The Silver in your Eyes by Elisif

Winter has arrived as you slept, my love; frost has chiselled and crafted the landscape beyond these doors, tempered and engraved the contours of the forest fine as glass, edged every trembling leaf in silver light that would match that was once in your eyes;  not the harsh, glinting silver of ice, innocent from afar, but raw as iron to the touch, blood-scented, crunching like shattered bone when finally underfoot; nay, your eyes were once the silver of the soft boughs of Telperion, entwining tendrils of light, soft as a spring bud squished between a child’s fingertips, sweet, precious, light, which can and will hurt no one.

So I once believed.

Once; the very word conveys a story-tellers lay of lands that never were- lies, lies, lies! - and never will be. A story, nothing more, one that soothed me in childhood- as you did, my love- one that led so many to freeze, to choke, to stumble in the all-consuming darkness and blur of blood-tainted silver and die, all for the sake of light. Wanting for the hallowed light of old.

 I do not know if such light yet lingers beneath shattered and bruised lids that every now and again feebly fight to open; does the light now pain your eyes as the alien, all-encompassing dark did my own? Are your eyes yet painted silver beneath crushed and lowered lids, or are they bruised black, tinged with fire I had only thought proverbial until they last met and turned away from mine?

I believe it was the last, for I do not remember if your eyes ever found mine in the place of which I will not speak; I remember that you lacked the strength to even lift your head, eyes opened to mere slits, red and raw with pain and blood, crying “kill me, kill me!” with a bleeding fist held to the heaving hollows of your emaciated chest, the words, however desperate, phrased so awkwardly it seemed you had long ago forgotten their meaning and knew only that they represented something you yet craved, the promise of dark Mandos turned to blissful spring and sweet nectar in the fog of misery and ash-flavoured filth in which I found you. What had been left of you.

I must have collapsed, for I awoke to trickled lines of fresh blood on your cheeks where you had scratched them in fevered nightmare- did you cry out for me love? I am sorry- and a healer knelt with a faded band of linen preparing to bind your drawn fingers to palm and wrist, keep them from you for your safety, further swaddle you like an infant so that it might be left unattended and the burden of your helplessness not weigh upon the consciences of others.

I will have none of it; I will hold your fingers, still raw as they are with scrapes and cuts, tired, limp in my palm, for so long as you need it, because, perhaps, somewhere beneath the bruises and the blood you want me to.

And perhaps you will wake, and perhaps we will speak, perhaps you will remember my face, and perhaps we will forget, because perhaps when you at last awaken the world will have healed and forged itself anew in that tangible silver and gold that was not merely a reflection of the winter and an afterthought discarded by this unforgiving earth.

And perhaps there will yet be silver in your eyes. 

After every loss, over every grave, it seemed some sage would repeat the old-as-the-darkness adage that life was nothing like the songs, but we privately knew otherwise, for life as we lived it religiously adhered to such tragic endings as were favoured by Tirion’s bards: the tragic hero, cut down ere he grew weary of the world; the unarmed and defenceless soldier, fending off monsters with a broken blade; the doomed lovers who died clasping at each other’s hands.

 All proved true.

Apart from the hands. In that, even Tirion’s most melancholy of poets lied; in that, the sages were proved right.

Lightning, I told you once, awaking from a nightmare in the intimacy of darkest night. Lightning, sudden fire, but not grief, please never grief.

Fire, you whispered to me. Fire.

I learned not until the next day that for the way your hand had clung to mine as you spoke those words, you had spoken them in memory-haunted sleep.

Or in foresight. With our kind, the difference is not always clear.

Fire would in time claim us both, the sudden rush of white-hot pain, the blackness… The wait. The knowledge that had always been there, lingering on even in Mandos, where it was cool, where there were no flames. Only smoke.

Such smoke as he drew from your mangled wrist, twisted and drew into fingers and palm as I held you, stitched your wounds beyond counting and re-fashioned your life from what had claimed it, as he had done to mine.

“Fire,” you choked, as I held you and a faint breath of life returned to your lips and your silver-tinged eyes met mine. “The fire…”

“The fire is gone,” I told you. “And I am here.”

It is a Feast-Day; a recitation will be held in its honour, and stories will be told, by those who knew and know them as stories and nothing more. We who knew them for truth and for lies only in what they denied us are expected to attend, gaudy robes disguising such scars as we still bear, flickering lantern-fires in the trees disguising the never-welcomed-night that has fallen upon Tirion and on the memory of Valinor lost.

Eyes closed, we listen; the poet recites onwards, in his now-ancient manner forges gold of his words and sings a story of lovers lost, holding hands as they leap from the tops of the crested mountain into an unknown abyss below.

And just just when the tale appears to have reached its end, dawn arrives in dark Valinor and you, my Russandol, reach over and lay your hands in mine.