Work Text:
I always thought dying would be different. More pain, more fear. Instead I simply drift away, letting the darkness cradle me in its arms and cover my eyes. Like falling asleep. The ground tilts and I am falling into a deep, grey sea. There are voices on the wind, singing. Telling me to rest, to lay down my sword and my oath. My mother is there, weaving strands of silver and strands of gold into a tapestry spanning from Tirion upon Túna, across the sea to these foreign shores. She pauses from her work, strokes my hair. Sleep now, my son.
But the frame shifts, and I am naked and cold, flickering between the endless dark and the crumbling ruin of my body. The eternal judge stands before me, towering like a shadow of doom. Welcome, Fëanáro. I have been waiting. I scream, and far away my body combusts in the light of a thousand suns, fire ripping through the dark as agony crashes into me, relentlessly like ocean waves in a storm. I thought I condemned myself to darkness and oblivion. I thought I was above and beyond the laws of this world, that an oath calling upon Eru as witness would be enough to crack open reality like an egg and let me escape into the void. Instead I find that I am bound to the wheel, bound to the endless progress of time, bound to remembrance and sorrow and pain, now and forever.