Into Water by avi17

Into Water

Written in my head on a long car drive. I love Ecthelion, and his death is one of the ones that has always stuck in my mind.

Warning for a somewhat graphic depiction of drowning. Death is not pretty, and I do not write it that way.

The end we have always dreaded has come, and I am entwined together with Morgoth’s beast-   we are become as one writhing, thrashing creature of steel and flame and flesh.  A horrible din fills my ears, which must be his roar of pain at the spike of my helm embedded deep in his breast, or perhaps it is my own scream as I cling closer to him and the fire that emanates from his body licks at my face and skin, burning me, threatening to engulf me entirely.   In a final, desperate burst of strength, I wrap my legs as tightly as I can around his and wrench them out from under him.

Suddenly the world is sideways, and we are falling.  Some instinct takes hold of me, and I draw and hold a single breath just before we crash into water.

For a split second, the shock of its coldness on my burns is more excruciating than the fire that made them.  The force of our impact with the water dislodges my half-melted helm from my head, and I float away from the dying beast, unfettered, face surrounded by a cloud of what remains of my charred hair.  I am suspended, unmoving, as the coolness starts to become pleasant, before I begin to sink.

I consider trying to swim- to expend the last of my strength in an attempt to force my steel-laden body to the surface.   I try to move and can barely twitch a finger, and the redness clouding the water around me reminds me that my arms are mangled, useless.  The futility of my situation strikes me suddenly as funny, horribly funny.  I open my mouth as if to let out a mirthless laugh, and it fills with water, at the same moment that I can no longer hold in that final breath.  My body tries desperately to breathe, and almost immediately I feel a burning sensation in my chest as I inhale nothing but water and more water.  As my throat closes I feel my first twinge of true panic, and the pain escalates until I feel as though I am being torn apart from the inside.

As I lie, near paralyzed and in agony, at the fountain’s utmost bottom, my blurred gaze points inevitably upward, and I expect to see sunlight filter in from the sky above.  But there is no light to be seen through the smoke and haze of destruction, and I realize that even if by some miracle I made it out, death awaits me a surely above the surface of these waters as below.

I make my choice.

I spend my last thoughts in prayer to Ilúvatar, to the Valar, to anyone who may still turn their thoughts and ears to the pleas of exiles.  I pray for my King, for Idril and Tuor and their little one, for Glorfindel, and the few men of my house who yet live.  For all those who remain from our fair city, whose secret bliss feels now more than ever like nothing more than a fleeting dream.  I beg whoever listens to allow them, beyond all hope, to escape to safety- or if no other mercy may be given, that their ends may be quicker and less cruel than mine.

The pain that wracks my body begins to numb, and my vision grows dark.  The waters offer me fully their suffocating embrace- deadly, yet in the end, comforting as an old friend.

I accept.

Through the blackness, I feel rather than hear a voice that seems to echo through the very core of my being.   It calls to me, irresistibly summoning me home, and my heart is glad.  I leave my broken body in the care of the fountain’s cool waters that I had so loved, and I am gone.

Chapter End Notes

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