Nothing but time by Aerlinn

until the end of arda

Read until the end of arda

I sit upon these shores and stare at the far one. Or I would, that is, if I could see anything but sea and sea beyond the sea. What remains of us is outside of time, outside of reality even perhaps. With each passing century --we have long since given up on counting years, fleeting as they are and unmarked by blemishes to distinguish one from another-- what we are seems farther from what is.

Flowers bloom in perfect harmony, and bloom on. If they fade at all, we do not see it; maybe they do not, maybe we have just given up on noticing anything that lasts shorter than a century. Even our dogs lives longer than the greatest of your kings, and from what little news we can glean they might be more fit to rule. Then again, who knows how dependable an immortal eagle's tales are? They are winged and strange to what passes below. Anything that is for as long as we are would be.

Still, a feathered spirit for centuries accustomed to carrying off hapless rabbits should perhaps not be one's sole source of news on the progress of history. I have noticed there are often more rabbits in these stories than I would prefer, and I am unsure how many kings I missed out on for the sake of the tale of a nest perched on a perilous cliff-face. But I digress.

-

It is true that I did not truly love the woman at the time I left her, though I was certainly convinced I did. Which was why I could give her up; I didn't. I carried her memory with me, and much of her had only ever existed in memory and mirror-image to me. Even when she was still living and breathing before me I already loved the memory of her as I made it, no moment left untinged by nostalgia even before it ended. I loved what was mirrored in a star-studded pool, vague and distant as the moon; her twin-image all the same. Reflected light caught in her hair, her shape reflected rippling in the breeze like she was made of something less substantial and prone to decay. But even that cool deep pool and all its eternal stars are long gone now, buried first beneath layers of dead leaves, a dreary marchland, drained again for the sake of a farmer's plow, then forever sunk beneath the waves. The eagles tell me (for I still ask for news of my pool, as though it holds onto the last starlit reflection of my beloved beneath layers and layers of muck) that after sea sweet ice came, dragging along clay and gravel, stones, carving deep sinuous lines like so many smiles into the surface of the earth where we once stood. Then sand, and dunes, and sand again. A new lake fed by the meltwater, its memories are of sun and snow. My beloved's name is unknown to the river-spirit, the stars we saw reflected as lost to it as I am to the world, alone with my memories at last.

-

Death came quick as a sigh and as silently. When I saw its early announcement in the subtle lines of my beloved's smile, when the sound of her heart would drive me to despair as I imagined it stopping when we danced so wildly, perhaps beyond what she could comfortably endure-- death seemed foreign and enormous, and it was not for me. When I was on the battlefield, it was all around, abrupt and bloody, but never for me. It seemed a different thing entirely, unconnected to the failure of mortal bodies and the ever-ongoing process of all that falls apart. I suppose part of our bravery then was our utter inability to understand the finality of the thing gave out to countless orcs, men, trespassers, criminals. Death was something I dealt out. Everyone assumed my mother-name hinted at the fire in my eyes when I raged on the battlefield, and not without reason.

It was an easy mistake to make, and I made it for years myself. I stood on the battlefield often, and my eyes reflected that familiar, fell Valinorean light that did not know much of mercy. We did not know much of mercy in part because we could not afford to, at first, besieged as we were from all sides. But then also because it did not understand what pains and decay mortals are subject to in life, or how fragile a soul so bound to a body can be. What I did know of it I learned from my beloved, and it only made me more eager never to see more of it. When I fought the enemy, there was never room for nuance, or names for that matter. I think we pretended not to notice orcs too had families, and were presumably capable of feeling the suffering we inflicted upon them. The mangled elves they had once been were easier to slay than facing what had become of them, or how much they still wanted to live despite it all. Killing them felt like a just act of mercy, or rather like cleaning out a drain pipe. The unfortunate fact is that there was us, and then there was simply a sea of blood which I was expanding, and for a time it kept us safe. Eventually we became part of it, and then the entire continent was wiped from the map and from memory and sunk beneath those darkened waves, as if none of it ever happened at all. Reduced to myth and then less then myth. Even the possibility of our lives there now seems unlikely, and it is sometimes hard to understand why we fought to defend them so.

Either way, it was an easy mistake to make. Even when it announced itself in a dream, death was always a surprise for us, a slightly unreal, sudden infringing upon by something we stood outside. Even that black night when I mounted my horse for one last time, knowing full-well to what sort of world I was abandoning my loved ones, I suppose I had no idea. I was certain my slaying would at least contribute to the possibility of her peace, or so I told myself. My final gift of safety to both of our peoples.

I was told later that she may have been felled by that same sudden battle, already unrecogniseable to me before it ever touched her. Certainly the stars had already become invisible by then, clouded by the breath of Morgoth's dragons.

Later, because there is a later for us at all. What we underwent in those killing fields was as painful an experience as can be, the burning and tearing of flesh and the slow gnawing on still-living limbs by stray orcs on lunch-break wherever an unfortunate soldier lay immobilised. My own death was quicker than that; it was a moment of distraction that had my head rolling at the feet of my horrified brother. His would follow soon after, but there would be no brother there to see it. Though Elvish spirits are attached to bodies quite firmly and some of us have been known to tarry, mine sped away from all of this as quickly as it could, leaving my poor horse to be eaten by some ambitious orc-captain, and to do to my body --god knows what.

I was released from Mandos some time later, presumably held back some time for my part in the rebellion of the Noldor. As a spirit one does not truly experience time, so as a punishment it did not make much sense. The ones who were punished for my youthful indiscretions were my family and friends, who eagerly if anxiously awaited my return. I think they feared I would refuse to leave at all, and hang about that dread place like a teenager sulking in his room forever. That seems to be what Finrod expected, at least. In fact I think this is what he promised to my Andreth, even if it was not quite what she wanted of me. My memories of these years are vague and only shattered by the bright flash of her, passing through. Some of her longed to stay, even where it should not have been to start with. She truly did not want to go the wherever she was destined to go, and somehow had enough strength left in her to find me. She was as beautiful as my starlit memory of her, and finally as untouched by time. But she never had a talent for singing, or magic, and no Maian queens graced her lineage. The quickness of her mind, the skill of her fingers, the dark pool of her hair--or the memory of it-- nothing remains of them now. When she was torn from me, I knew she would not come back. The halls felt cold and dark then. I am named for a flame, and perhaps I finally did consume her. But no light seemed to be left in the world for me, and it did not matter how many times I cried out. Eternity takes a long time, and I no longer think there is a reason to be so sure this world will ever end.

-

And so here I am, sat upon the cliff at the edge of the world. I look down to the silver-white beach, glittering with precious stones, and the sea it embraces, bluer than any jewel on mortal shores. The sea sighs like she remembers, but reveals nothing. Countless ages have passed; stranger and stranger bones wash upon these shores, the result of whichever unfortunate mortal or animal steers themselves too far into enchantment and slowly drifts out of the real. Nothing changeable can remain here, with us who live in a slow, blessed memory.

The sea has lifted us out of the world, where the horizon is the curve of a smile that never reaches the earth's face. The road is straight, and impossible. It is impossible. Do you really believe ships just lift out of the sea like that, and leave behind the curve of the world? Do you think they can just forget about gravity? No, that is not how the world works. That is not how life works, when one still lives.

And so we remain here, a story even we now are starting to forget how to tell, with no more gravity left than a butterfly in a dream.

I still think about my starlit pool buried in a foreign land, just one shade beneath one so many layers of many-colored sediment. And her dark hair, and how her hands would reach out for me, and then at last the memory of hands animated by nothing but moth-spirit, still straining towards the flame.

But nothing ever reaches me, and the world is unending.

The song of the pool beneath the stars

And they stood beside dark water full of Song and stars.

(But the waters of Tarn Aeluin were held in reverence, for they were clear and blue by day and by night were a mirror for the stars; and it was said that Melian herself had hallowed that water in the days of old.')

The lake remembers its awakening by Melian, and dreams of what came after.

Read The song of the pool beneath the stars

The song of the pool beneath the stars

 

My first reflection was of nightingales and starlight
I was shy still, my mirror green with duckweed
and no birds to eat it, all still sleeping in the dark
as she cleared it with her shining hands
singing a song of being, of remembering the Song.

I was young then, new-formed
my uncouth thoughts of rain and stone
No memory of longing frogsong
or sweltering cicada-filled summers
warmed then cold furrowed depths.
 
Dark, silvery, and green.
Embers of stars there must have been;
but I don’t remember any now.
None that would then come to me
cast lasting reflection into my deeps.
only dark roots drinking, deepening
what songs shadows found there must sing
whispering of far-away fires as they drained
and dark taproot tendrils stirred wild mud

But I now was stilled by gentle hands
that sung to me of growing smooth
reflective, still—of staying so the world could see
to be the eye of the high mountain, opening slowly
with the flowers to the Light.

and so learned, after so many a century
the joy of holding starlight stilled in my deeps
Oh yes, how I was silver-shot!
with many a sliver of the moon
And at last not even dread winter
could with his cold breath
stir movement
from my starred lakebed.

-

Long afterwards when I had lain deaf and mute
blinded shining beneath the newborn sun
--someone looked again, and it was night again,
her hair dark as the eyes of nightingales--
though wholly without stars;
and nothing here was singing.

Nothing about her shone; she seemed so frail a thing,
unreflected and afraid; alone.
It was dark, and so silent; as a finger came down
to touch its twin, trembling more than ember-stars
scattered on once-young waves, long since stilled--
now stirred by a single sigh, ruffling star-domed sky;
she stayed so long; I think she cried.
She taught me tears
and the taste of Sea away

(I didn’t mind—and dreamed of gulls,
learned to long for things I never knew)

At last looked up from my new scattering
with eyes her own, yet deepening
and undulating into her hair, casting there;
all the stars she could not hold,
all my memory of moons
yes I held her faithful sight; but silvering,
cold and dark, yet full of light
and memory of Song.

-

One day, she did not come,
and then came not again.
Until brown leaves drew a coverlet
over dulled stars in my lakebed.

For a long time, the straying roe-deer
alone disturbed, with dark eyes full of fear.
lost forever to the swift-footed hunter,
when she stumbled into the deep
where I wound my darkening mud to keep
her near to me, in lasting Sleep.  

-

When at last she came again, it was with someone like the Sun,
with strange fey stars lost in his eyes,
their reflections still unknown to me—
a Light I did not know how to keep.

A trembling hand strayed into her shadowed hair, hid there.
and seemed at first like a swallow to make its nest--
yet rarely –if ever- truly seemed at rest,
still Southward-bound, remembering great Seas.
And always again his eyes were cast into my pool,
of deep blue incomparable, impossible to forget,
coloring starless day-skies with deeper regrets.

And at night my faithful reflection seemed to become
instead of a comfort, a horrible wrong!
The arms with which I mirrored her, still asking for a dance
now signed of something strange
between
my little shadow and her Sun--
-- oh, I made some waves to match her sighs

but found I could not chase stars from reflected eyes.

Often still she would come alone,
sometimes long dancing toe-to-toe,
bent low towards her reflected face,
seeming to search with that deep gaze
For something I could not hold.

Often, I feared she would bend too deep
and found I did not wish for her to keep
my roe-deer company, reigning in its calls.
But tracing long waterlily lines, she stayed by me
and it was from her I learned to speak
of kings, and duty
of stern cold law.

I whispered them back to her with many-tongued reeds
to which she remained dumb, but seemed to heed
and cried for days at end.

But still I preferred her soft hand to any root
and held myself up, for all her days,
like a smoothened mirror to her sky;
wishing reflected stars to shine more strangely
bright and fell as across the wide, wild Sea.

-

That girl is long gone; and so am I
who learned to dance again, and hold more than sky

All that remains of us is a fragment of Song
faltering, fading, heard soon by none.

First whispered in my reeds when the Sea
came down to flood the sweetness of my keep
soon silenced by greater Melodies.

-

(far above a new river flows; beneath the earth,
the layers grow
of song upon song upon Song.

But whenever long taproot reaches down too deep
I call out from my starless sleep!
for her whose sorrow taught me how to speak
and sing through many mouths
now thick with sand, and set with gravel
never reaching sun or sky, or Sea
Ever pressed down by Time, into the Deep).

-

Oh starless Andreth, shadow of Song,
old Time should not move so smoothly along 
and leave no trace, allow no change of Part
for stumbling deer, for faithful hearts.

 

 

   

---

Chapter End Notes

(water holds the echo of the Music, even if the song has been forgotten, and the river runs dry).