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“You would sacrifice your own son?”
Silence, accusatory; gloom, no stench of beeswax or tallow, a cold light; terror, polluting the air like smoke (or perhaps the smoke itself permeates the waxed canvas and silk tapestries, always insidious in its invasiveness), and the faint sound of weeping.
Nelyafinwë, scorn-faced; Kanafinwë, mourning-white. Heaving under the weight of breath, trembling against the edge of light.
“You would not wait one more hour?”
Morifinwë, soot-handed. Restless on solid ground, straining against distance and closeness both.
“You did not know he fled?”
Turcafinwë, steel-gleaming; Curufinwë, lance-stiff. Washing no complicit hands, casting shadows without end.
“You would murder him? Your own blood and flesh, by your own hand?”
Pityafinwë, reeking of fire. Alone.
Silence, cleaving.
“And if I did?”
I am not weeping. I am still. I turn on my heel. I begin to walk. I let the tarp drop closed. I blink away ashes; I pass my sons’ knights voiceless; I move out of reach of grasping hands. I gave the order. I have nothing to talk about.
The rocks grind softly beneath my feet, singing white quartz, striated gneiss, dappled gabbro and inclusions of silicate scale soot-stained -- darkness reaches even this far, it has followed us, it has preceded us, the night has hands like a cataclysm and they pollute whatever they touch -- black, it's all black, not madder and indigo reflecting starlight in the paraphernalia of royalty but the black of annihilation where nothing survives.
The only fire they have ever known has all but gone out.
It is done, sealed as unassailable; the great carrion of my choice is lain beside me bones-barred in all its thrashing atavism, silverwood crumbling to ash like the funerary rustle of my crowning wreath. Every coronation is sealed in blood. The skeletal shadows of ships are beginning to collapse into the bowels of the earth, white flames dead, eaten by the cold sea. A wind is picking up. The pyre is at its end. The west is out of sight.
It is not mercy; it is the other shore. There is no mercy.
Mercy is a thing out of reach, as light once was for our forefathers, a mirage -- a beautiful betrayer, the ignis fatuus of that lie of deathlessness promised in a life mired in imperceptible decay from the very foundation-notes of the Song. I walk. The fires have died down now, though the chemical stench of oil lingers. No one may touch me; I hear no questions. Mercy is a lie, and I have sworn an oath that cannot be broken to detest a lie. Mercy is the past. And what of the past? What man, no matter how great, can reach back (can reach his hand into the darkness of all absences) without becoming blinded? And I have such a need of clear eyes yet, hurtling forwards into a recourseless and remorseless war, eyes like steel in place of a heart swayed by the promise that time can be turned back and sunderings mended and death overturned in resurrection so that it may be laid to rest and expunged from memory, look to the sword and not the blood that it sheds (black under darkling skies, slick like a lie, yet lingering in undeniable proof), look forwards and not beneath my feet where the debris of the bonfire of our vanities is spit forth and shards of Tirion-that-was resurface from the whitewater. Look forwards, look forwards; step past the amphitheater of pointless argumentation in woven silk, face away from the not-grave, give Turcafinwë’s men their orders, watch them toss the torches to the sea like necrotised fingers debrided from the ruling hand, let the trumpeters rouse those sleeping, have Curufinwë summon my squire, discard my sable, coil my hair in truesilver, don my mail, sword and chain. Forwards, forwards, through the skeletal encampment that my birthright had birthed. Forwards, forwards, where mountains loom black, capped in the starless eigengrau of fresh-fallen snow on the advent of inescapable war. Forwards, forwards, back turned to foreclosed treason and exiled faithlessness. Forwards, forwards, abandoning all egotism between fatherhood and brotherhood, the unweaned child with its umbilical cord still bleeding and the embryonic conception of a brother that had not quite become born. Forwards, forwards, past all recourse, past absolution, none can give it to us. Forwards, forwards, forwards into the dark. Only forwards.
Of course I would sacrifice my own son. Of course I would. Let them say so.
A king has no right to hesitate. And I am king, now.
Of course I would sacrifice my own son. Of course I would step onto the pyre -- the pyre that birthed me, that promises and lures, that I turn my face away from so I cannot hear it calling out in my mother’s voice, in my father’s face, in the corpse on the green catafalque and in the dura mater on the palace stairs promising that there exists a sacred oblation to exonerate every sin of insufficiency -- because I was begotten in death’s shadow in a land of life, a shadow cast from above so long it wraps around the earth from land to sea and cannot be outrun, and that shadow has a name and a fate unmoved by any will. Of course I would sacrifice, I the bone-idol in a mire of Eldarin blood, innocence, and vanity, and faith, and love, and even freedom; the chain of office binds my hands like a rope-trap, but I have never been shy of pain or afraid to scourge myself. Of course I would sacrifice anything I must, I who have been grave-born carnivorous and cannibalistic and unassuagable for inevitable martyrdom -- for kingship is martyrdom, I cannot be selfish, I cannot be selfish for my own children, I cannot be selfish for love.
Of course I would sacrifice my own son. I put my helm on. My horse is saddled. I would sacrifice anything. I cannot sense the warmth from beneath. The cool wind is out of reach. I am already dead. I have no other choice.