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Oh brother, you were always ice, a howling wind that sharpens the peaks of Taniquetil high in the skies where even the bells of Valmar fade.
It was I who first saw it, the winter of your gaze fixed upon me as I held you, no more than a bundle of flesh and blue eyes. You did not breathe as you came into this world and neither your golden mother nor our father could coax a cry from you.
I placed my hands upon your small body and poured some of my warmth into you, praying to Ilúvatar that you do not fade as my mother had. Instead, you whimpered and your icy eyes came into focus against mine. You never took them away after that, it seemed to me, no matter how far away I ventured.
You were always a survivor. Strong, impenetrable, a glacier that steadily carves the hills of stone.
But I did not understand it, not then, and perhaps not until the very end. How could I know when fires burned through my heart? For I was not content with empty praise of greatness within the borders of Aman, not even the limits of Arda. I sought the Flame Imperishable, the forbidden, the unattainable. That place of origin where all thought of creation resides.
It was revealed to me in a brilliant moment of genesis. When silver and gold met the flame of my spirit and were distilled into three glorious jewels. I tasted the boundlessness of freedom, infinity beyond the material confines of our world. And then, the moment was gone, and I could never achieve it again even though the Silmarils remained.
Oh brother, I believed you purposed to extinguish my desire, to freeze the embers that gave me life. For you could not know what I had done, how far my ambition had taken me. In my desperate search for light, I hearkened to His words instead, to one who had sought the Secret Fire also, and chose shadow.
The thin edge of my blade, which I crafted to perfection by the designs of my flaming heart, I laid upon your neck. I had memorized that marbled, perfect piece of skin as a scroll well worn by hands over the ages.
Your skin strained and reddened under my blade, your chest heaving in anger like a rising thunder, pulsing noiselessly in the sky. Oh brother, was it wrong to take such joy from it? Joy born in darkness, deadly as my newly forged weapon against your throbbing heartbeat?
Joy because I felt it, that small ember kindling within you at last. But you did not let it grow. You smothered it silently, with your straight back turning away from my flame.
And I burned, oh brother, I burned even as the light of the Trees was consumed by shadow, my heart blazing all the more like a torch in the dark. Loss I had known intimately, and loss would ever drive me forward.
'Remember no grievance,' you spoke, your words the first droplets of a rainstorm piercing the waters of a clear lake.
Remember no grievance, as if we were not made to grieve one another, to wound each other as no one else could, for I knew you as deeply as I knew my own self. And could anyone else hurt us better than we hurt ourselves?
I scorched the path before us, for you said you shall follow and then stood still as your people cursed my name. 'Let the ships burn,' I commanded in my madness. Let the fires roar and quench all that we once were, fill with heat the hollows carved by grief.
I let it all burn, my own body not spared either. A fitting end, for in flame I was born and could imagine no other end. But you endured, oh brother mine. An Ice Realm for an Ice King. You endured even as you watched your people fall, even as your children were gone beyond your reach, one by one, even as your lands turned to ashes beneath Thangorodrim.
But tell me, oh brother, were you not consumed by fire as you rode across Anfauglith to face Him before his Iron Gates? Did you not burn as I did when you plunged a dagger into his flesh with your dying breath?
In the end, we were the same, you and I. Oh brother, oh piece of my flesh and marrow, we were united in fire, its tendrils claiming all that was once ours - lands, glory, our firstborn sons.
The children of Finwë, the Kings of the Noldor, no more but songs of heroes and battles long past.
Yet it was not for naught. You stand before me now in this new world. The blue of your eyes rushing through me as two newborn streams fed by melting snowy mountaintops.
You are tall and unyielding as you ever were, but I look at you now as I never allowed myself to do before. It does not escape me how your lower eyelid shudders, as subtle as the trepidation of my Silmarils before I shattered them to pieces uncountable.
Your heart spills down your beloved face. These tears are not shards of ice, that I know now. They are water, cleaner and clearer than any of Ulmo’s rivers. They heal the burns upon my spirit as you rush to press me tightly against yourself.
I drink these waters deeply as I sink into your embrace, slowly coming back to life, finding my breath like you had when I first held you as a babe. Ice and Fire meet at last, merging with one another. The space all around us turns to liquid light, bright as the shine of the stars. That ancient radiance remains even as the Earth is broken and re-made.
This is perhaps the Light I sought, the Flame Imperishable, glowing gently between your body and mine. We return to the beginning of all things.
