50 Prompts: AU Silmarillion by Urloth

Prompt: Motivation (Tatie. OC.)

Summary: For there must be a reason for the suffering, even in Cuivienen they wonder why.

Warnings: Pagan Elves, thoughts about cannabalism (blink and you’ll miss it), starvation, death

“Atu’me,” Tatië whispers through cracked lips on a bloody tongue gone heavy, “Atu’me would not mean suffering like this to happen without good cause.” They are such pretty words, she is mother to most of them, mother to most of them as she is mother to the two children infront of her.

No one answers her. No one cares to talk any more.

Tatië’s stomach is concave and she looks down at ragged nails with torn bleeding nailbeds, black flesh peeling away from cloudy, unhealthy nails, then tries to pick up her sons without hurting them with those nails. Atu’me would not mean for this suffering to happen, she tells herself, laying Min against one thigh and Mor against the other. They do not cry anymore, they just make sad noises as though even breathing is a chore for them. She does not have the strength anymore to give them long names, to make up poetry for the beauty of their existence – the first two children born to them, the first two children perhaps that will fade away as some already have with wide open eyes and insects crawling over their faces undisturbed.

And Tata is turning into a wrath. His skin is turning yellow and his bones protrude, oh how they protrude, through his skin and she wants to scream each time they find pathetic roots or leaves they can chew to fight the hunger and he gives the children his own. She wants to scream, she wants to scream so badly but that noise requires energy she does not have.

The stars are blossoming again. She has lost the joy she thought she would never forget from her first sight of them unfurling white-blue petals against the dark field they were in and turning the spaces between them bright and brilliant red, blue, and purple.

There is movement and one of those who leaves and goes, or used to leave and go, slinks away from a pile of limbs that is her Other and her children, sallow pale skin stretching so tightly over ribs and shoulders that it tears, it tears enough to make Tatië think of meat.

She swallows down saliva and looks down at her boys, stroking the matting curls on their heads. She’s lost the will to comb their hair with her fingers. She can only stroke with flattened palms, not delving into where the knots are.

The hasty barrier they have woven from branches and reeds and barricaded themselves within further with rocks shakes and draws soft cries of fear from most still awake but it is only the one Tatië saw earlier, tearing a hole in the barrier with fingers crooked into claws.

“What are you doing?” Tatië moans and rises, piling her children against the other’s children and forcing Tata to lie down beside the other’s Other so that the children are between the two large bodies. It’s not safety, Tatië cannot call it safety anymore but it sooths her to see the children there.

“Better to fight then give up,” there is a flash of dirty pale skin and the other has crawled through the hole she made and is away, into the darkness beyond the branches, into the darkness where Chaos is stalking them with long pale nails it likes to flay their skin from their bones with.

Tatië barely remembers the name of the one that goes before her with the pale hair shining through the filth that coats it. Ilmarinë, she thinks, perhaps that is the correct name. Or something close to it.

Better to fight than give up.

The words ring and perhaps this, she realises, is why Atu’me, whose bones fell to this earth and whose spirit still weeps for them, allowed for this suffering to happen in the universe of their still living womb. If she cannot fight does she deserve to walk the world that the Mother and Father of All of What the Mind Comprehends dreamed for them?