Set Fire to the Stars by sian22

Night's curtain

How did I know? It was his hands.

Soft and sure, so exquisitely gentle even as they without ceremony dosed me as one would a gwinig. I should have been embarrassed, sensitive to a foreign touch, but I was not.  Pain was a white hot brand and all was dark and in the darkness the only light was the soothing of that touch.

I was dying.

I knew it even as the first of the seizures took hold: I lying, still and silent in my prince’s arms, each pound of hoof on turf a white hot agony. My heart cried out in anguish. We had waded through so much blood, so many battles, that to fall now to a haphazard skirmish in Morgul Vale-- it seemed cruel.  I had stayed. Though Amron had fallen, I had stayed. For my brother-in-law and for my father-King.  For the people I considered my own though I was not one of them, Noldo as I am.

Now, prisoner of a failing body, my senses dimmed. The pain lanced each time a seizure gripped, each time my limbs bucked and flailed like a fish gasping on the shore.  Soon there was no sound, no sight.  Legolas’ anxious voice pleaded with me to stay, hold fast to his strength and warmth, but it too faded step by step-- until  there was only darkness and that touch.

Perhaps I screamed. I must have when the wound was cleansed; when the burning ichor of the poison was dragged out and a salve shoved into the wound.  But again there came that touch.  A fëa so beautiful, so gentle and golden, it was a treasure. How sad to know it there when all was darkening.  Millenia I had been alone, my mate lost and never expecting to know that joy again, or desire or true touch.

Perhaps at the end of things this was a boon.  A bitterness that was also sweet.  I would know such beauty all too briefly before I walked Lord Namo’s halls.

I let the hazy pain take me down.