Brain Fog by Huinare

Chapter 1

This is probably stating the obvious, but, just in case: No, that's not a typo, my version of Pallando is genderswapped.

Sort of implied body horror. 

Read Chapter 1

“[T]hough they knew whence they came the memory of the Blessed Realm was to them a vision from afar off…”
– Tolkien, Unfinished Tales, ‘The Istari’

“I tried to warn you, but you were out of your head…”
– Mason Proper, ‘Fog’

_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_

Oromë was typically direct. Now even he hesitated and glanced away from the five Maiar gathered in the front room of one of King Arafinwë’s guest houses. “Additional consideration having been given to the matter, the Valar have concluded…”

A few of the Maiar exchanged glances. Curumo eyed Oromë silently. Pallandë’s gaze remained focused in the general direction of a table leg.

Rallying, the Vala turned back from the window and resumed firmly, “The enemy, as we well know, has ever been unscrupulous and enterprising in his methods of obtaining information. Some of us know too well.”

Aiwendil watched Curumo watching Pallandë sidelong. Alatar’s eyes narrowed. Oromë waylaid his Maia’s interjection, “Your number won’t change, Alatar. But, as far as we are aware, Sauron has little or no knowledge of what has transpired in Valinor for at least an age. We would prefer to keep it that way. If any one of you should fall into his hands, who knows what intelligence he may gain?”

“If indeed our powers and forms are to be–fettered, so to speak–that would certainly make that more likely,” Alatar suggested.

“That isn’t up for debate. You all agreed to the conditions decided at the council. The issue is that there is now a further condition.”

The five exchanged another round of uneasy glances. Olórin attempted to grin at a worried-looking Aiwendil, but succeeded only in grimacing faintly.

“You cannot take your memories.”

“Pardon?” Curumo managed.

“We must rid you of your memories, before you sail for Endórë. Nothing for you to recall, nothing for the enemy to take,” Oromë reasoned, perhaps too emphatically, as the Maiar stared at him.

“That is–” Curumo interrupted himself and resumed pleasantly, “Lord Oromë, I fail to follow this reasoning. If we have no memories, we have no comprehension of our purpose, thus how may we fulfill it?”

“There is a–process,” the Vala answered, “which Aulë and Yavanna, in consultation with the Noldo surgeons, think–”

Aiwendil gave a stifled wail and clung to Curumo, who winced and patted his shoulder gingerly without glancing at him. “My lady wouldn’t do that to us,” Aiwendil said, shaking.

“Do not fear, Aiwendil, it’s solely voluntary. We are not Morgoth or Sauron; we’ll not force you to do anything. Any of you may still back out, if you wish, after hearing me.”

“‘Back out,’” Alatar murmured with contempt. “As though we waver, as though we are cowards, when we were told nothing of this–”

“Alatar,” snapped Oromë.

“Sir.”

“Pour a round of–whatever you’ve got on hand here.”

The Maia pulled an eloquent expression of mixed irritation and relief, producing a flask from somewhere on his person.

Olórin laughed, a little hysterically. “No need to take ‘on hand’ so literally, Alatar.”

Alatar’s flask had some sort of tusked creature etched into the leather. Oromë watched the creature bob up and down as the flask changed hands, resuming presently, “Will you calm down if I rephrase this? Now that we have come to an additional decision, which was not a condition when you committed to this mission, you are free to decline the mission.”

“That is just.” Curumo considered the flask Olórin had passed him, took a small sip, and passed it to Aiwendil. “Please explain.”

_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_

“Deliberately?” Salmar, seated on a rock at the murmuring edge of the surf, put his head in his hands as though trying to hold all of its pieces in place. “Lord Ulmo said something of this. He wouldn’t say what was the matter, only that the Valar made a decision and that he was the only one to speak against it.”

Curumo stood a ways off with his arms folded, eyeing the east which lay beyond the mist-obscured sea. “Whatever Lord Ulmo said, the decision is made.”

“This seems to me too much like business of the enemy. If we must act like him, in order to contest him–”

“No, there’s a difference. Anything M–anything Sauron did or would do along those lines would not involve a voluntary subject.”

“Indeed.” Salmar lowered his hands and peered up with a look of skepticism and barely-constrained disgust, whilst the other Maia resolutely remained studying the fog. “Why would you even consider this?”

“I said I would go to Endórë. Shall I emerge a liar?”

“You said that before they imposed this thing. You cannot lie in ignorance.”

“Maybe you cannot,” Curumo flung back a bit sourly.

“So you’re going to let them deliberately inflict some sort of brain injury on you because you are too proud to back out?”

“Don’t speak to me of backing out, or of pride.” Curumo’s jaw clenched. He looked ready to stalk away, then drew a long breath and resumed in a pedantic tone, “The risk is minimal. The damage, the corrupted memory, shall persist only as long as that particular bodily manifestation persists. As soon as that form is discarded, for the incorporeal or for another form, the damage is no more.”

“But you said–we all heard, at the council–that you will not have the option of altering or discarding that form. So, you’ll effectively be trapped in a form that is not only hobbled in terms of power, but now in terms of memory.”

“Not all memory. The process would be imperfect, to say nothing of needing some memory of being given our mission in the first place.”

“So, just most of it.”

“Right.”

Salmar looked from Curumo to the obscured horizon and back again, saying at last with feeling, “Have you gone utterly mad?”

Curumo’s head finally snapped in the other’s direction. “If you plan to sit here insulting me, you are welcome to cease troubling my meditations.” By the time he finished, his voice had risen nearly to a snarl.

Salmar blinked at him, then held up one hand placatingly. “It was not meant like that, Curumo. I cannot fathom why you would agree to go through with something like this. It seems…uncharacteristic.”

“What do you know of my character?”

“I would think that I might have some idea, having known you since before the Trees germinated in the thought of Kementári–”

“Have you? But if you knew, you would not be confounded now.” Curumo took several steps toward Salmar, who gained his feet and backed up a pace in one awkward movement. Something perilous had kindled in the former’s dark eyes. “I will not idle away another age on this inane continent, nor will I renege upon my commitments. I will not be a coward, a failure, a traitor, regardless of the contingencies.”

Salmar observed the other Maia’s hands shaking, but when Curumo turned briskly and walked away, his bearing betrayed no hint of feeling. A chill breeze arose from the sea.

_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_

“So we’re actually going to do this?” Alatar snickered grimly. In the dark just beyond the porch, crickets and night birds carried on their own conversations, indifferent to the concerns of five immortal Maiar.

“I said I would do it, and I shall,” Curumo reiterated.

“We can still back out–that is, decline,” Aiwendil said, disguising his hope poorly.

Olórin pondered the contents of his glass, turning it slowly in his hands. “I should rather like to, but those powers in whom I place much trust and regard have asked this of me.”

“It isn’t as though it is permanent. It is a situation associated only with the forms we would assume for the duration of the mission–like whenever Alatar breaks his leg or gets his hand bitten off on one of his forays, but that injury affects only his physical manifestation of the time.”

“Shut up.” Alatar jostled Curumo, perhaps with more force than intended owing to his nervous state.

While Curumo rubbed his shoulder, Aiwendil pointed out, “Yes, but this…injury will feel permanent if we can’t remember much of anything, won’t it?”

“You need not go if you think you may find it too unpleasant,” Curumo said, disguising his hope poorly, at least to the perception of Pallandë.

Yavanna’s Maia shook his head. “If you’re going, I’m going. My lady said we needed to go together.”

Aulë’s Maia quietly took a long draught of his mead.

“Well, there’s no way I’m letting you two klutzes go by yourselves,” said Alatar.

Olórin cleared his throat.

“Sorry, make that three klutzes.”

Pallandë cleared her throat.

“You aren’t a klutz,” Alatar protested.

Pallandë raised her glass and slowly tipped its remainder over Alatar’s head. “Sorry, my hand slipped.”

“That was sheer evil! Wasting perfectly good libation. You’re in league with the enemy, aren’t you?” Alatar grabbed a ladle. Pallandë grabbed a platter. A dinnerware duel ensued.

“It won’t be half bad. You people are quite entertaining,” Olórin commented to Aiwendil. “Besides, we all wanted to experience life, as a being fashioned within the world might experience it; is that not why we came forth into Eä to begin with? If we don’t remember it all, might the world not seem new in some way, more interesting?”

“Hmm!” said Aiwendil.

“A fine philosophy,” murmured Curumo. He put his hands over his mouth as though to politely stifle a yawn. Behind his hands, he mouthed, I will not forget.

_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_

Uinen perceived the ship leaving harbor, not by sight nor sound as a solidly manifest creature would, but with the more nebulous awareness of vibration available to consciousness-as-water. These sorts of form and perception was lost upon most of the solid Ainur, horrified them even; yet, for many of Ulmo’s ilk, to contain one’s consciousness within a limited, unmalleable, and sensation-prone frame was the more horrifying. Over the millennia, this differentiation between Ulmo’s people and the rest of them had only grown.

Although Uinen often manifested as a watery aggregation resembling a humanoid figure, it had been long since she’d assumed a truly solid form along with the senses that entailed. Some of her colleagues still took true human shape and walked upon the earth, but rarely for long. Salmar, who had on occasion sung with Aulë’s folk before the world existed, was one such person. As Uinen drifted along with the ship, Salmar joined her, bearing an unsettled air as he often did after he had been on the land.

“You walked upon Aman’s shores again.”

“Yes.”

“Did you see the ship leave?”

“Yes,” Salmar answered again, troubled.

“What does it look like?”

“I don’t remember. It smells.”

“What?” Uinen couldn’t recall much of smelling, except that the sea always smelled good–too good, like it might destroy one with its goodness.

“Hospital reek.”

“I don’t understand.”

“A hospital, where they take care of the injured.”

“Well, that’s good,” Uinen tried uncertainly.

“Not precisely.”

“Salmar, who’s on the ship?”

“Who now can say?”

_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_

“Reorganized brain systems mediate certain preserved cognitive operations […] but without the normal complement of information concerning the self with respect to both past and future events.”
- B. Levine et al., ‘Episodic memory and the self in a case of isolated retrograde amnesia.’

 

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Chapter End Notes

This is the fulfillment of a speculation which I made two or three years ago, that the “far off” memories the Istari possessed of their origin were not some mystical byproduct of their physical metamorphoses, but something tactical and deliberate–and really rather creepy–required by the Valar. The question was then how on earth they would agree to such a thing, which it took me a while to happen upon an answer to.

This is also, in some senses, an improved version or postscript of a bloated ficlet involving Salmar, which hopefully lingers in nobody’s memory.

This is also directly inspired by the song “Fog” by Mason Proper.

If Curumo’s motives here seem as though they hinge on some as-yet-untold backstory, I’m afraid that is indeed the case. Someday I will edit and post the confounded thing.

The weirdness at the beginning with Pallandë “knowing too well” the enemy’s lack of scruples refers to one of my more ghastly decisions as a writer, in my (on an…er, extended hiatus) story Of Draugluin.

Here is the neurology article by Levine et al., quoted at the end of the story: ‘Episodic memory and the self in a case of isolated retrograde amnesia.’ Extremely helpful to me in figuring out some of the backstage action, as well as presenting possible implications for future stories.