Many Journeys by Elleth

Drowning Troubles (*)

Curufin visits Losgar to seek closure only to find that Amras had been waiting for him.  A horror ficlet, features character death and general unpleasantness.

Even from a distance, picking his way down the last slope to the beach, Curufin can see the remains of burned planks poking like broken ribs from the sea where the swanships foundered. The water ripples around them, laps at the shingled beach, pebbles grind together in the rhythm of the waves. All else is quiet and dark. Almost he wishes away the stars that allow him to see at all. But isn't that why he came, to see?

Yes. Almost, he thinks, he can still smell the burnt wood, that it is not merely the sharp pungency of salt water stinging the air he breathes, and the cloying sweetness of some dead thing nearby, somewhere hidden. Almost he can see the flames.

But seeing, facing, is difficult, and he sits, head in hands, and at long last begins laughing softly to himself. How much more like Makalaurë's soft-hearted sentiment this is, and how much less. For his older brother seems to have forgotten entirely about the tragedy here, mourning Nelyo instead, leaving him to bear the brunt of the blame now that their father, too, has died, and Ambarussa is but half a person.

Makalaurë prefers to drown his troubles in the contents of a bottle. He's come here to – not to drown, to avoid drowning in his mind, his thoughts, in the bloody guilt that will not let him rest.

The shingles continue grinding against one another, and the longer he listens, the longer it sounds like steps, slow, laboured, but surely that, too, is a product of his mind, his youngest brother swaying from the surf, death-pale where he is not burned, bloated, with seaweed in his dripping hair and one eye gone – perhaps a gull or fish took that. It doesn't suit him. He should be alive.

Fingers close around his wrist, slip, grasp again and with more force, and pull him toward the sea. The scent - the sea, and burning, and cloying dead meat, intensifies. He chokes down bile, and follows.

The question, how, the odd joy, his guilt, are all drowned in a gush of salty water, and a rush of silvery-breathed bubbles catching the starlight between a swanship's planks before all stars go out in a burst of white light, his littlest brother laughing, come.

Chapter End Notes

Written for Iavalir's request at Zeen's Halloween Comment Fic Meme From Beyond the Grave.