Cradle of Stars by Dawn Felagund, Elleth

Drowning

Then came the day of my drowning.

Time was lost in the darkness, the hours marked now by need: hunger, thirst, sleep. There was food on the beach each night, or what we now called night. I sometimes fancied that the Trees might blaze to life again: Laurelin at her zenith as we slept in what we would have sworn was the night. I kept still to the shadow of the dunes My company helped and were fed and brought food to me. I left when the songs began. Some nights, Eärwen came to me; other nights, she did not.

Arafinwë stirred in my thoughts. Anairë, our need here grows greater. What word from Alqualondë? But I could not ask for a share of their meager daily catch, even to save the innocent among my people. Our suffering in Tirion seemed small, a child's sandcastle beside the Pelóri that was the ongoing Telerin grief. Eärwen—herself still emaciated and rarely taking her full share of food—slipped away one afternoon, and I learned later that she'd attended a funeral for a woman who'd died of grief, her husband and only son having been slain by Fëanáro's people. No—I stared it in the face—possibly my husband's people. Possibly Nolofinwë or one of my sons or even my beautiful, fearless daughter, whose vision had become my dreams. I watched her feet pick carefully over ice in suede boots made for riding in the forests of Valinor. I inspected her white, bruised body and hands that quaked with cold. She would have taken up a sword beside her brothers.

For two nights after, Eärwen did not come to me.

Other such deaths would follow, I knew. Better to die of hunger than that. From behind the dunes, I watched as some of the people who came to the beach each night seemed to diminish, growing almost translucent so that it was possible to miss seeing them unless looking directly at them. When they began to look that way, I knew they'd shortly stop coming altogether.

I did not have the words to ask the aid of a people who suffered so because of us.

Eärwen and some of the other noble ladies began to take meals to those who would no longer come to the beach. I sent my company to the kitchens to prepare those meals. The lemon juice they washed with after preparing slabs of smoked fish and seaweed salads stung their hands made raw by weaving nets, but they did not complain. When my use as a scribe was unneeded, I worked beside them.

Then came the day of my drowning.

Eärwen came that night to sleep in my little stuffy scribe's room. As I listened to her breathing deepening into sleep, I made up my mind that I'd ask her tomorrow about aid for my people. We had proven useful here; perhaps we could arrange an exchange and send workers in exchange for fish, seaweed, and rice. Arafinwë had been pressing at my mind with urgency again lately, but I shut him out. Courage, Anairë, I thought to myself as I prepared to drift into dreams of Irissë and ice and the strange lights that ribboned across the northern sky. I awoke each morning, expecting my hands to be numb with cold.

Her boots were wearing along the bottoms. She stepped wrong once and was speared in the sole of her foot with a needle of ice, so she stepped carefully now, feeling with her toes and shifting her weight only slowly. I felt a dull ache of grief; someone had died. None of mine—I would have felt that—but the memory haunted even my daughter, who was affected by so little. She was climbing a hill of ice, sliding back nearly as far as she advanced with each step, wincing at the keen-edged cold even through her mittens as she drew herself up onto the summit. Standing, turning to someone: Findekáno, his breath coming in quick bursts of steam. They caught each other's glance; even in the midst of such misery, they were proud of their vigor. Many in their company could no longer make that climb, but their bodies had been strengthened by the hardship like wires drawn taut. It was Findekáno who turned his eyes forward first, his face relaxing into astonishment: "There are mountains just—" and I had a glimpse of another land, of mountains and a coast curving to the south, before all went dark.

I surfaced from sleep with the screaming gasp of a drowning woman admitting water into her lungs. It was like the Darkening: something so omnipresent suddenly denied that I felt my hands fumbling around me as though I could physically draw it back to me. I bumped Eärwen, the wall, the bedpost hard enough to bruise my hand. Since Findekáno's life had first kindled within me, I hadn't been without the sense of my children, but they were gone, gone, gone. Not dead but denied me, having traversed to the other, forbidden land. It was as Arafinwë had said: The Valar had fenced them apart from us as punishment for their transgression—but they were my children. I did not know what to do with this sudden empty space inside me.

I became aware of Eärwen in flickers of cognizance. It was like childbirth, the way the pain becomes so commanding that all else comes only in bursts, only the pain now was much, much worse. It was the kind that threatened never to end. I became aware of Eärwen, her eyes bulged and her jaw slack as though she might scream if she could find the voice. Then the fumbling emptiness again, and when I saw her again, one hand was clawed into her hair and the other waved in front of her as though feeling for something in the dark.

That was the night of my drowning.

When the song was taken up again, what would I become? All about myself that remained without my children and Nolofinwë had come unmoored and drifted, none of it coherent enough to reshape into a person. I felt as though I'd been made of glass and shattered, yet some of the pieces simply vanished upon impact, and I could never be made whole and would always crumple in upon myself if I tried.

This was the death of grief, something we'd been forewarned of by the Valar as in our nature to suffer but lacking in logic and so scarcely believed. The body could be slain by the slow wasting borne of need: of food, of water, of air, of warmth. The fëa, could be wasted similarly. Ever unspooling upon the thread of time, grief caused it to seize upon a moment and scrabble backward, desperately seeking something in the past it had scarcely known it needed until, suddenly, it did. I was trying to claw my way back to times I hadn't thought to appreciate until now. Findekáno sniveling as a little boy before his cousins discovered his valor. Turukáno pestering me for a very specific and hard-to-find type of pen. Irissë bringing me talentless drawings that I was ashamed to display. Moments when I felt annoyed and wished my children elsewhere and ached now to have back. Grasping, as time roared forward without me, my spirit was torn apart as though by shrapnel in a storm.

There were glimpses of the present in the midst of it: Eärwen, her eyes overlarge and luminous in her gray face, clutching at her chest with hands crooked into claws as though she could open the place where her children had resided and invite them back in. My company, blanched, faces slack, assailed by similar losses as spouses and children passed into the Outer Lands. Broth guided to my face; a taste of fish and salt. Bedclothes, hot and unwashed. My hand, extended, and a light shining pink through it. Eärwen, a solid silhouette, dressing for the day. Hands cradling my head that smelled of lemons.

Croaking out once, "Why am I still alive?" and Eärwen, seated at my bedside, not replying but giving me a look that answered both meanings of the question: Because I cared for you. And to my why, something wordless, vast, eternal: a lingering kiss upon my forehead.