Epilogue - A Fairy Story by Lipstick

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Chapter 3: Permanent Way

Permanent Way

"Keep the change," I say to the taxi driver, as I hand him the note. I then drag my brother to his feet and lead him by the hand into the station. He is still very dazed, his normal light footsteps made heavy and dragging by the weight of too much medication. He is almost asleep on his feet. He will have to wake up, soon. How it will be for him when that happens, I do not know.

All I know is once, thousands of years ago, in a land now buried beneath the waters, I woke from a deep, drugged sleep with him beside me. I did not know my past, my present, or even my own name. I think I would have preferred it that way. To continue forever, numb and nothing in the blank white space my head was then. Makalaure was having none of it. He forced me to remember, forced my head down so I saw the bloody, bandaged mess where my right hand had been. It was a far more barbaric rescue than anything Findekano did. Even as the memories, all unwanted, came rushing back to me, and I started to shake from shock and terror, he held me. He put his arms around me and whispered into my matted hair:

"It's alright, it is alright. I am here. I will be here beside you until the fear goes."

I can do no more than repay the favour now.

Makalaure leans heavily against me as we stand beneath the destination board waiting for our train to be announced. I hook my right arm about his waist to keep him from falling. We must look very peculiar.

"Where are you taking me?" He asks.

"Home," I say.

"But I do not wish to go home."

"Shush filit," I whisper. "You have to go home. You have been lost for far too long."

"No," he murmurs. "No."

"Alright," I say. I pull my arm back and turn to leave him swaying on the wide concourse. Within seconds, his arms are around me, clinging to my coat like a child.

"Do not leave me." The panic in his voice cuts through the slur of the Largatcil.

"I will not leave you. I shall never leave you ever again," I hug him back and stroke him a little until I feel the worst of the panic subsiding. Over his shoulder, I see people are really staring at us now. They can stare themselves blind for all I care.

"But you must come home with me." I add. "It is the only way I know to make you well again."

I let go of him, but he continues gripping on to my clothes. He is still firmly attached when our train is announced.

As Makalaure is in no fit state to fight over it, I sit myself down in the window seat. He slumps down next to me, bumps his head against my shoulder and is gone again, off in one of those remarkable sleeps of his. Rather inconveniently, he has passed out on my one good arm. I do not have the heart to disturb him by dragging it back. He sighs, although I could not see how even his dreams could cut through the tranquillizers.

The woman inspecting tickets is far more concerned with the beautiful sleeping elf on my shoulder than whether or not we have travel documentation. I watch the idea float out of her head the minute she claps eyes on us. All it takes is a few soft words from me and she walks away, convinced in her mind we have every right to be on this train. Somewhere beneath her conscious thoughts, she knows all is present and correct. Two battered, exhausted Quendi are finally making their way homewards to the western shores of the ancient world, nothing to get in a fuss about. We may not even be the first such ticketless creatures she has seen, whose paths in the end led them north and west. Although such thoughts will never enter her waking mind, deep down she knows it is as natural as starlight.

As the last of the great gray metropolis flashes past us, I wonder if I shall ever see such a mortal city again. It is an oddly sentimental thought, one of the many lessons of a long life is that nothing is forever. I must have been quite tired myself to think like that. I even dozed, for a few minutes, I must have done. When my eyes focus again I can see rolling green pasturelands. I also have a very numb left arm.

The train is heading due north, strait as a corridor. The fields are restful enough, although they too become monotonous after a while. It is a curiously empty landscape. As a very urban elf, I have become rather too used to having jostling humanity densely packed in on either side of me. I forget this must have been normality for me once. I find it unnerving. Maybe it will not only be my little brother who finds the journey home unsettling. I wonder if I will have the strength to take my own medicine. I tug my arm out from under Makalaure and wrap both my arms tightly around my own waist. Holding myself close, all I own, all I have been, all that has survived, I hug it into me.

You are as strong as you have to be, my Hroa replies. So it always was.

I have always had this strange relationship with my body. I am like milk that has gone stale, separated out, so my Fea floats on top of my Hroa but they never join. I think I had a slight tendency towards this even before Angband, It may even have been what helped me survive that. I find being touched, strange. It is as if my body registers the hands on my person, but my soul is miles away. Makalaure is one of the few I can stand to hold without that unusual sensation taking over me. Even he had to fight for it, for a while. However much I like my own Hroa, I find it damned hard to live in it sometimes.

My brother could live quite happily in his own body. I know this, because he fell in love. I know elven love can sometimes appear cold to you aftercomers. We have all the time in the world, so a century apart can seem as nothing. We elves too can be oddly condescending towards your own hectic embraces. There is something both touching and pathetic about the way you love, stealing what joy you can while the clocks we never hear tick incessantly and that last journey into the night looms heavy on your horizons. So elves and mortals love in very different ways, generally speaking. Not my romantic fool of a little brother, however. The Noldo with the unnaturally beautiful voice fell toes over ear tips for a poet who taught him just what that voice could do. She was of course a Teleri. My brother learnt from the best.

My brother fell for a Telerin poet just as the clocks of Valinor started to tick. In the middle of the intrigues, the whispers and the incessant smell of hot metal being forged into weaponry, Makalaure married a mousy little nis from the sea. My father cursed him as a fool for learning poetry from someone who could not even speak Quenya respectably. He did not try and stop them however. How could he, who had also in his time loved the only elf who could teach him? I can still see them in Formenos, heads down, together, studying, writing, while all other talk round our table was of treachery and impending war. The times, despite the walls of words they built against them, seeped in still. Just to look at them was enough to know, it was not the measured love of the Eldar they had. They loved like mortals. In fact, they loved like mortals with terminal diseases.

She died at Alqualonde. Silly girl, run onto that ship with a sword in her hand, although I had never seen her hold one before, let alone learn to use one. I think at that moment, seeing her with her grip all wrong and her eyes still shinning I knew how insane their love was. She really did not know what she was doing. The sailor did. He knew she was a Teleri. That is why he slashed her chest with his knife before he pushed her into the water. He knew that particular invader could swim. Kin Slaying. I know, it is not an excuse, but it is what we all saw.

He always said she made him a poet in the end.

So I could understand why my brother threw the Silmaril into the sea. I can understand why afterwards he sat down by the tides, insensible. All he had ever loved was under the waves. I can also understand my brother's fear, because this journey too winds back towards the great water.

Now listen to me, telling this little tear-jerker of a story, that was after all barely a foot note in the life of the great Makalaure, Prince of the Noldor. Maybe travelling backwards is softening me too, or maybe it is just having my brother beside me at last, I have to remind myself of who he is. I may have a memory long enough to take in millennia of experience, but that does not mean certain things become buried from time to time. I have to get the story clear, particularly as Prince Makalaure's grasp on his own story is rather shaky just now.

Filit shakes his head a bit as if trying to clear it, then smiles up at me. Some time ago, the train finally lurched to the left, and we are headed westward now. The track bed is no longer the wide expanse used by the express trains with many lines for many stations. There are only two tracks now, there and back, and only one final destination. Permanent Way, they called these metal paths when they were first laid, hacked through the stone or floated over marshes. When they build the iron track over the old west road.

We have left behind the rolling green country too. Either side of the line, low hills now rise, so we follow the course of a river, fast flowing over the rocks and stones it has washed down from the moorlands. The train weaves through broad oak trees, and this suddenly feels more familiar, more like a home that I once knew. When the mist rolls down from the mountains, it could be Hisilome. Laiquendi country at least. There is no mist today. In fact the sun has chosen the moment of my brother's awakening to burst through the clouds. Her light through the tree canopy is dappled and green. That must be why my little brother smiles.

Then, right in the middle of this train carriage full of fare paying holiday makers and farmers, he starts to sing.

Nobody, except me of course, understands the words, every one as beautiful as the voice that commands them. My brother sings freely, unhindered by the fog that clouds his speech. It is a simple song, of tree light, of gold, of living and being grateful for the fact. I had forgotten that too, just how much I loved to hear my brother sing.

Unlike when most people start up impromptu musicals on public transport, no one tells him to shut up. No one throws potato chip packets or in any other way disturbs him. In fact the whole carriage falls into hushed silence. I can see the ticket collector and several others crowd round the door from the next car to hear what it is that is going on. People look up from their books, their crosswords and their sandwiches. Everyone is still and rapt and I am sure no one has ever heard the like of this little song before.

When he stops it is very, very silent. Then suddenly a man says:

"Thank you."

"Yes, thank you, "adds a teenage girl with a bare midriff.

"That was the most beautiful song."

They all agree. It was wonderful. They feel lucky to have heard something so lovely. They are touched. It is a truly remarkable talent. I don't know how to tell you how grateful we are. Do you want anything?

And so it goes on. Even when I reassure them kindly, we are fine, really, no we do not need anything, they still go up to the buffet trolley and shyly present us with more chocolate and cookies than we could ever eat. They put them on the table in front of us. Cups of tea too. They look a little embarrassed as they do so. Save it for later, they say. Or - no we couldn't just hear that and not give you something in return. I can tell as well many of these travellers are slightly surprised by their sudden burst of generosity. Surprised, but not worried. In their secret knowledge, the smarts that protect all mortals without them ever having to know they are there, they know too. They know they have just heard a Calaquendi of Valinor sing. So no one panics, In fact, after the last packet of shortbread has been laid before us, the whole carriage feels very peaceful.

Chapter End Notes

 

Hisilome - Hithlum. Maedhros being pretentious again I'm afraid

 

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