Quietus by UnnamedElement

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Prologue

Quietus (n.): 

1. A severe blow (nautical). 

2. A finishing stroke; anything that effectually ends or settles: as in an argument.

3. Final discharge or acquittance, as from debt or obligation; that which silences claims.

4. Death, or something that causes death, regarded as a release from life (literary).

5. Something that has a calming or soothing effect (archaic).

.o.

“Now Maeglin and his mother were free for a while to go where they wished, and they rode often to the eaves of the wood, seeking the sunlight; and desire grew hot in Maeglin's heart to leave Nan Elmoth for ever.” --Of Maeglin (The Silmarillion)

 

.o.

 

“[Tuor] seized Meglin by that hand that held the knife [that had struck at his son] and broke the arm with the wrench, and then taking him by the middle leapt with him upon the walls, and flung him far out. Great was the fall of his body, and it smote Amon Gwareth three times ere it pitched in the midmost of the flames; and the name of Meglin has gone out in shame from among Eldar and Noldoli.” --The Original Tale (The Fall of Gondolin)

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Prologue

It had been days since Aredhel was separated from her companions, and the trees were tall and dark about her. The birds sang loud in a constant, if changing and raucous, hum, but her own steps were soft, muted by the slick, pine leaf-fall underfoot. She could not hear the wind above the trees and could barely see the sun through their interlocking boughs, and at every turn she feared to walk straight into an enemy’s arms, or to fall into some secret crevice from which she would never return, where cold water from the heart of Arda would suck her far away beneath the ground, entomb her in this foreign land apart from kith and kin… 

But she did not cross a single living creature besides the birds, and every tree and every turn looked to her the same. She was not familiar with these woods. She was not called by them at all—here, she was alone.

Alone .

She could not tell whether it was day or night, but her ankles were cut with the catch of thorn and pine, and she was tired. The chorus of birds elevated, building like a mountain into a cacophony of sound to subsume her.

Aredhel let herself fall in regret to the forest floor, and the woods fell with her into silence, like some recognition of prayer. 

She laid her head against the rough bark of the tree and stared into the boughs above— If she were to die here, she would think on those she left behind, of how kind they were to her, of how much they had, together, survived: her brothers, her father; her cousins, her mother (so far away, and long)—

The woods awoke with movement, then, and something stirred at the edge of her mind. There was the scent of moss crushed underfoot, and she tried to turn but she had turned, instead, to stone.

Alone .

Her heart beat like a wardrum in her ears; her skin burned with the cold of lonely crossings; but the trees were tall and dark, and she was small and silver— 

Her vision faded into grey until she could not see.

A closer stirring, then, a burst of the scent of loam kicked up after the longest winter, and the night crept down to drown her. 

She could not breathe, and she could not flee. (She could not even cry: Hark! For I am Írissë, daughter of Nolofinwë! Behold my core of steel, the fire of this heart so bold! ) 

The night was heavy on her mind until the pine underfoot cut the silver of her dress and set her aflame.

The birds screamed in the canopy as the crushed moss built like a zephyr around her, as the forest crept over her body to claim her—their cries and their wings a whirlwind that dried the tears stiffening her face:

Tears like salt on the longest crossing—

Wind like rain, the scent of shore (birds greeting them as saviors to tell her they were close!)—

But this was a forest that pinned her; this was moss and it was vines that filled her gaps and grew in crevices deep, crept with perversion down her throat to pierce her heart behind her ribs— 

(A core of steel and a heart so bold!)

Alone .

She was drowned in the earth of this faraway place.

Alone.

She was crushed and she was pressed …

Moss cupped her cheeks, edged her nose—spider silk across her mouth, an art she could not breathe, and then:

A final sleep so strange.

An unbearably heavy night. 

The trees were dark and tall, but she was small and silver. She was folded into the woods like a natural thing forgotten—it grew over her as if she were stone, some memorial to an ancient land: moss and fern, lichen and vine... Trees opened their roots to cradle her cairn until her veins were theirs; their sap pumped through her until the respiration of leaves under the birds’ undulation became her only breath—

The scent of moss crushed underfoot…

(She swam from the depths of the drowning cold to shoot the watery sun.)

The sun rose gold in her faraway mind, but in the darkness of the wood she was taken.

.o.

Aredhel awoke in warmth. There was a quilt across her chest, and the sound of a fire gentle in her ears. She opened her eyes and blinked: a cottage, but grand—grand like someone had lived here for hundreds of years, old and beautiful, austere and…rustic. 

She could not keep her eyes open, for she was weak from the woods.

The woods! She opened her eyes again and looked around, then let lids fall heavy like morning mist—it did not smell like the woods here.

She breathed, raised a shaky hand to touch her own face.

There, there was no moss, no silk—she was dry and she was clean. Her face was her own.

Tired .

Her lungs breathed air and her heart pumped blood.

Alone?

But no, there had been more than moss, had there not?

No…

“Sleep.”

She breathed, and then her hand was grasped and pressed gently to her side.

(She sunk into the depths of a sleep so strange as the moon cast wide overhead.)

In the hearth, the fire popped loud, and Aredhel slept like death.

.o.

The trees were tall and dark about her, but far above (as if leagues away) she could see the palest dappling of sun, and it warmed her—a dusting of gold on moon-white skin. She blinked as if wakening but she must have already been so, for she stood alone among resinous pines, the soles of her shoes thick with autumn’s late refuse. 

She spun around and stared, but there was neither movement nor sound.

How long had it been since she left Himlad? It could not really have been so long that the trees should have shed, limbs silver and reaching, naked arms cut cross pines darker than night to clasp at one another’s— 

How had the seasons turned like this?

What was happening?

She spun round again and peered into the depths of the forest, but nowhere was there light. She did not know which way to go—she could not even tell in which direction the sun would set within the thickness of the forest.

How had she come to this place? Had she not been abroad before and then lost in the woods? And then there was a death and a sleep; and next a warm bed and hot fire, a gentle hand and a sleep again like death, but now— Now.

She was here ?

A twig snapped somewhere far away, and Aredhel’s breath caught in her throat, for she had seen no creatures, had neither felt nor heard even a susurration of wind. No thing she wanted to meet in the dark cold of this wood would give warning by sound…

At least no elf, and she did not wish to encounter wandering men or journeying dwarves when she was disoriented and forgetful, when she had lost all sense of time and place or where she was—

She had been travelling south from Celegorm’s, and yet she could not remember coming upon these woods, and then—somehow—there had been a house…

The trees creaked around her, and then there was stirring at the edge of her vision and the scent of moss crushed underfoot—loam kicked up after the longest winter—and, suddenly, he was there:

Tall and dark and fair, hair nearly as midnight as her own: face cold and pale as snow yet, somehow, warmer than hers—as if lit from within by muted sunlight—though he did not look as if he had walked beneath anything but bough or star for centuries upon centuries upon years. 

It was not the glow of Valinor she saw in him but, she thought, one of vitality , and it was familiar, if not wholly welcome…

He took a step toward her and she took a step immediately back—or, rather, she tried to. She found immediately that she could not, could not move nor breathe; and as he walked closer and closer to her, the woods became a spinning funnel from ground to sky, as if she stood in the middle of a waterspout of woods.

She could not stand and fell to her knees and was sick.

He was in front of her then. Steadying her, long cold hands pressed against her ill cheeks. Aredhel looked up to see the face of this unknown elf, the only still thing in the yet spinning woods. She closed her eyes against the spinning and swallowed hard, felt the pinch of pine needles at her knees.

“You have the light of the Trees in you,” the elf said underbreath, and there was something cuttingly bitter beneath the blithe observation; she would have shivered if she could but, as it was, only her neck and her head would move. “Your name?”

“Írissë,” she said, and her throat stung.

“Do not be rude,” he said softly, and he lifted her chin so she was forced to look into his eyes, and they were dark and deep as those waters beneath ice at the Crossing. Never had she seen eyes so dark.

The arboreal waterspout fell utterly away into stillness as he gripped her harder, and she could have cried in relief, though she did not, for she would show him she was strong.

He pinched her chin. “Your other name,” he insisted. The fingers bruised her. “Not that one; that is dead.”

“I am Aredhel,” she said quietly. “I am Aredhel, daughter of Fingolfin—”

(A core of steel! the fire of a heart so bold!) 

“—Ar-Feiniel of Tirion, and Gondolin. I come from my cousins in Himlad.”

“Ah,” the elf said, but he offered no name in return.

She was still under his hands once more.

“You are beautiful,” he finally said. “It is a pity you must leave me.”

What was happening?

He dropped his hands from her cheek and chin and suddenly she was limp and limbless, and she fell to the ground, helpless as an eel out of water. She rolled just far enough to see him pointing into the far-off forest:

“That is the way out, Aredhel. I wish you luck. You will not see me again, I think, for a while.”

And then the elf was gone—the backwards scent of spring burst through winter loam spiraling in his wake—and she was alone again, the trees tall and dark around her. Before she could steady herself, she was spinning again, pinned by the vertigo of it all to the needle-sharp floor, and her mind was chased to the edges of the world.

.o.

Days or weeks passed. She could not tell waking from sleep, dream from reality: she knew only the woods around her and the images that flashed before her eyes and inside her mind like the moving panoramas she and her cousins had loved as children in Valinor, long ago, except—

Except these were ghastly . And she did not know if they were real or part of sleep so strange.

Her horse she saw, at one point, laid on its side and swollen as if it were many days gone. She blinked and then it was ripped open from chest, down underline, to groin; and—as she watched—viscera spilled from the newly-gaping chasm to the rich and rotting detritus like a hot red wave. When next she blinked, there were maggots all about it, and her own lost sword lay on the ground beside the beast, as if she had defiled the body herself: Aredhel lunged for the blade but it was just as suddenly gone, evaporating between her fingers, and—by the time she looked up from pounding the ground in anger—she was but a hand’s width away from her horse (a dessicated thing now) and it writhed lifelike with maggots-cocooned; the forest wound its way about the long-gone body the way it had done her on her first day in this place: it crawled across the bones and jellied sinews, spun vines like coils—like the gold in her distant brother’s hair—around empty ribs, and the moss grew faster than the centuries as it padded the spaces where the flesh once had been… She had tried to scramble away at that (for fear of being caught again herself), but she was swept up in a sudden explosion of black: the flies burst from their cocoons to swarm her until the world was colored deeper than deep-forest night—dark as the eyes she had seen somewhere, but could no longer recall—and they chased her like yellowjackets until she could run no more, until she collapsed to her knees gasping and exhausted, until the woods exploded about her…

Another time, Aredhel had approached the promised edge of the woods and could see dawn lightening the world at its horizons—she could see it between the distant trees like toothpicks, a child’s twigs in play—and the sun… She could almost feel it on her face. She ran then, faster than she had ever run before: She leapt over logs as would a doe, picked her way through deadfall with a speed to rival the nimblest children of those laiquendi she had once sighted from afar—squinting—in her travels.

Breaths heaved past the point of pain, she was fit to burst through that coveted border (that cursed barrier between light and dark) when she was forcefully struck by some thing— invisible , unseeable, unfeelable—and the world spun away again. 

When she woke from her daze, everything was as it had been, except that when she raised a hand to her face to clear her sight… She bled.

She had stood at the edge of the woods, then, and she had watched the sun burn away the night. As far as she could see, it lit the broomgrass from the edge of the forest to the edge of the world a brilliant, burning, roughspun forbidden gold… The grass waved to her and beckoned in the early morning light. 

She spat blood from her mouth onto the ground.

She gazed abroad, ran hands down her cheeks, and cried.

Since then, she had walked the edges of the forest every waking minute—grass melted into rocks melted into distant mountains into darkness and then empty lands of grey mist that urged her faster forward. She shouted into the emptiness of each place, called for her cousins, called for elves, called for men and dwarves, for anyone who would come: even Melkor’s foes would be preferable to this wood-quiet silence and the cacophony of her lonely mind, for she could not tell sleep from waking from walking from rest. But the heart of the forest had begun to work its will on her, and by her second time round the borders she was not only hungry and thirsty but dragged—unbidden (light shoes now ground through; the soles of her feet protected by layers upon layers of pine sap and duff)— toward the heart of the dark woods.  

The trees were tall and dark as they pulled her in from the borders in an ever-shrinking spiral.

Sometimes, she thought she could hear her kin calling for her; sometimes she thought she saw a child flit through the trees, dark as night and fair as dusk both; and she cried, then, for the sieve her once fine mind had become, for there was no child here, there was no one here —she was alone.

Alone?

Alone.

The trees were tall and dark, and she was small and silver; and the closer she got to the heart of the forest the more wildly beat her own heart, a wardrum, except she was marching forward in an uncontrollable advance while her mind tried to run, to retreat.

Days or weeks passed, she could not tell.

She saw her fallen horse; her fallen cousins; her lost brothers, her lost folk; children she did not know; mirages of those things she wanted most; memories that no one should know but her; and sometimes at night the woods were the sea, were the ice, were the yawning maw that had swallowed her aunt, that her father had pulled her and Itarillë from, thrown them into Turukáno’s arms (her brother, her erstwhile protector: behind in Gondolin: Why had she left? What had she done?) ; and there was a child, a child —

A child? Of twilight. A child. 

(Moss cupped her cheeks, edged her nose—spider silk across her mouth, an art she could not breathe, and then:

A final sleep so strange.

An unbearably heavy night. )

Her child? 

And then she awoke—like a drowning woman cresting the water, like a too-long-dived pelican bursting forth for air—at the doorstep of a cottage (but grand, as if someone had lived there for centuries) , and she fell to her knees and bowed her head. She beat on the door, prepared to beg, to barter, to give anything at all for a way out of this cursed place…

The door opened with a silent gasp:

“Aredhel.”

She looked up and pushed long hair from her face with scratched and swollen fingers, and she squinted into the face of this man who seemed to know her.

“Do I know you?” she tried to ask, but she could barely make a sound, so great was her thirst and so raw her throat.

“I am Eöl,” the elf said, and he helped her up. “And you are Aredhel, daughter of Fingolfin, Ar-Feiniel of Tiron, and Gondolin.”

She could not speak but he took her into his house, and the door shut heavy behind them.

“I will give you clothing and food, and a place to recover,” he was saying, and she stared at the decorations on the walls, foreign and exotic to her—dark and green. Had she been here? The door was locked with a key behind her. “How long have you been in this place, my forest of Nan Elmoth, Aredhel Fingolfiniel?”

She did not answer him. She did not know. 

He took her to a large stone room attached to the main cottage—slightly below ground, she thought vaguely, from the temperature—and helped her to a bench. Before her was a steaming basin of water in a deep-carven bowl in the rock. Warmed for a bath, as if he had been expecting her.

She blinked and fought through the fog of her mind to look at him better.

What was happening?

But she was tired and she was lost, and as his hands came to her, as his body came close, she let him unwrap her shredded clothes from body and limbs, let him lift her and place her in the basin, let him wash her as she shook.

The scent of moss crushed underfoot…

“Your life will not be so hateful here, Aredhel,” said he.

The sun rose gold in her faraway mind, 

but in the darkness of the wood 

she was taken.

 

_________________________________________________________________________

Eöl was not wrong, precisely. Over the months, Aredhel became used to the place and to the silence that those who lived in the austere and somehow-grand cottage wove about it, like memory. She had found the things Eöl loved and she gave them to him; she had discovered the things that made him smile, and she ran with him under the eaves of the dark forest. He taught her to climb trees as surely as she had once run upon the walls of the City of Seven Names, balanced light as a bird—she and Eöl would watch the stars rise all around them when they settled together in the canopy. 

After a time, she stopped trying to get away, for every time she ventured to the wood edge she could only stand at the border and watch the broomgrass burn in the light until it was replaced, over time—days upon days, upon moons—with muted winter grey. She would return then, each time, as if inexplicably pulled, like wool pulled through and wrapped thin round a spindle, until she was back at the door, into the cottage, back to her small works.

Over time, she stopped thinking of herself as Írissë, as daughter of Fingolfin, as Ar-Feiniel… She became only Aredhel of Gondolin, sister of Turgon-the-Hidden, cousin to the Feanorians, so close yet so far away. She never stopped peering from the treetops toward those places she knew they would be, her surviving kin: the only ones remaining who would know to look for her, though she was beginning to think there was something unnatural here, something that would keep others out just as skillfully as it kept her in.

And yet… Life became bearable—less hateful, indeed—when she accepted she could not leave, and that is when she opened her heart to the Valar: She asked for a child to fill her days and distract her mind; to turn Eöl’s thoughts from her to the wider world of possible progeny; to tempt him, perhaps, to open the borders of this place so that their child might grow as any child ought: under stars and under sun, with love freely given by both kith and kin... 

Aredhel did not know if the Valar cried for her as she had once done for herself—she did not any longer—but, with the new moon, she quickened with child, and she was glad. Even Eöl wept to be a father.

She found herself often, then, smiling alone in the gloaming light.

Sometimes, memories of her desperate and neverending race through these trees when first she came flashed across her mind, but she would grab them fast and lock them tight inside her heart so she could not dwell.

But there was one she could not stop reliving: the sight of that child, fair and dark, slender and fast, eyes sharp as ravens as he ran between the trees like some lesser Valinorean spirit… She had always seen him—flitting out of the corner of her eye—at dawn and at dusk— at twilight —and she had thought he was not real.

And he had not been. Then . (Perhaps.)

But that night the next Autumn when she was laid out upon a well-stuffed pallaise, in the center of  a clearing in the trees (the sky was black with the absent moon, pinpricked with the cold light of small and silver stars) , curled on her side with one leg held open by one of the ladies of the house… As she pushed and rested and cried and bled, the stars blended into glorious streaks as she watched the night sky shift above her…

As—on her back with the hands of near-strangers supporting her, the elf who had brought her here, to this place and this state—nowhere to be found… As—with one final push and another final tear there was a moment of clarity—

Then, she knew.

The sun had begun to purple the sky at the farthest edge of the clearing when a lady placed the child in her arms. As another stuffed rags into her to stop the bleeding, Aredhel looked upon her glorious child, her salvation, and she knew . 

That child of the twilight she had seen, was here in her arms. The only thing, perhaps, that had not been an illusion.

Lómion, she thought. Lómion. 

And then Eöl was there, taking the child gently for himself.

She would not say the name aloud, for already that name was dead.

She watched Eöl’s face carefully.

“What shall we call him?” she finally asked, dry lips almost sticking to her teeth as she tried to speak.

“You may call him whatever you want, but I do not have a father-name for him yet.”

The child had hair like Eöl’s.

“I shall call him child ,” he said. “My child.”

 Aredhel swallowed and took a sip of water offered her by the birthing lady.

“Eölchín, I will call him,” he continued. “For now.”

Eölchín for you, Aredhel thought. Lómion for me.

Aloud she said: “Let me take Eölchín, beloved. We shall see if he will latch.”

He handed him to her and she cradled the boy close to a naked breast.

Above them, the sun crested the treetops, and she and the child were burned an autumn gold. Lómion latched and began to suck.

 Eöl and the others of the house dissolved around her so it was just she and the child, just she and this gift from the gods, and she closed her eyes and let the sun warm her, let herself awaken to the Wide and Wild World about her.

Eöl walked away, then, instructing—over his shoulder—those of his house to do away with the bloody palliase and to see Aredhel cleansed.

The child mewed as he ate, and Aredhel was small and silver in a woods tall and dark, but she swam from the depths of the drowning cold to shoot a watery sun that rose a burning, brilliant— beckoning— gold.