Ulmo's Wife by pandemonium_213

Ulmo's Wife

She did not reveal her secrets easily to him. He had to open himself to her: floating in her arms, letting her waves caress him and pull him into her until her knowledge brought him to a peak whereupon he burst and spread his seed throughout her vastness.

He fell in love with her as soon as he and the others had emerged from the yawning gate they sang open above this blue and white jewel, later named Imbar. The others embraced the winds, the stones and metals of the earth, or the flora and fauna that dwelt upon this world. But he had chosen her.

He remembered when he first entered her, sliding into her fluids and tasting her brine, drenching his senses with her fecund odor of birth and decay. She arched against his might, meeting his power with her own immeasurable strength, rendering him insignificant.

“Where is he?” she had gasped. “He knew me. I told him my secrets from the very beginning. But he left me.”

“He has fallen. I am with you now,” he said, riding on her swells, trying to make her forget the other, and trying to forget how he had been an instrument of betrayal to his kinsman, driving a brilliant but brittle mind into madness.

In anger, she pushed him away, tossing him into the coldest places of her liquid heart, and she would not speak to him. So he cajoled her, seeking out what she hid in her depths. Slowly, she came to trust him again and showed him her unending stories from the rainbow coral reefs that ringed her warm hips to the white crown on her brow where ice and water met. She took him to where she stroked the land with tender affection or lashed it with fury. She spoke to him of the leviathans that swam majestic with her currents and the strange tubes that waved in the hot vents deep in her belly, singing the flute-songs of fire and water.

She wrapped him in her waters and led him back in time to when the sky churned with vapors and was rent by lightning, back to her little wombs, the warm, silent pools where the beginnings of life danced, born of her substance and star-semen. The twisted strands of molecules gyrated wildly, crashing into one another and reeling apart, but gradually they stepped with stately order until they shimmied on fins out of her waters, carrying her blood within them as they grew to fly, to walk, and to make rocks into tools and name the stars. For she was the mother of all, and that was why he loved her.

Rarely he came to the abode of his brethren, the ones who had embraced the winds, the stars, and the stuff of the earth, or who passed their time weeping and dreaming. They watched his lover’s children trudge across sun-scorched savannas, through dark rain-soaked forests and over frigid mountain passes to look upon her shores, yearning to taste her salt. His brethren draped themselves in the forms of her Children, mimicking them, and sought to protect them from the ravages of their dark brother, his anger at past injustice turned to black madness. But his kin never truly understood her Children, not like he did, for his lover had told him her secrets.

He came to Valinor, his lover’s fingers dripping from him as he rose from the water, and he walked alone to Máhanaxar. There he saw them: Manwë and Varda, Aulë and Yavanna, and the others who had paired, their desire to mate reaching back to a time unknown when his kind once dwelt in bodies of flesh throughout their lives, carrying within them the blood of a distant sea long dead. The echoes of that blood still called to them, and they could not help themselves in their desires, but then neither could he.

“Ulmo, why do you not marry?” they asked, but he did not answer. For the tides of his lover awaited his return, her waves whispering that she had another secret to tell him.

~~~~~

Ulmo is the Lord of Waters. He is alone. He dwells nowhere long, but moves as he will in all the deep waters about the Earth or under the. Earth He is next in might to Manwë, and before Valinor was made he was closest to him in friendship; but thereafter he went seldom to the councils of the Valar, unless great matters were in debate.

Valaquenta, The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien