Pursuing with weary feet, the road called life. by Urloth

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Life ~ An uncertain introduction

This was a large chapter originally, 7000, but the 2000 words from the Silmaril's POV was jarring so I broke it up. Next chapter is back to normal size.

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Time had always been a fluid thing for the Silmaril, and now time flowed past it without any sort of comprehension.

It recalled awakening with the sun always in the position it had been in. It had been this way since it had descended into the first true sleep of its existence.

It had no way of gaining the knowledge of how many hours had passed upon it.

Not, at this point, that it knew what hours were.

It was the same when it finally managed to stay away long enough that it fell asleep at night. It awoke with the moon staring down at it balefully just above an outcropping, as the great lumbering thing had been, when the Silmaril had closed its eyes against the silver glare.

And sleep.

Sleep was an incomprehensible thing as well.

Often in its previous incarnation, when nothing was occurring, the Silmaril would stop any concentrated awareness on the world around it, usually when it was stored away. Always though, there had been the movement of time around it.

Sleep was different. It was a complete blankness. There was the knowledge of time passing, after the fact, but time was not experienced in the same way. It disturbed the Silmaril on an instinctive level, but there was nothing it could do. Sleep seemed to be a thing that its body craved now. Sometimes it could only take two steps, before its body began to feel heavy, and it was forced to curl up somewhere safe. 

This lesson had been learnt the hard way just the once. It had tried ignoring the heavy feeling, pushing its body to continue the dull, plodding pace it had taught itself. A blink later and the Silmaril had swam out of sleep when it had been sure it was about to take another step, to find itself sprawled over rocks with its neck at an odd angle, the bones of one arm twisted wrong.

That arm throbbed now, introducing a new kind of pain to the already massive list of the various ways pain was …pain. To the Silmaril’s horrified chagrin, pain was not a singular sensation. There were as many variations of it, as there were colours you could dye agate.

For instance right now there was a pain within the middle of its body, completely different from the rest.

This pain was a floating kind of sensation, occasionally sharp but usually a cloudy sort feeling. It gently drifted about the Silmaril’s middle in a strange, not quite oblong shape. This pain was completely different to the pain when it took a step, or the sting as liquid seeped from its skin and into the scratches in the epidermis.

The pain in its middle lessened and intensified at random intervals, though lately it had been intensifying rather than lessening. The sharp stabbing pain was interrupting the cloudy far more often as well.

It could not tell how far it was travelling. Sometimes it seemed like it had only managed two  or three steps each dying of a day. This was not in fact correct, they would do the calculations and find they had made a great deal of distance, for something so young.  But even at the time the Silmaril noticed the bizarre change in surroundings between their first step, and their last.

What was happening, was the Silmaril’s straining body took the first step before higher brain functions, including recall, shut down. What was the use of recording step after step after step? Its body, the vehicle, was driven to stumble along all day through till exhaustion hit upon it, and it was forced to think again, to find a place to sleep.

 If it seemed like outside forces were at work, guiding its movements, this was probably what was happening. For nothing happened without reason, and having now been reborn, it made no sense for the Silmaril to then die near the chasm it had crawled out of. 

It came to pass one evening, as the sun was turning the sky a bruised sort of violet, that the Silmaril awoke kneeling in wooded area.

The dew was coming in upon its skin which made it moan in groggy relief because its burns were being cooled. It could feel the earth beneath its scrapped legs gently sing to the sky a never ending love sonnet, bereft at the separation between them. It tried and had been trying to fill the wide space filled with birds and mountains for eons now, but it was never enough.

No never enough.

The Simaril closed their eyes and listened to the music. It was the first time it had heard such… no, it realised, it was not. But it was the first time it had laid down and listened solely to the music that made up every part of the world around them.

 Answering back from the diamond speckled dome above, where the velvet black was the deepest, came the sky’s returning song. It was of a pure affection with the promise of rain to further bridge the distance between them, and caress the earth lightly.

 Somewhere in those outer reaches dwelled the entity who had created the earth; who  thus was daughter, and wife at once. Their love remained chaste for this reason.

The beauty enveloped the Silmaril. They tried to sing along at one point, warbling small peals of uncertain noise. Sometimes they added noise.

Language was coming to the Silmaril now.

After untold years of being worn against skin; of being carried, and touched, and absorbing emotion from all of this, of course some words would have crept in. But it had never had a mouth to fit the words into, nor teeth to click together on the hard consonants, or a tongue to roll the softer ones.

The first word the Silmaril truly knew as a word, and used, was hands. It knew multiple words for hands, in black speech, Quenya and Þindarin, that had appeared when the Silmaril thought of touching-grabbing-snatching-stealing-taking, which was how it had perceived hands before.

Other words were not so easily acquired; some gentley drifted into the Silmaril’s mind after a slow contemplation of a concept, whilst others remained elusive.

 Some concepts had no words but the Silmaril was not too concerned with language, and acquiring vocal communication was set second to figuring out how to work its flesh shell and survive. It did not realise yet that survival was what it was trying to do. Survival had not been a problem before: Silma was the strongest of materials and nothing could scratch it or scuff it.

A jewel needed no food, no rest and no shelter, though occasionally a polishing cloth was appreciated. 

Something ran over the Silmaril’s scuffed legs.

It had four hand things it ran upon, and its body was covered with a curious substance like the grass but thinner. It squeaked at the Silmaril when it caught it between its hands, peering down at the squirming thing which bit and clawed at the fingers trapping it.

The Silmaril ignored the pain, for it was a drop in the ocean, and inspected the thing all over. It was an ovoid shape, with a pointed nose. The backside of its body extended out, and lost the strange covering, becoming pink and long like a stretched out finger with no joint to it. It was small; if it had not been trying to escape it would have fit nicely into the palm of the Silmaril’s hand. 

It was small enough to fit in its mouth. 

Animal parts of the brain worked faster than the smaller, barley civilised parts, and the Silmaril was already trying to stuff the squirming thing into its maw before it realised what it was doing and stopped.

It was confused as to why it had tried to stuff the thing into its mouth, staring at its hands as though they were at fault independently. The mouse took the opportunity to escape, and the Silmaril cried out, scuttling after it on its hands and knees but failing to recapture its prey as it dove into a hole beneath a mound of dirt. 

The Silmaril’s hands clenched and it reached for the dirt. It began to lift, dig and drag away the grass and dirt over the hole in the ground. Their movements were frenzied, not knowing why they felt so compelled the chase the thing. The floating pain in its stomach was suddenly driving sharp spikes into its spine again, which only made them move faster.

They uncovered a hollow with more of the things. Eyes, which glowed like fire through diamonds, beheld the squirming mess of fury bodies that escaped away into the grass in a flurry of rapid squeaking. The Silmaril was left to stare down at a small pile of smaller, squirming things. 

The Silmaril picked one up. 

It was alike to the first thing, but it lacked the covering of not-grass, and was only the size of the Silmaril’s thumb.

The Silmaril’s mouth opened without thinking, and it was already swallowing down a mass when it realised again what it had done.

It paused, unsure of what would happen now, feeling the little lump slide all the way down into the floating, stabbing oval of pain. The pain seemed to …halt? And suddenly it did not seem quite as intense as before.

A connection was made: put things in mouth, swallow, and the pain will go away.

 Quickly and efficiently the Silmaril willingly and consciously swallowed more of the thumb sized things down until there were none left.  More importantly, there was also no more of the oval, floating pain….wait, language was finally filling a space.

Yes. No longer did the Silmaril’s stomach hurt. 

The relief from the pain was so beautiful that the Silmaril wept for a moment.

It was still in pain, horribly in pain, but that pain had been there since the dawn of this nerve-filled existence, and was almost part of the background now. It was like breathing or blinking, and the creature was so used to it, that only the absence was noticeable.

Happiness bloomed like a rose. The Silmaril sighed, wiping away the tears, and peering at the saline droplets for a moment before cautiously licking them away. The salt made its dry tongue even drier. 

It staggered to its feet with a hiss at the pressure it put on the wounds on the soles of its feet. 

Taking a few heaving, unsure breaths, they stumbled towards the river. Something inside was drawing its attention to the moisture in the air, ears pinpointing the sound of running water with a surge of urgency.

Their body seemed to know what it needed, so the Silmaril let it do as it wished, head dunking into the icy cold eddy with mouth open into the flow.

In flowed the water, filling their stomach until it was tight and hard beneath their skin.

The Silmaril lost count of the countless times it swallowed. All it cared about was that the water was easing the tight, and grinding pain in its throat for the first time.

Sated and just a little off balance by the sudden extra weight inside it, they sat back.

The wind rustled the grass quietly around them, and the river continued to murmur, undiminished despite the sating of their great thirst. It seemed safe here, and pleasant in ways the Silmaril was only just learning to appreciate.

Drowsiness introduced itself as heavy eyelids, and a nagging need to lie down, just for a moment.

Willingly the Silmaril found for itself a patch of soft grass. They turned a few circles, so they had a comfortable nest within the generous greenery. As close to content as it could be with such limited life experience, they slept.