Matters of Choice by kimikocha

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Matters of Choice

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There are many who wander in the lands of Middle-Earth. Some of them are lost, sojourners searching without knowing what they seek; some of them are only a little lost, knowing what they search for but not knowing how to find it. A few of them are very fortunate, not being lost at all. Many more are those who search in vain: not understanding the nature of the mirage on the horizon, they lose themselves in its pursuit.

At one time or another, every one of those wanderers will encounter Death. Indeed, most of them will meet her more than once, though most of them will also forget. Those who remember her will know that she is kind, and often rather silly. These days, she has a fondness for blackberries.

One need not be dying to gain an audience with Death, though as her travels are not marked in the manner of the living, it is often difficult for the living to find her. Indeed, a wanderer can search for a thousand years or more and hear only whispers of her passing. Or — perhaps if he has wandered long enough — he might stumble upon her by sheer coincidence one day. Sitting on a precipice above the west gate of Moria with her bare feet dangling in the air, juice running down her chin as she bites into a piece of fruit. Kaki is what they call it in the land where this Death came from. The orange fruit has no stone, and if the wanderer knows his plants well enough, he might recognize it as a very large berry.

At her side, the cat whose eyes are lit by flame — the cat who gained the power of Sight — lays his ears flat. He hates Death’s table manners, or so said the apple trees in the west, but he doesn’t hate her.

—Or does he? When the wanderer looks into his blazing eyes, it might be hard for him to say.

*

“Hello, Makalaurë!” rings out the high, bright voice of the child seated on the cliff. The girl-child, who does indeed look to be no older than eight or nine years, scoots a little to the side and looks back, an enormous happy grin spreading over her face. “You’re more fat now! Good. Would you like a kaki?”

Maglor was skeletally thin the last time he met Death. He’s doing much better now. With a wary eye on the cat, he joins her at the edge of the cliff. “No, thank you. You should save it for someone else who needs it more.”

“That’s what you said the last time you talked to me,” Death says reprovingly, and plops another persimmon directly in his lap with a tiny hand covered in fruit juice. “There. You can give that to someone else if you want, but I don’t think you should do that just because you don’t think you should have it.”

“…Were you always this bossy?” Maglor inquires with a sigh, tucking the now rather sticky fruit away into his sleeve.

Grinning at him, the little girl swings her heels against the cliff and laughs in delight. “Nope!”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t,” the child retorts, grinning wider. “But I’m glad you’re more happy now. And you found Uncle Hal!”

“Uncle Hal?” Reflexively, Maglor glances back down the path where Halbarad waits — still just out of sight. It shouldn’t surprise him, but… “You know him?”

“Yes,” Death says sagely, and gives him a sympathetic pat on the hand. “I really do know everyone. I know people think that’s strange.”

“No, I—” Somehow, this is the hardest thing to wrap his mind around. “You called him Uncle?”

“What else would I call him?” The little girl frowns up at him, as if deep in thought. Then she claps her hands over her mouth as something seems to occur to her. “Oh! Are you confused because he’s not my uncle? You’ll have to ask him about that, I’m afraid. That’s his story to tell, not mine. It happened long before you met him.”

Which reminds Maglor of the circumstances under which they’d met. He clears his throat. “I wanted to thank you.”

“…Thank me?” Curiously, Death tilts her head. “For what?”

*

Less than three days have passed in the village of Bree since the raid on the inn and the departure of the Shire-hobbits, who left by the main road in the company of the ranger called Strider. Tongues wag as the Bree-folk go about their business — bad business at the inn last night, they say to start. By sundown, half the town seems to know the tale as if they’d seen it for themselves.

Bad business, bad business. The folk of Bree are unused to outsiders, though more and more of them have been coming up from the south by way of the Greenway of late. After the assault from the Black Riders and the destruction at the Prancing Pony, more than a few have had enough of unfamiliar people turning up in their little land.

“I say we shut the gates and send ‘em all back down the road where they came from. Young, old, doesn’t matter. Bad times are coming, and we’ve got to look after our own,” old Tom Goatleaf from down by the south gate is telling Milo, the south-gatekeeper, as the newest of these outsiders comes padding up the Greenway.

“They bring nothing but trouble, the whole lot of ‘em,” old Goatleaf says darkly, “Mark my words.”

“Haven’t seen anything good come of this lot since they started turning up in these parts,” Milo agrees. Though it wasn’t his gate that the Black Riders took on their way into Bree, the night of the raid he’d encountered them in darkness. Holding up his lantern as he’d gone to investigate, without warning his candle had stuttered and died — then something seized him, a strange and ancient terror with fingers icy-cold as death. By some miracle that will be talked about for years to come, he’d managed to disarm it. But he’d pricked the flesh of his fingers as he did so, and some potent horror of poison on the blade made his blood run cold and black.

Being a practical sort with a young wife and family to look after, Milo told the barber to remove the hand before he lost the arm, or worse, his life. The sickness disappeared almost as swiftly as it came, but the thoughts in the dark have not. A hospitable sort in good times, just a month or two ago Milo would’ve paid no attention to old Goatleaf’s ramblings — but with all the latest happenings, he’s starting to see a bit of wisdom in them.

The old man’s bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows draw together as he shakes his head. “You’d know it better’n any of us now, lad. A terrible bad business that was, terrible shame. If you find yourself needing work, you just let my boy down at the mill know, and he’ll set you to rights.”

“Thank you kindly,” says Milo, and means it. No one’s said anything to him about his job as yet, but it doesn’t take a man of letters to see the problem with a one-handed guardsman in times as dark as this. Not to mention a night watchman who, Milo thinks privately, might never stop fearing the dark.

*

“From what the gatekeeper told me,” Maglor says very dryly, “You turned up out of the blue and shamed the townsfolk into rescuing me from the ditch where I’d collapsed and keeping me safe until Hal turned up to take me off their hands.”

Suddenly Death’s eyes grow sad. She looks away, down at her sticky hands. “I’m sorry. I didn’t really mean to make them upset.”

“You saved my life.”

“No,” says Death, looking up at him with a strange, fierce light in her eyes, “That is not true. You’re only saying that because you like me more than them, because you think I’m better than they are, somehow. But you’re wrong. I didn’t save your life. They did. They were scared, but they chose to be brave. They saved your life. They did something good.”

She seems much older now, ancient even by Maglor’s reckoning, though he’s nearly certain that even accounting for all the lives she’s lived she’s younger than him still.

“All I did,” Death tells him, her voice growing softer, “Was give them the choice.”

It feels vaguely inappropriate to give Death herself a hug, but — Maglor gives her a squeeze around the shoulders anyway. Call it fatherly instinct. “Then I’m glad they chose as they did.”

“Me too,” says the little girl, closing her eyes and turning her face up towards the sky. A peaceful little smile tugs at the corners of her mouth. “You should go now. There are many choices to be made today. Go down the mountain with your love, and don’t look back.”

The cat, whose presence Maglor had almost forgotten about, makes a low rumbling noise as Maglor rises to leave. He looks. Eyes of flame stare over the edge of the precipice, unblinking.

“Go, silly,” Death says firmly, and makes a shooing motion with one small hand. Maglor feels the weight of another persimmon settle into his sleeve with the one from earlier. With a merry laugh, the little girl looks back at him. “We will meet again.”