On Caradhras

Don't Leave

Sunlight

Autumn

Horn

Touch

The awful thing about flashbacks is that no matter where you are, no matter who you are with and how warmly you are clad, you find yourself suddenly naked and alone in the cold.

Hair

Dis spent her girlhood fascinated with her brother's hair.  Her own took after her mother's; Father, tousling their blonde heads, laughed and called them the truest gold in Erebor.  Thorin, on the other hand, came crossly into the world with a thatch of jet black curls that made his lumpy infant self look like the monkey a merchant from Dol Amroth had brought their grandfather.  

Dis found him almost mesmerisingly ugly, and, even as newborn hideousness grew into chubby childhood, she decided he made a far better playmate than any doll.  Dwarves breed more prolifically than elves, but that doesn't take much, and rank always comes with distance, so Dis often had been lonely, and found in this strange little creature that squawked and grumbled delightedly when she dressed him up and inexpertly dressed up his hair - first by sticking in it baubles and bits of jewelry, and then, as it lengthened, braiding in little lengths of silver chain, often distracting herself halfway through by comparing its curlier texture and shining darkness to her own blonde waves - a great satisfaction.

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.