Numenor That Was by Himring

Not Waving But Drowning

Miriel, Queen of fated Numenor, near drowns in images of water long before she drowns.

Warning for major character death, suicidal ideation, and implied non-con

Teens

The heavy tiara made a dent in her forehead. The tiered necklace dragged on her neck and shoulders. The train of her brocaded dress slowed her feet. Miriel the Golden, made to bear the evidence of Pharazon’s conquests like a pack mule rather than his unwilling wife. Each step seemed to threaten to sink her into the ground, as if she were walking through a swamp rather than across the smooth flagstones paving the main thoroughfare in Armenelos. She pulled herself up, raising her arm. She must be seen to be waving, not drowning. So little remained even of the pretence of a lawful state, a civil community. If she failed to uphold the pretence herself, Sauron would begin openly hunting the Faithful in the streets.

‘You cannot fight against the tide,’ Gimilkhad had snarled at her father. An apt metaphor for a nation of seafarers, perhaps. He had thought himself in tune with the times, her uncle, but time had run out for him. A frustrated man, in a discontented society—a dangerous legacy, opening the door to worse. So much worse.

Tide going out, the irresistible pull, turning and finding oneself too far out, the safety of the shore out of reach.

Wandering among the tombs of Noirinan, she had known that she had little of the simplicity or certainties of her distant ancestors.

‘Yet are our struggles of so little account?’ she had asked the effigy of Elros. ‘Could we not deserve one elven ship? Not one?’

Tide coming in, the inexorable advance, the cold reaching higher and higher.

Had there been a moment when she should have called the Faithful to arms? If so, she had missed it. Perhaps she was brought up too much in the tradition of Andunie.  She had gone on sending secret messages to Romenna, to Pelargir, as her networks unravelled, brutally torn apart by Sauron and his minions. Now she had few secrets left to keep…

When, after all the waiting, after the terror of the thunder and the eagles, the wave finally broke, there was the animal fear that drove her to flight, the guilt of having failed her people, the searing anger at the death of innocents. All that. And also, in a very brief, very quiet moment, among all that violence and noise, the relief of letting go.

She rose and fell.

Chapter End Notes

Text of Not Waving But Drowning by Stevie Smith at the Poetry Foundation.