The Silver in your Eyes by Elisif

The Fire

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.