The Silver in your Eyes by Elisif

The Silver in your Eyes

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.