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And what can I tell you my brother, my killer
What can I possibly say?
I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you
I'm glad you stood in my way
Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes
I thought it was there for good, so I never tried
Leonard Cohen, from Famous Blue Raincoat
Faramir puts the glass down and opens the window. Above the City the dome of the night-sky unfolds like a giant dandelion-clock. At its edges white stars break off and drift into the vastness of space, like seeds on the wind.
Where did you go Aragorn?
It was now two weeks since they brought Aragorn’s broken body back. He died on a beautiful, cold and still evening, with black tree-silhouettes, jagged rooftops and mountains scorched into an orange sky. He died to the accompaniment of peaceful autumnal noises, owl-hoot, leaf-rustle.
Hoof-hit.
They told him Aragorn fell off the horse sideways during a wild ride together with some of his men.
In two days, he will accompany Arwen to Lothlorien. She came to his rooms yesterday evening – grief stricken but determined. Arwen was never part of the old fabric, and in his own way neither was Aragorn.
Faramir accepts her unuttered reasons for leaving, and on some wordless level he thinks he understands. She’s returning to a place that was once home. Some elves still live in the forests of Middle Earth, and while not of her family, they’ll treat her kindly.
‘Now he’ll never have to choose the moment of his passing,’ she says, and I will never beg him to stay.’ She knots her hands and looks Faramir in the eye.
‘It’s said that beyond the circles of the world is more than memory. You can see the ghosts of the City, what do you believe?’
Faramir takes her hand.
‘I believe in the memory of places, and perhaps that’s what the ghosts are: splinters of the vast memory of this City. I never talk to them, and they never approach me. So as for what awaits us beyond the circles of the world, we, elves, humans all, have no reports, just stories.’
Arwen cries then, hard, like any mortal. Faramir draws her close. She’s as tall as he is.
‘Walk in peace, lady Arwen,’ he whispers, ‘walk in peace. Let me ride with you to the edge of Lothlorien. Grant me a long goodbye, before you too are lost to me.’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘ride with me Faramir. I would like a companion on my last journey; one loved by Aragorn.’
*
Faramir fills another glass, rubs the stem with his finger. It’s old and solid, dark green, heavy. He sighs and looks out the open window again. Time to concentrate, time to pull the threads if the last few years together. Time to let go, probably. He doesn’t know of what, yet, but by tracing events back and forth he’ll hopefully know, eventually.
Faramir blows on the wine and hums a tune:
“He walks on earth no longer the grey eyed king...”
Now I will go and awaken my daughter from sleep,
My grey-eyed daughter, into her eyes look deep.
And hear the poplars beside the window, sighing,
"He walks on the earth no longer, your grey-eyed king..."
‘Thank you for leaving something of you behind, in my care.’.
Aragorn has always been there between them, him and Éowyn. A friend, a healer, a lover…
**
Some years into their marriage the lights went out for them both. It was Éowyn who went first, and in his immediate reaction of exhaustion and resentment Faramir didn’t recognise the same happening to him. He loved Éowyn, her fierceness, her fragility, her weapon skills, but just then all he wanted was to remove himself from her presence. He didn’t, he sat by her bedside, passive and silent and held her hand. Comforting words bobbed and sank somewhere at the back of his mind like flimsy boats. Words seemed pointless, only so much ash falling from his lips. Elboron and Mariel was sent to family in Rohan. As the days passed and Éowyn slid ever further into a strange mute despair Faramir realised he needed help and forced himself to act. He called for Aragorn. There was no-one else he would let into the dark space that had closed around them. Aragorn had been there before, seen it before.
Aragorn came late one night, accompanied by two people from the House of Healing, a woman and a man. The clammy murk surrounding Faramir lifted a little.
The woman sat with Éowyn while Aragorn and Faramir shared some food in front of the fire. Then Aragorn leant forward and folded his large hands around Faramir’s. It felt good and Faramir closed his eyes.
‘Is there anything you can tell me, Faramir?’
Faramir looked at the other man.
‘Old shadows catching us both unawares at the same time, leaving us unable to help each other. We both drank deeply from a cup of darkness once, a cup forced upon us.’
Aragorn leaned further forward and put his forehead to Faramir’s. ‘
‘We need to bring Éowyn to the Houses of Healing. She will recover, in time, but I judge the situation serious, so I suggest you come too.’
‘No,’ said Faramir, I will go away for a while, but not to the City.’
Aragorn looked at him, sadness and worry rippling across his face.
‘As you wish, Faramir, but remember darkness can be an alluring companion.’
They took Éowyn away. Faramir caressed her pale face and watched her leave. It was for the best he told himself; he felt he’d nothing to offer her healing.
Before he left Aragorn lifted Faramir’s hands to his cheek. Faramir let the moment linger and then leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth. After a moment’s surprise Aragorn answered in kind. Faramir felt himself held inside a sphere, inside a scent of rain on leaf and stone. The kiss a desert bloom in the bleak landscape inside him and a brief outpouring of love and desire for the man in front of him. Feelings he observed with detached wonderment when the kiss ended. He felt no embarrassment as the intensity of the moment faded. But a trace remained; an indelible track in a dark wood.
‘Get well, Faramir, for everyone who love you, and remember you can’t do it alone.’
Aragorn’s voice had a broken edge to it. He squeezed Faramir’s hands. Then he turned and left. Faramir watched his retreating back in silence.
Faramir began to prepare for a solitary sojourn in the Ithilien wilderness. He wanted to travel light, literally. He cut his hair short, brought provision for an outwards journey only, brought few clothes, without reflecting what this might mean. He seemed to have lost his ability for reflection; all he wanted was to keep his body moving until it didn’t. It was an agenda that didn’t require much of neither planning nor energy. But when Faramir was ready and went to fetch his horse from the stable, he was met in the door by two men. They bowed to him, presented themselves as Duinhir and Iorlas and told him they were to be his travel companions.
‘By order of the King.’
Faramir stared at them. His first reaction was fury. An order. When had he last been given an order since becoming an adult? But his fury proved as feeble as any other feeling in his present repertoire: a dull flame on a damp log. The two men looked at him calmly, waiting for him to acquiesce, as if he had a choice. Faramir sensed these were no ordinary soldiers. Both at ease with themselves, not hindered by undue reverence and no doubt told to restrain him if showed signs of unravelling.
‘We are battlefield healers, Lord Faramir, we work for the Houses of Healing.’ Faramir drew a deep breath and nodded his consent to get it over with. He wanted to leave, and if this involved two minders, or in other words: to be under the care of The Houses of Healing, so be it. His only request was to be allowed to ride alone a distance ahead of them. Duinhir and Iorlas consented to that, provided they could keep him in frequent eyeline.
Faramir didn’t want to know when Aragorn had arranged this. He suppressed the pain of realising the extent of the King’s concern for him and the accuracy of his insight.
The days that followed was a slow journey out of his bleak mindscape for Faramir. The monotony of riding, being carried without effort by another being in slow progression was perhaps a good start, effortless up to a point but still requiring awareness and control.
In the beginning it felt as if his mind was fracturing and falling like snow into a deep abyss, frosty and painless. But the absence of something tangible, a clear cause and effect, created its own kind of hurt as the days passed. The force of this hurt, the weight of this nothing, drew a slow red line along the white of the abyss and started to fill the void inside him, It was agonising, like blood to frozen fingertips. Overwhelming, but not unwelcome. Faramir could deal with pain, his old companion. It lingered, like an icicle down his spine. It made him shudder and tear up but was still an embrace of sorts.
His minders, Duinhir and Iorlas, cooked for themselves and him and until now Faramir had eaten his food a short distance away, but one evening he remained close when they had their evening meal. The food was the usual soldier fare, dried meat, dried fruit with tubers in a watery stew. But Faramir was grateful for its plainness. He looked at his minders across his bowl. They bore a strong family resemblance, dark hair, dark eyes. He guessed they were brothers but didn’t ask. They met his gaze calmly and went back to talking between themselves.
Over the next few evenings Faramir learned a little more about them.
They’d grown up together in the Houses of Healing orphanage. Twins but not of the identical kind. Theirs were a not uncommon story: father slain in some battle, mother leaving them by the door of the orphanage and leaving the city.
‘We have always worked together for the Houses in one form or another,’ said Duinhir.
‘We often accompany battle-shocked soldiers back to the City,’ added Iorlas, ‘and others traumatised and unpredictable.’
Faramir finished his stew and asked into his bowl: ‘Is that how you see me?’
Duinhir said: ‘No. We are not here to assess or judge you, lord Faramir. Trauma takes many forms, and we, you included, don’t know the nature or timespan of yours, yet. Someone in your situation is never the best judge of their own needs.’
Faramir didn’t answer, but it occurred him that he complete solitude he felt he craved perhaps was not the right thing for him at all.
Later, before he settled for the night, he watched the two of them silhouetted by the remains of the fire. They shared a pipe and blew smoke rings across the embers. Little by little they grew fainter as the darkness fell silently, like smoke of a different kind.
That night he was dreaming for the first time in months. He was standing in the doorway of a large room; a woman was sitting by a table near the fireplace on the opposite wall. First, he thought it was Finduilas, but as he moved closer, she turned into Eowyn, and when he reached the table, the chair was empty. He heard a screaming voice from the fireplace. Look at me! The woman was sitting there, surrounded by a ring of flames. Her face a swirl of fragments, sometimes a familiar shape of rose to the surface before being submerged again. He stretched his hand towards her to help her out, but she made no move to take it. For all her pleading she seemed unable to see him.
The view changed. He was tiny, watching a high wall of fire and the woman looming above it like an enormous effigy – her face still swirling. Then someone rushed to his side, picked him up ran out of the room with him. The door slammed shut behind them and all went black.
Faramir woke with the smell of fire in his nostrils and a roaring fever-headache. Duinhir leaned over him, looking concerned. Faramir knew he was ill and that he didn’t want brought to the City. He forced his wish out through his dry throat and mouth.
‘We’ll give it three days,’ said Duinhir, ‘if you don’t improve by then, we’ll have to take you.’
They gave him bitter infusions for the fever and the headaches; the infusions made him drift off and dream. The woman in the fire did not reappear, instead he was alone, sitting in a room without furniture. The room was light and the door open, but for some reason he was unable to leave. Then someone he couldn’t see put a jacket across his shoulders and pulled him close. The embrace made him see himself clearly, briefly. He was a small layer of turmoil and flesh between the hard bone at his centre and the cold air outside the tent. Faramir drifted in and out of half and full sleep. He heard muffled voices laced with concern for their patient: exhausted and drained, the fever still not broken at the end of the second day.
But then something shifted. Faramir woke and stayed awake. The fever had gone, just exhaustion remained. He lifted his head carefully and sat up, drank some water from the cup beside him. He could smell fire and the acrid scent of yet another infusion. He didn’t call for the Duinhir or Iorlas, enjoyed a moment free from their sharp-eyed concern. He felt gratitude though. On the one hand they were in the king’s employ, doing their duty, but on the other he felt their concern for him was personal too, carried by pride at being chosen to mind him. Chosen by the grey-eyed king.
But who will heal you, my king? he whispered.
Feeling lightheaded Faramir lay back down again and closed his eyes. He tried to make sense of his fever dreams. Tangled in their strange, muddled language lay perhaps clarity and insight of a sort.
**
What haunted Éowyn and him preceded their time together. There was a gate inside them beyond which both were alone, and the other couldn’t enter. On his side of the gate, he now saw an abandoned garden, or rather a garden that lived according to its own design. It was dark and knotted in places, the view sometimes barred by enormous leaves, but perhaps he had no reason to fear what might linger underneath them in the undergrowth. Monsters subverted one’s expectations. Some monsters clawed and cut, some rested quietly warming their cold limbs on a summer’s day, and one’s own monsters weren’t always the monsters of another.
He visualised the house he’d seen during his fever. He looked for the large room with the open door that had trapped him, the room with the table, the fireplace, the woman with a face like swirling leaves, but didn’t find them. Instead, he saw a long corridor lined with open doors. Feelings nested there, like plants in separate ordered spaces. He expected the last room to be love, but it was no last room, the corridor went on forever. And then he saw the plants spilled out and intertwined, like greenhouse free of its moorings.
He’d been found by someone in this house, in that was love, but love was an ever searching ever changing thing. The same hand could be both a raised fist and an open palm. Open, closed…His life was its own room, with doors open or closed; utterly beyond his control.
Outside his internal house and garden, outside this small camp, something had been irrevocably changed. Aragorn, Éowyn and perhaps somebody not yet born moving towards the corner of his vision
Faramir pushed himself up on his knees and wrapped the blanket around his shoulders. Iorlas appeared in the opening of the tent, studied him intently and looked relieved.
‘I think you have beaten the fever,’ lord Faramir.
‘Thanks to your care.’
‘Our care doesn’t always succeed, neither in the blood-mist of battlefield nor with single patients in calmer circumstances. It’s always a triumph when we manage to turn sickness of any kind around.’
‘I would have sunk like a stone in a dark well without you, fever or no.’
Later Faramir joined the brothers for a bowl of soup by the fire. He didn’t say much, just listened to the murmur of their conversation and watched smoke rings drift between sparks from smouldering wood.
It was easier to feel gratitude towards these skilful men than towards Aragorn who’d employed them to watch out for him. He almost felt he’d been played: by the best of intentions and by precise assessment – and subsequently the best of outcomes. A stern healer’s logic paired with a king’s order. Faramir sighed. His resentment was unwarranted. He loved Aragorn, he was finally able to acknowledge that, but it was a tangled kind of love.
All these entwined feelings in their cluttered spaces. He would deal with them, step by step.
Just now he wanted to immerse himself in the peace of the evening. The comfortable closeness of Duinhir and Iorlas spun a template he knew. He didn’t need them to admit him to their private sphere; it was enough to sit near them and be transported by the mood they inhabited. He’d been there often enough: darkness, stillness, fire, smoke rings, a brother. It lifted the remains of his fever-fatigue to almost serenity.
Ten days later Duinhir and Iorlas left Faramir to his own company, albeit with the gentle suggestion that he should head for home.
Faramir looked the two men in the eye as they were about to part ways, one after the other. Then he embraced them, one after the other. He knew their positions had shifted; the king’s order lifted. He was no longer under the care and command of Duinhir and Iorlas, but they still answered to the king and not to him.
‘Goodbye, Faramir,’ said Iorlas. ‘May we never meet again under similar circumstances, and may you never again need a battlefield healer.’
Faramir smiled. ‘Your hope is mine, but the mind is an unpredictable companion.’
‘The mind can be tamed,’ said Iorlas, ‘to a certain extent anyway’.
‘However,’ Duinhir added, ‘regarding other circumstances: look for us in The Amber Vial, near the Houses of Healing, when you next come to the City. We’re often there at the end of the month.’
‘I promise’, said Faramir, ‘I’d love to meet and talk with a glass in hand and a laugh at the ready.’
Faramir left first, with his meagre belongings. He winced at this reminder of his original, unacknowledged, intention of shedding himself bit by bit. He had to try to prevent another slide into such darkness or at least lessen its impact. Faramir thought back to the kiss he’d initiated, and Aragorn responded to. How he'd for a moment been held inside a rain-lit space, free from the clammy grasp of his desolation. He wanted to recapture the sweetness of that moment and bring it to the forefront in his mind. Something told him he would need the memory in the months to come.
The shadow of him and the horse had begun to climb the trees and darken patches of ground; slender limbs brushed branches and stones. Faramir was tired but as he was nearly home and knew the road well, he rode on, into the awaiting future, towards the presence and scent of Éowyn. He’d been totally removed from her, in both mind and body for months. He didn’t fully know this part of himself, familiar though it was: the part that saw the ghosts of the City and sensed emotions rolling towards him before he’d entered the house which contained them.
When he arrived, Faramir got off his horse, leaned towards its flank while he looked up at the windows. Candles flickered within and he felt Éowyn’s shadow across the glass like a touch. She was waiting for him, and he longed for her, now that it was safe to do so. He had let her down. He hadn’t wanted to know anything about her stay in the Houses of Healing or the steps taken by the people who cared for her. The bitter truth was that the vast darkness they’d inhabited left space for no-one else.
**
It was one of the stable boys who noticed him first, and then they all came running. Éowyn in a blue and grey dress he remembered from countless evenings. When Faramir pulled her to him he felt how thin she was, bony shoulders filling his palms, but even so he was no longer strong enough to lift her up.
‘All in good time,’ he whispered, all in good time.’
And they needed time. Things had changed between them. Faramir was happy to let things go unsaid. He didn’t want to know everything, didn’t want to put words to events lurking in the shadows. Sometimes he got the feeling he was following traces made by another hand when he touched Eowyn’s skin, and at times towards morning before he woke completely, that he was making love to somebody else entirely.
**
Faramir was waiting for a birth. And when the day came, and he was holding the newborn girl he knew two things. That he loved the child desperately and that he would be her father in what mattered. He had questions but left them by the bank of another river in time for now. Eowyn and Faramir called their daughter Morwen.
**
Towards the end of her stay in the Houses of Healing Eowyn asked the healer on duty to enquire about an audience with the king. She made the request in formal terms, it felt safest. She still found it difficult to bridge the gap between the king of Gondor and the ranger she’d known.
The Houses of Healing had given her excellent care, no doubt under Aragorn’s supervision, but she hadn’t seen him in person since she arrived. And while she had recovered, the people looking after for her had given her little or no information about Faramir. He might as well be on an island in the middle of the ocean for all the chances she had of seeing him. Eowyn didn’t have Faramir’s farsightedness, but she was bound to him and knew he was sinking. She missed him desperately.
Within two hours she was told Aragorn would receive her the same evening.
A soldier accompanied her through the streets winding up towards the Citadel. She only wore a shawl on top of her dress and shivered in the cool night air but enjoyed the soft autumnal light, enjoyed the energy of the City, felt the pull of its long memory.
Eowyn was shown into a comfortable room with doors open to a small balcony looking out over the City and Pelennor fields. Aragorn greeted her with a wistful expression she was unable to interpret. She was shown a chair and given a cup of hot wine. Clutching the cup, she looked across at him in the chair opposite. Aragorn was dressed in colours of grey and green - neither king nor ranger. He looked tired, but she sensed he was pleased to see her.
‘Thank you for pulling me ashore,’ she said.
‘Nobody is happier than me to see you almost healed’
‘And Faramir?’
Aragorn looked down on his hands
‘He wanted to ride out into the wilderness of Ithilien alone, but I arranged for two good men to accompany him. They are under orders to bring Faramir to the City if things take a wrong turn, by force if need be. So, he’s not alone, you don’t need to fear for his life. I haven’t heard anything from the men, and that is a good sign.’
‘Will the man I get back be the same as the one who left?’
‘Probably. Changes will happen however, visible only to the two of you.’ Aragorn’s voice sank to an almost whisper. ‘I want Faramir back whole. I don’t want him to break.’
Evening crept into the room and Aragorn stood up to close the door to the balcony.
‘Why did I go under, Aragorn? Eowyn asked to his back, ‘So completely, even losing my ability to speak for a while.’
‘You were hurt by the Witch King, Eowyn. That wound lingers. It reopens but can be healed – again and again. There’s no permanent healing. But I do believe you are unlikely to be affected so severely again.’
Eowyn felt a sudden fury towards the fragile woman she’d become. She was a warrior of Rohan; she’d stood against the Witch King and survived. She was proud of it, proud of her wound and the turning point it represented.
Her shawl left behind in the chair Eowyn stood beside Aragorn and watched the pale, narrowing band of daylight stretched across the Pelennor. She moved closer to him, and he put his arm around her shoulder. They stood in silence until it was almost completely dark. A man and a woman in a room, differences rubbed out by the approaching night
**
Morwen became a focal point for Faramir. A hook for his love, a bridge between past and present. She helped to ground him, brought him and Eowyn closer together after their fall and separation.
One evening during the autumn Morwen was five, Elladan and Elrohir arrived for a gathering in Ithilien. Faramir enjoyed their company immensely. Elves were elusive beings. Many had left and the ones who stayed kept to themselves. Towards the end of the meal Morwen came in and watched the visitors in her attentive, serious way while she leaned against Faramir's chair. Elladan smiled at her and as he did so another expression flickered across his face. It was brief, but Faramir knew it for what it was, recognition. A memory of another child with the same eyes and expression almost a century earlier. His breath caught, a chill gathered at the small of his back. Answers to questions he’d thought long buried and forgotten appeared, unwanted. He pulled Morvern close, his heart hammering as if he’d just a stepped back from a precipice. Elladan looked at them with affection and Faramir lifted his glass to him. Everyone needs a locked door that stays locked.
That night after the meal was over, children in bed, guests withdrawn to their chambers, Faramir walked across to walled garden facing the river. Its inhabitants of moths and ghosts gathered and fluttered around him as he entered and then withdrew. He curled up in one of the large chairs and lit his pipe. A curious flurry of air wrapped itself in the smoke trails.
Faramir looked into the bright line of sky touching the trees in the distance.
‘Thanks for the despair you removed from her’, he said aloud. ‘When I thought we couldn’t move on, thought us stuck in amber for eternity’.
The last four years the encounters between him and Aragorn had been restricted to formal occasions. Discussions regarding matters of state, council meetings. But the kiss they had once exchanged lingered; lurked beneath their assigned government roles, both a treasured memory and a disruptor.
Tomorrow he’d call for Aragorn. It was not going to be a bitter meeting. He wanted to clear things up, with the man he owed his life to.
Eowyn woke when Faramir eased himself into bed beside her, smelling of pipe smoke and wet leaves. His breathing told her he’d drifted into sleep almost immediately. She turned and snuggled close to his back, put her forehead between his shoulder blades. His hair had grown long again, now – she found that reassuring. He’d cut it short before he rode into the wilderness of Ithilien. To those who knew him, an extreme thing for him to do. Shedding himself bit by bit....
She remembered the windy day on the walls of the City, when they’d first known each other and the fate of the human world hung in the balance. Light and dark hair mingling, uniting them in stubborn hope.
She loved him, but Faramir was wary of love declarations. Eowyn imagined Denethor, in terror and madness, expressing his love for his son as he prepared them both for the pyre, and that Faramir heard him as he drifted into unconsciousness. Usually, they didn’t need words though, and just now she enjoyed the almost-touch of his stillness, his intricate, weary mind at rest. Love was a corridor with an endless string of rooms. Eowyn fell asleep and dreamt of a large hall, silver light trickling down the walls and pooling on the floor.
The next morning two distressed riders arrived from the City and told them Aragorn was dead.
**
Faramir wakes with a jolt and almost knocks his glass over. The candle has reached the end, and he lights a new one. It shimmers and trembles inside the windowpane. He turns his head and looks into the face of the man on the other side of the table. Diaphanous yet strangely solid, eyes a paler green than the window, reflecting the same flame.
Faramir sits stunned into immobility while battered on the inside by a storm of emotion; his skin thinning under the assault: happiness, grief, relief and the shuddering end to a wait he didn’t know he’d endured. He’s forces himself to move and pushes his hands across the table towards his brother.
‘You took your time’, is all he manages to say
Boromir looks amused.
‘Took my time to find my place among ghost crowd of this City you mean? Well, time for the likes of me’, he spreads his arms out, ‘works differently. But I guess we all need a port to arrive at, a place to belong. It seems The City claimed me in the end.’ Boromir’s voice drifts towards Faramir like smoke and Faramir feels the touch of his hands like breath upon his fingertips.
‘The thought of your bones in a small vessel on the ocean, bleaching under icy stars used to haunt me, encased you in a, for me, unfathomable loneliness’.
‘It isn’t quite like that,’ says Boromir. ‘You curl up in the end of the boat and without fear you watch the sea, the clouds, the wheeling stars, watch your bones crumble, the boat gleaming under the moon in its shell of salt, and you don’t count the days, the hours, because you are at one with water, air and night fog. Apart from that kernel of who you once were giving shape of sort, to the nothingness.’
‘I was once advised to let a part of my mind keep vigil over you, as a way to ease my grief’, says Faramir.
‘I think you kept that kernel of me together.’ Boromir’s words billow gently across to him.
Faramir moves his chair to the other side of the table. When he puts his shoulder to the outline of his brother’s he feels a definite and inside and outside to his permeable form. Boromir fills the space of his body, like he always did. His face is a paler shade than the grey and black of his clothes; all muted hues apart from the sea green of his eyes, so unlike his one-time Númenorian grey.
‘It’s strange,’ says Boromir. ‘When you sit near me, I get an echo, in scent, from the living world I was once part of. Rain on stone and leaf, sun on leather, wine in a cup, logs on a fire.’
Faramir moves as close as he can to his brother without falling off the chair. The grief and heartbreak of the last month settles. It isn’t happiness he feels exactly, just an acceptance of where he is. His eyes begin to feel heavy, and he fights it.
‘If I sleep, will you be gone when I wake?’
‘No, I’m here now, you’ll see me re-appear. Sleep Faramir; I’ll stay with you.'
Faramir stands up, shadow swaying against the rafters. He wants to talk about other things, about Aragorn, about taking Arwen to Lothlorien, but the words are locked inside his tired brain. He lies down on his bed in the corner, fully clothed. As he drifts off, he feels an airy touch on his shoulder and hair, the smell of salt in his nostrils. A voice like smoke whispers: ‘Open, closed, open, that’s all we are.’
Then sleep pulls him away and lifts him up, far above the roofs of the City. Ladders of rain and sunlight, ropes of air and water, stretching – into eternity.