Quietus by UnnamedElement

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Epilogue

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It was a beautiful city, and it was glorious and strange.  There was a woman there who shone brighter than his mother, so that she was just a reflection of this lady’s greater beauty, and yet… To see his mother and her brother—his uncle !—come together for the first time in a century? It nearly shattered his mind, and while once he might have wept, he instead wrung his hands:

For a moment, he understood love.

Turukáno, she had cried.

Írissë! he had called, and then, his mother:

This is Lómion! Brother, look—

He had glowed, then, from the inside out.

This is my Lómion, your sister-son, my morning star.

But then came the night, and his life—tiny once and meaningless, but expanded, now, and sprawling—collapsed around him.

And he could not have predicted it.

And he did not know.

He was cast into eternal twilight when she slipped through his fingers; and he felt nothing (nothing at all, except for the sensation of air as he dove into the depths of some secret crevice, as he fashioned his own tomb of cold and dark in this foreign land, far away from kith and kin)—  

He felt nothing at all as he watched him go.

And he stood silent and listened, and when his father cursed him he spoke not a word in return but—in his mind—he cursed him worse: to the eternal darkness, past the edges of the world and beyond.

The sun set.

His world crumbled.

His heart was mists of grey.

“Lómion,” she had said, as she brought his hand to her lips. “How lucky I have been to have you.”

The sun set every day, such that sometimes he could not tell whether he waked or dreamed.

Lómion.

He dug deep into the earth, and—for the rest of his life—there was a hunger and a longing that could not be sated. 

He was free of command and yet...

For the rest of his life, he groped in the dark, and grieved.

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He opened his hand without looking away from the child, and the gems fell like bodies into heavy water—one, two, three—in their pillowed clatter onto the carpeted stone.

His chest was flooded with a cold that took his breath away, a cold of deepest seas and tallest mountains and ice and ice and ice and—

The longest crossing, a chorus of birds building like a mountain into a cacophony of sound and then:

Fire, tall as towers, tall as the darkness, deep as—

His hand burned and blistered and throbbed, and the child spat his blood—hateful blood, cursed—onto the ground. 

He was caught and flung, then— flying, suspended:

(“Put out your arms as if you could fly.”)

One.

The sun rose gold in his faraway mind —

Two.

His father’s eyes—dark as night, sharp as obsidian—burning away the encircling night —

Three.

His chest burned with shame as he —

 

Fin.