Three Leagues by heget

The Second

Read The Second

Dying was like the river.

 

Ethir’s family lived below the Gates of Sirion, down in the willow forest where the River Sirion met the River Narog.  Ethir knew rivers, knew how to swim in their strong currents, how to paddle a coracle one-handed while netting fish, how to pole a laden barge upstream and avoid sandbars and strainers, and how to predict how the courses shifted in their banks every year like a cat stretching before a nap.

The River Narog was like an aunt to Ethir, a proud old woman with a voice that could be gentle or cutting as she brought him gossip down from the north and bragged about her lake as she stretched out green and lovely beneath his boat.  He would run his hand across the surface of her water and feel ghost-like fingers thread between them.  Herons would watch him from the riverbanks as he paddled the round coracle northward.  On the Narog he never felt alone, even in his one-person craft.  The river sang to him, promising her constant love and bounty, and Ethir always felt safe upon her currents.  As a boy he assisted his family in porting goods on barges up the River Narog to the overland road that led to the Crossings of Taeglin.  Trade goods came down in barrels from Doriath, and Ethir’s neighbors had kin that would take some of the trade-wares all the way down to the Mouth of Sirion and up the coast to Círdan’s settlements, but Ethir’s family stayed away from the sea, clinging to the rivers, the Narog most of all.  The small streams that were her many daughters had been playmates for Ethir, yet in time he grew bored of them.  He followed the river north to the new city nestled on her bank and found his calling as a ranger of Nargothrond.  Dipping his feet into her cool waters, he spoke to the river of his accomplishments with the bow and sword, of his companions and new king.  He thanked her for the promise of safety as he tracked and slew orcs with the river at his back, knowing he could escape if needed be upon her currents, that she would drown his enemies if he called to her for aid.  He spoke of seeing Lake Ivrin and how it had been just as clear and sparkling as the river promised.  Musically she answered him in the splashes against the canyon walls, the burbles over smoothened stone, and the cries of her waterfowl.  She carried his contentedness down to his kin in the willow-meads of Nan-Tathren so they would not worry.

Sirion was not family.  Ethir mistrusted that river.  It was wide and twisting, deep and deceptive, heavy with the waters of six other mighty rivers before joining the Narog.  It carried the shadows and mists of the dark, ancient forests it had traversed and the sheer cliffs of two mountain ranges it had divided.  Secrets flowed through Sirion, twisting it twice into fens.  The river cared not to speak to Ethir, ignoring all elves that floated upon it.  Its voice was too deep and layered to understand, plunging ever faster through Beleriand to reach the sea, its mouth empty but for the lonely sea-birds and a few sailors that dared its estuary.  Ethir spent one summer with the March-wardens learning to ply the hidden ferries among the reeds of the Aelin-uial.  Well-named had been that marshland, for even high noon hung muted by mists as to feel as dark and unwelcoming as twilight.  Sound twisted along its branching currents, stilled into sinkholes and brackish pools, and ran swift and snake-like where least expected.  A boy grown to manhood among twisting flood-meadows of the willow forests, still Ethir never felt secure in the Aelin-uial.  He panicked often, would fall into the mere and flail his limbs as if he had never swam before, flinched at every croak of frog or hooting call of owl.  In the Aelin-uial the River Sirion became like Nan Elmoth, ensnaring the unwary and wary alike.  Only the roar of the falls to the south stayed constant in that bewitched place.  Ethir approached the falls once, under the supervision of one of the king’s March-wardens, watching the great white plumes float up from where tons of water fell screaming into the earth and disappeared.  The sound was dreadful.  Close to the falls no other noise could compete against it, not even the horns of Ulmo.  Only when the wind blew just right could Ethir see the black pit that swallowed the white spumes.  Specially crafted barrels could survive that plunge and the underground caverns to reemerge at the Gates of Sirion, but few living things did, and no boat would chance it.  Ethir returned to fens above the falls, learning how to navigate the marshes and walk across the half-submerged brown moss.  A sense of abandonment hung damp across his skin, the callousness of a land that sang for no elf’s pleasure.  It had been a miserable summer.  Even at the start of the marshland where the River Aros joined the Sirion and began to spread into a land of mists and reeds, Ethir felt the bellow of the thundering waterfall.  Memory reverberated terror in tempo with the falls.  He never returned.

The Fens of Serech had been Sirion’s waters as well, just as fetid and mist-heavy.  The river had been narrower, closer to its headwaters, eager to journey to the sea, and yet it still braided out into flat marshland, swirled in backwards currents and brackish pools, and stilled into thick mists that sucked in sound and hope.  Ethir knew not to look to that river for safety.

Fitting that this dungeon was surrounded by the River Sirion.  Ethir could not hear the river’s voice in this deep pit, though the roar of blood in his ears and the screams of the prisoners might have been why.  His heart sounded like the Falls of Sirion, the continuous thunder that denied all challenging sounds.  Distantly Ethir recognized that King Finrod was singing counter-enchantments to try and save them from Sauron’s wizardry, Captain Heledir was shouting at the steward, and Bân and Consael were trying to rouse Fân.  Gadwar was pounding his head against the stone, or perhaps that was Tacholdir.  Ethir tried to count heartbeats and calm himself.  Fân coughed.  Bân cried in fragile relief.  Beren was singing in Taliska something that made the wolves snarl in anger and the jailers that patrolled the upper levels of the dungeon scream for the mortal to cease.  “Bëorian war chants,” Aglar whispered, who was chained beside Ethir and knew the Edain language.  “They must be survivors from Dorthonion and remember Barahir’s outlaws.  Sauron hunted him for years.”  Aglar rose his voice to join with Beren’s, singing mortal defiance.  Ethir knew not the words but tried to sing with them.  Soon his mouth grew dry.  His fingers had dried hours before, when the blood had splurted over the wall and peppered the right side of Ethir’s body as the wolf pulled Arodreth from the chains.  Ethir had felt the hot breath of the wolf as it ripped into Arodreth in the center of the dungeon pit, heard every crunch and squelch even as he had pulled his hand away, curled his body and pressed tight against the stone walls, reaching for Aglar to shield him.  Arodreth had died close enough to Ethir to overwhelm all sounds.  Soon the wolves would be back to pick a second victim.  He would not call to the River Sirion for aid.

Still, the memory of the waterfall and the black pit in which the river fell returned to Ethir.  Three leagues the river flowed, hidden from eyes, only to spring forth from the ground at the Gates of Sirion proud and swift, its waters banished of all traces of the swamp it had once been.  Ethir imagined the Doors of the Halls of Awaiting looked like the Falls of Sirion.  The Noldor suggested via stories that the Halls were underground or along a northern shore where the outer ocean fell in an endless fall into the void. No Sindar returned from the Halls with memory intact, and only the assurance of Queen Melian convinced Ethir’s people of the certainty of rebirth.  Once he died, his soul would find its way on a lonely, unfamiliar journey to the Doomsman and be safe from Sauron.  Finrod had promised them that the Necromancer would not trap their souls as he had their bodies.  Beren had worried about that, but spoke not why.  A strange fear.  Beren would go to the Doomsman, too, according to Finrod’s wisdom, but he was mortal and would not leave the Halls the same as elves.

Dying would be like the river, Ethir thought.  His soul would detach from his body, flow like a subterranean river to the Halls of Awaiting only to emerge in time reborn from its Gates.  That must be why Arodreth had not been afraid, why the older elf has been so strangely calm as the wolf came.  The wolves’ howling was not more terrible than the roar of the falls, the crashing of water to erode the stones around the lip of the sinkhole, rumbling as the boulders smashed into gravel along the riverbed.  His soul would be retrieved like those pitch-caulked barrels his family pulled from the river, inspected for holes, and gently cleaned until they polished once more.  Ethir imagined there was something akin to the implacable grandeur of the great River Sirion in the Doomsman that knew all and spoke little.  He was patient as the best sailor, the Keeper of the Halls, and no storm could dissuade him, no mist confuse.  The Doomsman’s net fished up all souls; Ethir’s would not be overlooked.

Three leagues the river flowed through darkness.  It did not die, not truly, nor disappear.  The waterfall had been loud, screaming from fear and pain perhaps, but the river had been quiet at the Gates of Sirion, and Ethir had not feared to paddle to the gates in his willow-woven coracle and fish at that spot.  Dying would be as dreadful as the Falls of Sirion, that could not be denied.  What came after, though, Ethir would not fear.

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Chapter End Notes

Ethir's backstory and his connection to subterranean rivers is also explored in Chapter Eight of Release from Bondage. His homeland is a nod to the Youngest Ranger from The Leithian Script.
Beren singing of his companions' feats in Dorthonion while imprisoned in Tol-in-Gaurhoth comes directly from "The Lay of Leithian".

Coracles are one-person rounded river boats, especially common in Wales where traditionally they were woven from willow branches and bark.

The existence of Goldberry the River's Daughter meant I could have pushed the personification of Beleriand's rivers stronger than I did in this fic.