth, under his sovreignty.

Jareth is covered in scars.

I wanted his sword, which is of iron (a fact that has earnt him a certain degree of mingled terror and acclaim amongst fae who have faced him in battle) to have a kind of essential, visceral look to it.  Unfortunately, due to the limits of clay, by which I mean my rank amateurism, this would have no balance as a life-sized prop but oh well.

A better view of the sword and amulet, accompanied by that gorgeous goddamn scarf/belt/thing.  The sunset colours are breathtaking.

During the casting for Labyrinth, Brian Froud first met David Bowie right after the costuming people had given him a bone flute they'd made for him; at the time, Froud and Henson were still trying to decide who to cast as the Goblin King, and as soon as Froud walked in, Bowie introduced himself then picked up the bone flute, hopped up on the table, crouched down and winked at Froud and proceeded to play the bone flute at him, evidently with such mischievous otherworldliness that Froud decided on the spot that yep, this is our Jareth.  So of course I decided my version of Jareth has to have a bone flute, though I've yet to decide how he got it.

The sculpt came out with rather an expression of pathos here.  I wish I'd done his mouth differently though.  Oh well.

A few eons into a reign whose length is best measured  in geological ages, Jareth and the Unseelie monarch whose many names include Mab and Morgana fought to a standstill, and at immeasurable cost,  a terrible monster from the worlds before, the living incarnation of malice and despair, which during its last awakening epochs before had left a terrible mark on the world and bid fair to do so again.  The thing cannot be killed; however, they exiled it to a deep slumber in a far, supposedly uninhabitable corner of the world Above, which had only recently drifted into any semblance of its current configuration.

In the instants before it vanished, it looked Jareth in the eye and rasped "I leave you my hatred," cursing the entire coastline along which it had lain dormant with its blight.  To erase that mark and prevent its otherwise inevitable spread, he undid entire epochs - the greatest manipulation of time he has ever attempted, far less accomplished, as such things are not undertaken lightly, even to one of his power and skill.  And when all was said and done, the earth for miles to either side still-warm lava and the sea barren of any life, far less the schools of fish on which the equally vanished, he found, in his pocket, the skeleton of a fish, which had washed there in his battle with the monster.

Props - the fish's skeleton, souvenir of the horror known in what is now Orkney as the nuckelavee; the iron sword, forged by goblin smiths for one of their own kind in the days long before they had a king; the bone flute; the crystal; and the staff, embedded with a crystal, used for support both magical and physical for centuries subsequent to his battle with the nuckelavee.

Jareth Sculpt: Part I

For no discernible reason, while visiting my best friend in La Jolla, I took it into my head to make a sculpey Jareth.  He's my first go at sculpting anything and turned out surprisingly well, though the arms are subpar with the rest of him.  Obviously, the trousers aren't intended for him, but the scarf, which is of hand-dyed silk my friend got at university in Santa Cruz, might stick, costuming-wise.

HORRIBLE ARMS.  However, I'm somewhat proud of his face.  The eyes are cat's eye beads I had kept for ages, doing nothing with, then gave to her this summer and, in typical fashion, proceeded to steal back and use.  However, they contribute to a sort of mutable expression on him so I gues that's all right.

The beads, backstory-wise, are made from his own bone, during his days as a freelance mercenary; he'd broken a bone quite badly and the enemy commander who captured him turned him over to the resident torturer, who threatened to make beads of the protruding bone, to humiliate or intimidate him, whereupon Jareth, who was too mind-numbingly tired to care, cordially invited him to knock himself out.  Preferably literally.

Just a couple shots of the thing standing.  The fact that he actually stands makes me a bit proud, though it's slightly wonky. Wonky's a completely legitimate, dictionary-authenticated word, riiiight?

I made a tiny version of his amulet from the film, of course; there are better shots of that, and the other props, later.

No words can suffice for how fucking much I hate those fucking arms.  My friend has sworn to fix them at some point.

The best that can be said is that his hand does at least sort of hold the crystal.  Sort of.  The more I look at it the more I loathe it. 

And now, on to Part II - the details!

Fearless

His men said the Steward's elder son was fearless; they said he'd killed a troll with a bread-knife once, and calmly gone back to slicing bread for supper. It is easy to believe, as the encroaching storm follows him into his father's hall, tattering the long dark cloak about his calves and playing havoc with tangled dark hair, the wild curls of it matted with sweat and blood.

Ginger Peach

Spring came on suddenly, like desert rain. Sarah, forever in love with the turning of the seasons, woke up full of light and floated to the window, with breath bated until the rush of cool air twirled her around, and she breathed out a laugh and, inhaling, felt her eyes sting at the cold. It could not be much above freezing, but the world had shifted. It was spring, spring, spring!

Sing Up the Dark

Vanka shaves her head in the early shadows of dusk, beside her sister's slumbering shape. She shaves away long lank locks of glossy black; she shaves away her husband's touch, her half-remembered mother's fingertips; she shaves away a lifetime's children who will never quicken, and when the first sob threatens she chokes it out into song, her rasping voice rising with the darkness to the stars' lonely eyes, singing, singing, singing up the darkness – not in the high tongue of the dark lords on their black horses, but in Orsi, her people's language, a tattered shroud of a tongue that refused to accept its own death.

The Road Through the Maze

Of the realm of Jareth the Goblin King (a border kingdom and thus half dependent upon the hopes, fears and fantasies of mortals Above,) some will look at its construction and say, "But it is ill-named! It is not a labyrinth at all, but a maze! A labyrinth is supposed to have a straight line to the center!"

As with so many other statements about this bizarre kingdom, that is only half true.

There is a road.

Vanka of Ten Thousand Scars

An officer and tribal leader at the time of the War of the Ring, Vanka is one of very few orc women to rise as high as she has; another is her sister, Irinna, an elective mute and perhaps even a greater force to be reckoned with on the battlefield than Vanka herself, which is a high compliment indeed.

No One Remembered

He would not mourn her.

Hers had been a heroic death, all told – valiant and selfless, if hardly picturesque. Two out of three wasn't bad. But he would not mourn her. He would not grant her such an early death; he would not let her go so easily, nor lie so heavy on his conscience. He would keep her exhausted and beautiful, radiantly defiant, not angry but joyous in her epiphany, denying him. He would not mourn her.

After all, he had no power over her.

Faramir - facial ref. sheet

I subvert things, more or less by existing, and LOTR, despite its in many ways fantastic world-building, is ripe for subversion largely because Tolkein was so very Anglocentric - I mean, he was a British professor writing in the first half of the twentieth century, so it sort of comes with the territory but it's still quite glaringly THERE.

And Gondor is sort of the Faded Classical Culture of that world.

And I like doing character design.

And so I decided Gondorians look sort of Greco-roman, with olive skin, arched noses, dark curly hair, etc.  My friend Pearl enjoys my bizarre ramblings and has been wanting to draw my version of Denethor's sons, and was having a hard time with Faramir, ergo, facial ref-sheet.  He looks considerably less Grecian than many of his people due his Numenorian mum.

Stewardship

His first memory:

He can't be more than four; maybe three and a half – his mother is well, then, her stomach flat under the graceful fall of her shift. Sometimes he wishes he could better remember her face, more than the curve of her mouth smiling, the sharp bracket of its frown. She smelled of juniper and roses, he remembers. His father always brought her roses. And his grandfather can still pick him up, swooping him off his sturdy little feet to spin him round and round strong bony shoulders.

In the memory, his father is very tall. As childhood memories go, it presents itself in a blur of smell (polished wood, all orange and beeswax; the damp wool of his father's cloak – it must have been winter; the stony scent of ink) and sleepy golden light, which now he knows for candles, with sharp pinpricks of lucidity.

Thunk!

It was not so much administration as entertainment, but he'd grown expert at getting them to accomplish some approximation of what he wanted, albeit that this frequently involved a dramatic lowering of expectations on his part. The disturbing thing about ruling goblins, however, is that one must think like a goblin and, after innumerable eons, he still wasn't at all sure that goblins thought. And then he realised that he had, on the first attempt, conjugated that as 'thunk'. Jareth briefly considered throwing himself off the nearest cliff.