Chapter Text
The End
510 F.A
The path that led him thus far had been barren in the true sense, filled with nothing but light and stone. He followed it for what felt like hours, without change, until suddenly, his thoughts became clearer, sharper, and though the path was still barren, his thoughts supplied the way with details that he might not have noticed before.
He saw the light grow dimmer as he went— he tried to think back, to cast his thoughts back into the fog behind him, and the more he thought, the darker the path became.
On and on he went, following the path where it took him, and it grew steadily more and more dark and foggy until it stopped, just ahead, at great, dark gates. They towered overhead, even at a distance, and he could do nothing but walk towards them as the vague light of the path behind disappeared and left him in darkness.
The bars of the gates were an ornate, wrought metal, or else they were a dark, well-shaped glass; their surface was so sheer and perfect and cold that he almost suspected it could be ice, but he had never felt ice so dry. Something about them was familiar—perhaps it was the perfection of the iron, perhaps it was the darkness. He ran a finger down the length of the cool surface, following the twists and the intricate shapes as the strands that made it up split apart, twisted into a geometric pattern, and then came back together to create a solid surface once more.
He did not know how long he stood before the gates before he realized that he was meant to go through them. He pressed his palm against the metal this time, with intention, and they drew open effortlessly before he could even begin to push. He walked through them as they opened, moving from formless space to something darker and more real.
Past those black gates, the vague, dull stone of the previous path and its unremarkable formlessness became dark, intricate flagstones, and it was not long before he found himself in an echoing and imposing corridor that stretched onwards into churning darkness. He counted the great shifts in this strange world as he passed through it, recalling the dark, nondescript before, the eerie gates a moment ago, and then this dark, beautiful corridor.
He took a step forward, and it echoed throughout the darkness, though against what stone walls or what ceiling, he could not tell. The corridor— or was it a grand hall? — was a structure of unknown depth and length, filled with crowded pillars and high, ornate arches that seemed to support no ceiling at all, for he looked up and craned his neck and saw only darkness beyond what little light reflected off the stone of the arches. At the end of it all, wherever this corridor led, there was a distant dimly visible door that haunted his eyes when he looked away from it.
It beckoned to him over the vast distance between, but still he tarried along the way. The chance to turn back had long since passed. He had stepped onto the path because it led far off into the distance, and what he had wanted then was to be as far away from the ruins as he could possibly get. His memories were still vague just then, far away, but he remembered his father broken on the stones by his feet and the path stretching out behind him, and he remembered watching the light on the snow as the ruins burned behind him in the darkness, as snow and ice passed through him.
He had stepped onto the path and turned away from the pyres. He had left his father there on the stones— his father? — as he stepped onto the growing path without hesitation, watching as it led away from wherever he was—where was he? —and sprawled ahead like a great serpent. Desperate to leave his broken body behind—no, not his, his father’s. His father’s?— he followed it without looking back. He never wanted to see that body again. He did not want to see what might have happened behind him either.
He left and there was a sound of roaring behind him, a sound like great stones tumbling down the mountainsides and something else. Something alive, screaming. It sounded like many birds at once, like the sound that the alpine vultures sometimes made when they found some abandoned, vacant flesh in the mountains below. He did not turn back.
His mind was not unlike the path, and now that the fog had set in, he found that he did not care to think about the journey ahead, nor the journey behind. And so, he lingered. He paused to inspect the stones; he approached one pillar and leaned in close, his hand hovering over the strange surface. It was not quite stone, upon closer inspection, but not quite crystal either—the pillars were almost like a sort of dark glass. Translucent, cloudy, and obscurely textured; they looked like glass catching smoke in its depths. He ran his hands over the surface. It felt like a kind of ice, but cool and dry, as though water had somehow become stone without freezing. His flesh did not stick to the surface, like it might to ice.
It took him some time to recognize the repeating, multiplying nature of the uneven surface of the stone. Like ripples in water, he thought as the realization came to him, and he ran his fingers over them again and again in fascination.
He knew he should continue, and soon, no matter how interesting the stones were. For as he stood and as he passed from fog to corridor, he began to know these halls; he knew, somehow, what must have become of him, and so he knew what awaited him just beyond the chamber.
There then came a cacophony of unrest up ahead, just beyond the dim door ahead, and if he had not known by then, then this shift in the path before him would have given it all away. The voices were incomprehensible at this distance, but he could identify the sounds of grief, anger, and lament, emanating from a formless light at the end of the corridor.
They grew louder and more distinct as he moved towards the glow of the light ahead, from pillar to pillar, until he could see the figures themselves. They were bathed in the odd, dim glow, and it illuminated their armor and swords, sending brief flashes of intensified white light into the chamber. He felt something tighten in his throat, something dark and painful clenching a hand around him and holding him still.
The light flashed here and there, casting long shadows behind each pillar. It lit the flagstones and cast their uneven surfaces in hills and valleys of light and shadow. There was a bright gleam of golden hair, and then there was a fierce face in a bloody silver helm turning towards the source, the reflected light and the dim glow caught upon a multi-faceted stone in its center, and then the glow was far too strong, and the figures were swallowed up in its strength.
Maeglin turned away. That thing in his throat threatened to tear itself out of his chest, and his memories were painful as they rose from the fog. He retreated into the shadows, further, further into the darkness and the still air, away from the light that now leapt from wall to silver helm to golden hair. There he lingered, far out of the way of the path that he had chosen to walk, waiting for the sounds to fade, for the light to dim as it fell through the pillars and onto shining, smooth stone.
He had only a moment to brace himself and lift his chin to face what would come when he continued this path— because he would, and he must— before the sound of footsteps distracted him. Maeglin stared into the darkness and held his breath, waiting to see who revealed themselves, for he had assumed himself entirely alone, and the knowledge that he was not was disquieting.
A voice rang out from somewhere in the darkness, and it called for him by his mother-name.
Whatever lies Maeglin had been telling himself could no longer hold against the strength of that name, and the memories rose from the vague fog in his mind; they towered over him like a maw prepared to snap shut. It hadn’t been his father’s body that he had left behind at the base of the cliff. It had not been Eöl lying broken on the stones when he had made the decision to walk this path.
It had been his own body, and it had been Ondolindë, his own beloved city, burning behind him when Maeglin chose to turn away.
The memories surged like a wave. He tried to kill her; he had tried to kill the child, too. He had sent his men to die for him, with no hope of success, driven by his own madness— Maeglin spun away from the voice in the distant dark, and there the light was again in the distance, straight ahead, a horrible explosion of memory and accusation. His chest heaved, and he only kept himself upright by gripping the pillar behind him so tightly that he wondered at how the delicate glass-like surface did not fracture under his fingers.
Maeglin knew where he was; he knew these halls, and who would not? But he could not imagine that the one who would call him that was here. Here still. His head was still cloudy and vague at the edges, but grief pierced through it all, leaving him alternating numbness and terror and disgust before he realized that the voice was wrong.
It was not a voice that belonged to anyone he had ever heard, but he knew it all the same. He had heard it, he felt, his whole life. It sounded like every grief he had ever heard told and every sorrow he had ever felt; the sound of it was almost unbearable. There was a feeling to it, however, that lingered after the pain. It made him turn towards the sound—it sounded like peace, it felt like warmth. Like old hurt, comfortable hurt. Maeglin had never had a hurt like that, had never known a companion like it, but he had imagined what it might feel like, to have something constant that did not stab him, that did not feel like death and pain.
The voice came again, easing into another tone; a more soothing layer lay now over the words that came from the dark, and the voice asked, “May I call you by that name?”
The light hit the approaching figure’s face briefly and confirmed that she was a stranger. She was something far worse than that, too; he felt it pouring off her, and the name of it was just at the edge of his awareness. Her power was just barely palpable in the space between them, as though she was holding it tightly within herself. To anyone else, she would appear unthreatening, a veiled figure with a beautiful and ornate metal mask that covered her eyes and seemed to blind her; odd perhaps, but not dangerous.
But Maeglin had always had a sharp eye and a mind attuned to a certain plane of things unseen. Threats, dangers, anything that could threaten him; he saw it all.
He could see the strain of her, the tension of an armed shepherd quietly circling her flock. He could see where there was tightness in her mouth, where there was a slight studied movement to her step. She was being careful, quiet, approaching him as though he might flee if she was not careful.
It made him want to do exactly that.
“Why do you ask?” He spoke as coolly as he could. He saw what she was hiding; he could sense it even in shadow, even as the glow of a light much stronger filtered in from just beyond the distant end of the corridor.
“I come to offer you peace,” she said simply, and with both hands she lifted the ornate mask that covered her eyes and lifted it high, revealing two closed eyes. When she opened them to look at him, they looked like more metal. Glassier and flatter than the stone of the halls around him. She placed the mask atop her head, and now he saw that it was a crown, but her eyes never left him. “I sensed that you would benefit from hearing your name.”
“Do not condescend to me,” he said before he could stop himself, because the rage was easier than everything else that he might have felt otherwise. “I know what I deserve.”
“Oh? You know better than me?”
Something felt dangerous about the question, and though he was usually good at gauging danger and reading it in others, he could not pinpoint why or how it manifested here. There is also the fact, he thought with some disgust, that I have not been good at gauging anything as of late. He brought his walls up high around his mind at that thought, higher than they had been since he had come to this place, and, just as he expected, the sensation of someone prodding at his defenses came shortly after.
“Stay out of my thoughts,” he snapped and then, because he never did know how to leave things well enough alone, he added a biting, “Stranger.”
The figure seemed to absorb this, and those glassy eyes shut in a strange, slow way. An owl, he confirmed to himself, and he fought to keep his shields up against a stronger prodding, a renewed attack. He moved back, away from her, until his back hit a pillar or perhaps a wall, and he could go no further.
“Lómion,” she called, almost sadly. Fear clawed at Maeglin’s throat again, and his walls briefly fell. It was all she needed, and he saw her eyes open in glassy, golden slits as her head tilted.
Calm washed over him, just as her eyes became golden lights in the darkness, but the fear was still there. He was there, in the center of it, farther away than he had ever been from himself, but still there. “What did you do?” he demanded, struggling to sound as though he had any control, fighting the calm and peace as it made him pliant and quiet.
“I come to offer you peace, Lómion,” she said in that same sad voice. “I hope you will continue to let me.”
Something about that shocked him back into himself. He built the walls high again, easily, and the calm was gone by the time he raised the first of them. He realized that she had allowed him to push her out, that she was condescending to his weakness and that his walls were all useless.
But the sickness of fear and grief was back, and all at once he regretted pushing the feeling of peace away so quickly. The loss and the swift change left him unbalanced and uncertain, weak and unable to even summon his old, steady anger. She seemed to sense that, for she looked away from him, and for a horrible moment he thought that she was now disinterested in him. But the feeling of her power touched his mind again, and this time he let it in freely, desperately. She did not look at him, and he got the sense that she was giving him a chance to salvage his pride and pretend that she had had nothing to do with his composure.
His strength returned to him as the calm sank in, and he stepped away from the stone towards her, because he would not be condescended to.
“Walk with me,” the lady said, and he did. He found that the calm was less drowning this time, as though she knew that giving too much of it would only push him away. She was studying him, though her manner carefully hid it. He walked beside her as though a blanket was draped around his shoulders, as though he had simply chosen to go for a stroll after a nightmare.
The calm retreated for a moment, then returned with another feeling, a familiar, newer, feeling of being alone with stones and thoughts—he realized with this sudden change that she was summoning these feelings within him, deliberately placing them around the fear and hatred at the center. She was making it all easier to bear. His throat tightened and he gnawed his lip.
Under the lights overhead and the light that reflected off every pillar, he looked to her and saw clearly for the first time what and who she was.
Owl indeed, you stupid fool, the center of him whispered even as the memories of peace around it grew stronger and stronger, fighting his panic as it rose. This is the Lady of Mercy, of Sorrows, he despaired. This is Lady Nienna.And then he was assaulted with the uniquely calm sensation of his mother’s hand on his forehead. “Stop that,” he whispered, and the sensation receded. “I am not a child; I do not need to be managed.” It disappeared.
Lady Nienna smiled— for it was she—and he saw that her eyes were glassy from tears, tears that flowed almost steadily down her face, and he saw that they were only reflecting light. She looked remarkably less terrifying now that he could see that, almost like a true person, though the crown atop her head, the most beautiful wrought thing he had ever seen, reminded him of what she was.
“Lómion,” she said, “I am doing for you that which I would do for any who called for me here in these halls.”
“I did not call for you.”
“You did, Lómion,” she told him gently, still using his name. “Your grief summoned me as clearly as though you had called my name.”
“I am not grieving.” It sounded unconvincing, but when he said it again, the words did not gain any more conviction. “I am not grieving; I am angry,” he protested anyway, but then he paused for a moment, his mind taking the time to wade through his thoughts and her words. “Why do you call me by my mother-name?”
“As I said, I am here to offer you peace. Some calm and clarity before the difficult task ahead of you.”
“You are here to manage me,” he confirmed, and then he pulled his walls around him when she frowned, her clear, wide forehead marred by a single, long crease of concern between her brows. He was not scared of her, not anymore, but he knew that he should be. Her power was great, and he only had refuge from it because she permitted that his defenses remained intact. He did not like the reminder.
“In any case, I do not need your help. I will go to your brother’s hall. I need no help finding the path...” He trailed off, remembering the swords and armor and the golden hair, the way the figures had turned to the formless light as if expecting someone. Him. He shuddered.
“When there is no one to see you,” Lady Nienna finished for him. “But I am not here to shepherd you to those halls; that is not my purpose.”
“You have a purpose?”
“I have explained my purpose to you three times now. At what point will you listen to me, Lómion?”
Maeglin winced, embarrassed despite himself. He was not usually so slow, nor so unsure, and he suspected that the horror of his death had affected his mind and his spirit in ways that he did not initially notice when he stood alone with the stones. “What awaits me in those halls?”
“My brother, Námo, among others,” she said patiently. “He is the one who will deliver your judgment.”
“Yes, I know,” Maeglin muttered, certain that it would be so. “I am to face oblivion here. Is that the task you mentioned?”
“No,” Lady Nienna said, and he almost imagined that the tears that flowed from her eyes come more quickly, that her voice wavered a little. “My brother is wise, and he sees more than people tend to assume, but even so he tends favor the scales and the debts and the costs of death. It has happened only once that someone moved him towards pity, and it will not happen again.”
“Who was it?” Maeglin asked.
“Someone who could speak to him as he is and relay her thought to him as he might understand it best,” she said cryptically. “That is a story which you will either hear or recall later.”
Maeglin considered this information, and then concluded her purpose from what he knew and what she had said to him. “Then you are here to offer me comfort before the judgment is made.”
“Your judgment has been decided already,” she said. “I can relay it to you, if you wish, but that would be redundant. My brother will do that quite well on his own, when it is time for you to hear it.”
“I would rather hear it all from you,” Maeglin told her, with frightening honesty, an earnestness that he did not know he felt until that moment. He found that he really would rather hear it from her. It was in the way she spoke. Distant, but measured and patient. Not cloying with sympathy, and not embarrassing, but somehow calming and grounding. She did not respond to his admission.
They arrived at a set of wide windows that opened upon an ocean of light and glimmering stars, more brilliant and wildly magnificent than anything he had ever seen while he was alive. He followed her to them, and there she sat on a bench built into the walls. After a moment’s hesitation, he sat down beside her, assuming that it was her will. When he was seated, she finally spoke again.
“What do you wish to hear from me? I will answer, though you will not like anything I can tell you. You would do better to focus on what is before you now.”
Maeglin considered these words, and found that while they did not frighten him, they also did not need to. There was a steady vein of terror inside him, exactly the thing that had caused him to tarry on his way down the path. He considered that fear now and found that it was not even the prospect of the figures at the end of the corridor that frightened him.
So, he asked the question that had come to the front of his mind in the silence, that had now become stronger than even his curiosity about his own fate. “The child.” He could not say the name, and his throat caught on the words even as bare as they were. It felt like a hundred years ago that he had ever said the name at all. “Did he—? Did Itarillë--?" He gave up on formulating the question, rubbing his arms with his hands, and shrugging helplessly when she looked at him with something that finally looked like pity. His throat seized again, and he choked on a sound.
“Your heart is a confusing web of guilt and fear and hatred, but I can puzzle out your greatest fear. The worst of what you wrought has failed.”
Maeglin stared at her, but her distant, glass-like stare was unreadable and hauntingly closed. “Please,” he finally managed, his voice a miserable, broken shadow of itself. “I want to know. Clearly. As clearly as possible.”
That glassy gaze seemed to open and engulf him as he looked up at her, pleading. “The boy survived. His mother lived. His father lived. This is all you will know, for now.”
Maeglin hesitated, unsure how to ask the other question he needed answered. She seemed to know without words, however, and she answered the question that was threatening to break his self-control. She did not look happy to do so.
“Your uncle is dead.”
The words took time to be true, to turn from a series of sounds to words to meaning. His breath came harshly when they sank in, a painful escape from his throat, and with it came a sound like a sob.
“Did you not intend that, Lómion?”
Maeglin could not answer, and despite all his efforts to remain upright and firm, his face was falling into his hands and tears were flowing down his face. He could not summon a word, and his mouth hurt from how sharply the ends were pulled down, a grimace of nothing but the purest hatred and grief. For whom—the king or himself – Maeglin could not have said.
For a long time, there was silence. Maeglin shook, trying to control himself, relief battling with grief, with regret and anger, with self-disgust, with acceptance. Eventually, the shaking subsided, though the lady said not a word the whole while.
“I’m ready now.”
“Are you?”
“Yes. I will face Mandos. I did this, and worse.”
“An extraordinary statement, Lómion, for one who tarried after death and laid no such plans for responsibility in life. Are you assured that your punishment will not be so harsh, now that you believe that the worst of your machinations were averted?”
The switch from disinterest to sharp insight caught him off-guard, and he could not help but flinch at the sound of her suddenly cold tone. He wanted to tell her that the worst had not been averted, that his uncle was dead and that it was his own fault, but all he could say was, “I never denied my fear.”
“No, you have not. But you have let it consume you. And others.”
“What would you have me do now?”
“There are several powers that bind your fate,” she continued, her tone returning to its previous calm, implacable serenity. “A great deal is tied to you and your soul where these powers are concerned, and it is why I am here. You were right to question my purpose as it regards you; I do come here, to these halls, to offer pity and comfort to those who need it, but not this time. Not to you. You have no need of comfort. I am not here to comfort you, nor to pity you, though pity does drive my hand often. No; I am here to give you some peace before I do what must be done. I am here to guide you.”
Maeglin stared into her eyes, lost in their golden, liquid depths as she spoke. The words were clear, but the meaning was all vague. She continued, as though it did not matter whether Maeglin was following. “I confess I have awaited this day with some anticipation. My labors after we are through will be great, and likely unprecedented.” She smiled. “Of course, no one but a very select few will ever know anything of how great and unprecedented my work is.”
Maeglin watched her stiffly, adrift, unsure how to comfort her if she was lamenting such a thing. Her voice was so beautiful, but it was emotionless. It was odd, watching that crease between her brows deepen and then smooth out in a smile while her voice betrayed not a sign of the endless, deep emotion on her face.
“I seek no comfort from you, Lómion.” That serene voice did not waver, even though her face was bathed in tears. She sounded the slightest bit incredulous, if Maeglin could presume to read the subtle, barely present lilts in her voice that could have expressed emotion. “I seek only to guide you, if you will let me.”
“Do you accompany the souls of the dead? You mentioned that this is what you do, other times.”
“No. I do not guide in that sense. I teach; I provide instruction and wisdom, and comfort; the kind of guidance one might receive from a tutor, but I do not lead anyone anywhere.”
“Will you do this for anyone else?” He studied her suspiciously.
Lady Nienna tilted her head away from him, and though her eyes had all the depth of glassy, shining stones, he felt as though she was considering him very carefully. “There are very few in existence who are or ever will be in positions to learn from me,” she answered.
She spoke as though she was about to tell him something deeply important, but she never seemed to say outright what it was. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he found that he did want to be guided by one of the Valar, and that his grasping hunger had not left him, not even in death.
He wanted what would never come to Laurefindelë, nor Turukáno, nor Tuor the Mortal, nor Itarillë, any of those other great princes and captains and heroes—he wanted so desperately what they did not have. It was so much better to long for what they did not have than it was to long for what they did. If this was part of his fate, then he would seize it, if only because she had approached him, and him alone.
The lady reached out to take his hand in her own and, like her blank serenity, it made him feel uncomfortable and pitiful. He pulled away from her, drawing his walls closer around himself instinctively, ashamed of the thoughts that had consumed him a moment before.
“I knew what I would find when I came into your mind and into your fate,” she said anyway, as if there were no walls at all. He was reminded of her courtesy earlier, as well as her unrelenting sight. “From now on you must not attempt to hide your thoughts from me. It will not work, though I will grant you privacy; but more than that, it will not do you any good.”
“You do not find my thoughts twisted?” His glare and his distrust came naturally, even when he did desperately want her to like him now, to want to help him, to take his side. But all the want in the world could not soften him, and he could not help himself, or his sharp nature, even though he knew she was possibly the only person who could stand to look at him with anything resembling kindness right now.
“Not in their essence. But they can be twisted, and I think you know that very well. It is better to let hunger and anger see the light and grow or die naturally than it is to hide them away and let them twist themselves up into shapes worse than they are.”
Her eyes were almost too bright to look at, the tears reflected the light too well and gave him the feeling of looking into a mirror, and it was worse when she was peering into him so deeply. He could see himself in them, all dark, large eyes and craven, hunched shoulders; his mouth was pulled down and exhaustion was written in every line— wanting. He looked away. “I want whatever it is that you offer,” he whispered, and it came out just as terrible as he had thought it would.
“You do not know what I offer; not yet.”
“You said that people learn from you.”
“I said few can learn, though I teach, and I did not say you were one of them. I can make no one learn.”
“I do not care. You offer this to no one else. You have not offered this to the others.”
“It astonishes me how certain you are in your own singularity,” she said, and held up a hand when his head snapped up with a glare that came too easily. “But you are correct. They have no need of what I offer, and it is likely that they never will. It is not a mark of honor, nor distinction to have the Lady of Sorrows claim you after ruin. You need only look to my brother’s most infamous prisoner to know that. For I did try and guide him too, and if your people have retained those histories at all, then you will know; it is no honor to have me by your side. It is merely the path you chose.”
Something ugly, ugly like the feeling from before, arose in him. He knew the prisoner in question when she put it like that. “I know,” he admitted, letting go of his pride for a moment, dropping his eyes down to his hands, scarred and calloused, twisting in the light pouring off her. “But I will honor you anyway. I will try”— he swallowed— “and I will do what I can to deserve your—” He still did not know what she offered, so he tried again, saying desperately, “I will not be like him.”
“My brothers dread that I am making a similar mistake again, for I take a great risk in what I will offer you. Do you want to know what I will do?”
“It does not matter. I will accept it.” He suspected that he already knew what she would do; she would claim him as her own and take her brother’s dominion over his doom. He would be at her mercy, and he knew that being at the mercy of the Lady of Pity and Mourning was a greater gift than even one of the Valar had once known what to do with. He was not so stupid to betray that, though he supposed he had already betrayed something like it, in Ondolindë. He dashed the thought to the stones as soon as it rose in his mind.
No, he thought. Not now. Not while she was here, before him, all but telling him with all her wisdom and knowledge that she believed that he would not be like Morgoth.
“I can guide you to heal the cracks that I see, and that would make your burdens easier to bear. But they would be temporary solutions if you do not understand what I am healing and why.” She turned her head towards him, her eyes unreadable and strange. The crown on her head glittered like her eyes, like a thousand suns. “Do you know what would need healing?”
“No,” he answered honestly. “But I thought you would teach me. You did not mention healing before.”
“You are right about that. Each case is different, however. Let us begin with the easiest task and soothe, for a while, this all-consuming fear.”
The calm came back in, rolling over him like wind and water, and for the first time she disregarded his walls and shields. They fell away like so much paper piled high before an open window, as though they had never stood, had never guarded him.
“Does it feel better not to be so scared?”
“Yes.” He let out a sigh, the bitterness and the guarded distrust gone, all at once—he could not summon them, and he found that he did not want to summon them, not anymore. Had all that really been fear? “But this cannot last, can it?”
“You begin to understand why I cannot simply vanish all the cracks, and why I mentioned teaching and not healing,” she said with satisfaction. “No, this isn’t true healing. This is just peace.”
“What else must be done?”
“I think you know.”
He did. He knew the hunger—the consuming gnawing—and the terror that things would change, that he would be cast aside. And then the greed, the deep, bloody marks he left behind in everything he loved for fear that it would be taken away, or worse, that it would leave him. These things, now that he was dead, seemed so obvious. Now that the fear was gone, they felt…
Remarkably cruel, and terribly lonely. How could he have let himself live that way? The grief— the grief he told her that he did not feel— came back again. He lived with that, mundane and ever-present, all this time. He had not even felt it anymore, not even when he saw his own body broken on the stones of the mountain.
It had been so ordinary. So familiar. A cruel, beloved, comfortable weight.
“May I at least ask—"
Lady Nienna’s hand came to rest over his own; her own dark and shining gold, his own dark and calloused, hurt and scarred. “Ask, Lómion. You may ask what you please, whenever you please.”
The name felt like a blow. “My mother—? Is she well? Does she know—”
Lady Nienna was silent for a moment, staring at him without a word, and then she took his hand in both of hers, pressing gently into the rough skin with her thumbs. It was immediately calming. Her skin was warm, but it was also hard and smooth like the stones of the halls around them. “She does not, not yet, but it does not matter. She has her own journey to make, but she is happier than she has been in a long time—and she longs to see you. But she can wait. And she must wait.”
The tears fell, and he did not brush them away, nor did he try to hide them. He met her eyes, because he could not imagine avoiding the sight of them anymore, and then there was a new calm, and it swallowed up everything he could summon. Unyielding, uncaring, unbroken—this calm was like a flood.
Before long, even the pit of confusion and loss in his center did not hold, and it fell apart in the face of peace.
At the gatehouse, before the fall. Do not forget this. Do not forget it—hate them. Hate them.
509 F.A
Her flesh was cold, but her blood was warm.
She had something she needed to tell these people, but she could not recall it now. They killed her at the gates, for the king’s law was final and irreversible. She thought perhaps there was pity and reluctance in their eyes, but she could not care. She would kill them all.
She hated them. She hated them. Oh, how she despised them. When she drew a rattling breath, it was only to go on hating them while she could. But eventually the breaths stopped coming, and the hatred could not hold without a heart to grip.
Death was not so bad; the fear and pain that came before it, she could have done without, but death was silent and tranquil and dark. The darkness was a relief after all the snow, and the near blindness of being in the snow for so long.
Even so, all she could think of, even as serenity and darkness washed over her, was that she longed to see a certain face just once more. Her memory supplied it, beloved and unrecognizable all at once. Who had he been? He was not pleasant to look at— no, there was a residual horror and grief still that rose at the memory of him, broken though she was here at the end. But she loved him so, and she wanted to hold him and tell him it was not his fault. The darkness here was not his fault, and she hated to think that he would assume it was.
No, he could not have predicted the barbarity of these people, nor the horror she would face here. He could not have predicted this.
She was killed in the gatehouse, a mere short path from an audience with the king she might have saved, if he had just left his fortress and listened. She died hating them all, but once she was dead, she laughed at them. Their necks would split, blood would pour, and the city would be aflame before the winter was over.
A path came to her feet, and she took a single step upon it. But she remembered her beloved’s ruined face and longed to see it again. She turned back to the city. The world fractured then.
A reckoning that will not cease.
510 F.A
He marched for her, she who was dead somewhere in these walls.
His forces had rejoined the throngs and the thralls of their enemy, and behind him stood vipers and snakes beyond the understanding of anyone who drew breath in this beautiful, damned place. He could have saved them, too, but they had erred, and now he longed only to crush them.
They could seize victory against their enemy elsewhere.
No, the city would not stand another night; the sun would rise on a rotting ribcage, picked clean by shredding talon and claw, an honorable burial that it did not deserve. They would raze its beauty to rubble, burn it and crush it into the ground. He would leave no door unopened until he found her body. He would hunt their murderous king down himself, and he knew he would die doing it.
He came to the fountains finally, running with blood, and smelled the smoke of burning roses on the air. Before him was the tower, the tower they knew the eagles singled out in all their landings. The king’s tower. He would crush it. The dragon was nearby; he could feel its thoughts on the air, twisted and mournful and full of pain. He could do this, at least, for her. It would crush him too, but he wanted that. He wanted to leave.
When the tower fell, his death cry was torn from him, and the pain of it was like a knife across the throat. He thought of her in every moment.
The alley; sweetly smelling, burning
510 F.A
She did not want to leave the roses to burn alone, but that was not the only reason she stayed. She sat in the middle of the alley, and the flagstones beneath her thighs were already unbearably hot. She was tired, too tired to move and run. Tired, heartsick, and lost; she thought that perhaps the dragon understood. It looked back at her with such hollow eyes. There was a cry in the distance, a terrible one, and the dragon seemed to attune itself to it.
No. Not yet.
She stood with a sigh and approached the ancient, twisted serpent with her hand outstretched. She could almost imagine it the way it must have been, before.
Their eyes locked.