The Strands that Bind by AdmirableMonster

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Through the Darkling Mirror

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The mushrooms were growing well.  She had been keeping a very careful eye on them.  One or two shelves had even appeared at the pond, though the summer was turning slowly towards autumn now.  The days were growing shorter and colder, and the bushes were putting out clumps of pretty berries.  The wind was chilly, Ma had started making her famous cider, and the fire in the kitchen was stoked more days than not.  Chalcedony often had to use her kerosene lamp to keep the basement heated, and as it had a tendency to give her headaches, the hours she could keep were shortening.  This gave her the queer, haunting feeling that winter would be the end of everything.

For some reason, Celebrimbor and Annamir were still staying somewhere in the Shire—where, Chalcedony wasn’t certain.  She thought they might sleep outside, since she couldn’t think of anywhere else that would be large enough for them. It was getting colder, though, so they would have to move on soon, surely.

If she could only find something out about Nimruzimir, perhaps she could hold onto the happiness she had found over the summer.  She might not be able to bury herself in growing things in the cellar for some months, but she would be able to bury herself in the library, reading about the place he had come from.  If only she knew enough about where that was.

Today, she had holed herself up in the library again.  The weather was particularly unfortunate: wind lashed heavy cold rain against the  shutters, eaves, and windows, and the Sun hid its face entire.  She couldn’t focus, and she didn’t even really know where to begin, because somehow—whether it was because of the way that Nimruzimir thought about things or because she didn’t understand him well enough or because there was simply so much time and space in the way between them, muddling things—she still had no real clues as to where or when he must be living.

She knew he had come from an island, somewhere.  She knew that he had lived, once, in a great empire, and had left for some reason—she got the sense that perhaps a terrible disaster had befallen it, but somehow he and Lilóteo had escaped.  But those seemed to be the only things that she knew.  And she had no idea how to begin to search with them, so she wandered restlessly up and down Da’s library while the rain pounded against the glass, pulling out a book here and there and looking at it desultorily.  

Finally, she flung herself into the particularly squashy armchair in front of the window, pulled the necklace out from beneath her shirt and started twisting it lightly between her fingers, staring restlessly out at the dark day, which was only growing darker.  A crack-boom of sudden thunder made her jump, but it made no difference to the rain, which only lashed down harder than ever.  Drops of rain frothed as they spattered and ran down the window, and because of the darkness outside and the light inside, Chalcedony could see her own brown eyes reflected faint and pallid in the glass. 

Beyond that, all she can see is darkness.

Nimruzimir raised his torch; the light seemed pitifully faint against the heaviness of the darkness. There was a little sunlight, filtering down from somewhere above, but the paucity of openings and the distance and materials through which the light had to travel left it greyish, faint, and dim.

“What is all this?” Lilóteo asked in a hushed voice, and Nimruzimir startled.  He had almost forgot that his lover had accompanied him here.

“It is...the first layer, I suppose.”  It had been a long time since he had been here.  “Long ago, there was another city, and Lond Daer was constructed on its bones.  I have not gone so far down—I was quite young when I found this place—but I believe there is at least one more again beneath this.  It is even darker there.”

“Gods below,” Lilóteo breathed, taking a step forward.  “I knew that Númenor itself was old, but I always thought of the hinterland cities as newer.  Foolish of me, I suppose.

Nimruzimir chuckled dryly.  “Very foolish,” he agreed.  “You of all people ought to know that many folk lived within Arda before Númenor was even a whisper in the mind of Tar-Minyatur.”

“Yes,” Lilóteo agreed, a sharp edge running through his voice.  “Yes, but I of all people convinced myself not to think of it.”

Turning to him, Nimruzimir looked him up and down.  He had the sense that he had trodden upon a sore point, and that the appropriate measures to take were those of comfort.  Hesitantly, he laid a hand on Lilóteo’s forearm.  He did not know what to say.  That he understood the impulse to blend in, to hide one’s origins beneath a different face, a different skin?  But he was not of the Drúedain, as Lilóteo was, and he had barely known his mother’s people.  

He cleared his throat and instead said, “I played down here as a child.  I thought it would seem smaller now that I am grown, but it does not.  If anything, it feels bigger.”

“I’m surprised your parents said nothing about such a thing.”

“Well.  I do not th-think they knew, in r-retrospect.”  He was quite sure that seeking physical comfort was appropriate, and he shifted closer to Lilóteo’s side, curling against his shoulder.  Lilóteo’s arm tightened around him, and he kissed Nimruzimir’s cheek briefly, his beard scratching across it.

“What are we looking for this time?”

“I do not know, exactly.” He squeezed Lilóteo’s hand, then moved further into the darkness.  “I wanted to know if it would be the s-s-same.  I wanted to—”  He shrugged, groping for words and finding none.  Instead, he moved forward, into the dim grey streets.  His footsteps sounded loud and hollow.

He remembered, almost as if it had been a dream, the gentle slope of the cobbled street, and the strange ruinous foundations of buildings from long ago.  He remembered the great imposing building at the end of the street, with its blank black windows, like the eyes of a dead beast staring at nothing.  

As a child, with little experience other than his mother’s small bone altars, he had not realized that it was likely a house of worship, and the thought sent a shiver down his spine.  (Somewhere, he hears the whispering of the White Lady, the susurration of her voice as it croons in a language he does not understand.  Her attention is not on him.)

Nimruzimir stopped and shuddered, hand groping in the pocket of his heavy coat for the flask of tonic.  He had it unstoppered and nearly at his lips when a hand caught his wrist.

“Hey, hey,” Lilóteo said.  “You had your dose already.”

“I thought I heard s-s-s-something, I n-n-need it.”

“You do not,” Lilóteo replied sharply.  “No, Nimruzimir, I’m not going to order you around about most things, but this is your health, and I’m your physician.”

“The r-royal physician of a d-dead kingdom?” Nimruzimir snarled, grasping for the tonic.  The sound of his voice rose and echoed, dom, dom, dom—before it had died away, he could already feel shame swelling beneath his breast.

Lilóteo did not flinch, though the barb had been calculated to hurt.  After a moment, he rolled his shoulder—the one whose muscles had healed a little too short after the torment he had suffered at Tar-Mairon’s hands—and glared.  “And also your fucking physician,” he growled, the liquid notes of his childhood accent—beautiful but foreign to Nimruzimir’s ears as always—bleeding into his tone.  “And you risk doing yourself a great harm if you take more of this than you need.  You know that.  You’re no fool.”

Nimruzimir ground his teeth, not quite letting go.  “Y-You d-don’t understand, you don’t know what it’s l-l-l-like to hear even her whispers.”  He swallowed thickly.  “I w-would rather be insensate.  I would rather be—”

“Don’t,” Lilóteo cut him off.  “Don’t say that, Nimruzimir, don’t fucking say that.”

A terrible shudder wracked Nimruzimir from head to toe.  He let Lilóteo tug the bottle out of his hands, close it up, and slip it back into his coat pocket—a staggering gesture of trust, after what had just transpired.  Then, to his surprise, Lilóteo pulled him into a sudden rough embrace,  one hand on his waist, the other cradling his head.

He almost pulled away, thinking Lilóteo was trying to comfort him and doing a poor job of it.  Then he felt the tremor running through the hand on his head, and he remembered all that Lilóteo had lost as well.  He took a deep breath, then turned up his mouth and kissed Lilóteo, biting hard at his lower lip.  Lilóteo swore loudly into his mouth, big fingers digging into the bones of his spine.  The heat of him and the taste of blood did what nothing else would have, and Nimruzimir heard the voice of the Lady trail off into nothing more than the sound of a sorrowful wind whistling somewhere overhead.

“I am sorry,” he said stiffly, pulling back after a moment.  “I will not say that again.”

Those dark brows drew sharply together, but Lilóteo nodded.  “Do you want to leave and come back another day?” he asked.

Something tugged in Nimruzimir’s chest.  “No,” he said.  “I will go in there and prove to myself that it is empty, and then we will go.”

He feared, a little, that Lilóteo might argue, but he did not.  He only nodded tightly and said, “Let’s go, then.”

Nimruzimir approached without pausing, refusing to flinch.  He gritted his teeth as they passed up the wide flat stone steps and came to a pair of dark wooden double doors, inlaid with some sort of milky white crystal.  He had heard of such things, reading in ancient tomes, and he wondered if perhaps they would take on a light of their own beneath the Moon, but this was not the time to try and find that out.

The doors were stuck.  Nimruzimir tugged futilely at them, barely getting them to move at all.

“I’ve got it,” Lilóteo told him, putting a hand over his and straining.  They groaned, ancient hinges protesting at the forcible motion, but Lilóteo set his heels into the ground and pulled again.  The right-hand door made a screeching noise and stuttered forward perhaps a foot and a half, which was not very much, but would certainly be sufficient for entry.

“That was quite impressive,” Nimruzimir said, leaning forward to peek around it.

“Thank you,” said Lilóteo, and then he began to cough, dry and rasping.  Nimruzimir remembered in an instant of the old weakness of the lungs he sometimes alluded to, noticed the smell of musty damp in the air, and immediately panicked.  What did one do under this circumstance?  He was no physician.  He slapped Lilóteo heavily on the back several times, until his lover shoved at him and shook his head, then leaned sideways against the stone and glared, his breathing slowly settling.

“There’s no need to attack my poor back, man,” he grumbled.  “What has it ever done to you?”

“I was, I was trying—your lungs.  Do you need to go back before we go in?”

Shrug.  “I’ll keep.  I’ve had far worse attacks.  I just overdid it a little with the door.”

“And right after being so concerned for my health,” Nimruzimir said primly.

He got a gruff chuckle for that.  “Physician, heal thyself,” Lilóteo said wryly.  “All right, all right, I’m sorry.  Come on, the sooner we go in, the sooner we can go out again.”

The ceiling—such of it as remained after the centuries had taken their toll—was hundreds of feet above their head.  Nimruzimir had never really thought before about how far down they must have coming, wending their way down the great spiral of cellar stairs.  Fluted columns rose up to it like the ribs of a carcass, and he shivered.  A crumpled swathe of black cloth lay down nearly the length of the aisle; when Nimruzimir bent and reached out to the very edge of it, it dissolved into dust as his fingers touched it.  Fear prickled along the back of his neck again, but he forced himself to ignore it.

Smashed colored glass lay across dark wooden benches.  It was not so different from what he knew of the Black Temple, though there was no trace here of the violence in which that place had been steeped.  He felt some kind of pressure building against his ear drums as he paced along the aisle, trying to avoid touching the ancient cloth.

At the end of the aisle was a stone altar, waist-height for Nimruzimir and a little below waist-height for Lilóteo.  Shreds of cloth and a few yellow-green tassels lay around its base, and a heavy crack had riven it in two about a third of the way from one end.  Just to the side of the crack, something glittered in the light of Nimruzimir’s torch.

It was a mirror, he realized, stooping closer to inspect it, a silver hand mirror with a lily wrought around its base.  As he looked into it, he caught sight of a flash of movement and froze.

Behind the darkened glass, peering out from behind a series of brown smudges, a pair of brown eyes caught his, and a small round mouth formed a startled O shape.  The torch fell from Nimruzimir’s hand and rolled across the floor.

“Who—” he said hoarsely, ignoring Lilóteo’s startled oath. Darkness crawls up the side of the vision, and the flatness of the mirror is the curve of a brown bead, the yellow light of the torch the bright golden setting holding it in place.

Chalcedony yelped and dropped the necklace, sitting back in her chair, her heart pounding.  Had he seen her?  He couldn’t have seen her.  No, she told herself, he couldn’t possibly have seen her.  He must have seen something else.

“Lond Daer,” she whispered, her mouth forming the queer syllables in a way she seemed to know was inexpert.  “Númenor.”

Her mind was racing; her hands trembling.  She had heard both names, she thought, though with her thoughts suddenly galloping about like this, she was not sure where.  Surely she had seen the word Númenor inscribed on one of the books, and as for Lond Daer—wait!  She might start with Da’s atlas.  As a child, she had loved the atlas, had loved curling up in her father’s lap while his fingers traced path after path and his laughing voice told her story after story of the War of the Ring.  And she knew where the atlas was.  It had a place of honor on the bottom shelf nearest the door.

She managed not to trip over her trousers in her eagerness, hands still caught and twisting in the necklace, and soon had fetched the tome and brought it back, settling down in the chair and smoothing it out across her knees.  Then she began to read.

It took her longer than it should have, really, because it was exactly where it made sense for it to have been—up the North-South road and down the Greyflood, the reverse of the journey Da had described for the necklace.  It made sense, but somehow this was obscurely disappointing, because it didn’t really tell her anything.  For all she knew, she might have remembered that was where Lond Daer was, from poring over the atlas herself.  It wasn’t, she told herself hastily, that she didn’t believe in the things she was seeing, it was only—

It was only that the rain was so heavy, and the mushrooms grew so slowly, and perhaps none of it would make a difference.  It was only that she felt so queerly trapped within her own skin.  It was only, she told herself—firmly—that she was growing up, and it was difficult, but it would be easier when she got there.  Hadn’t her uncle Sam made that clear?

So Lond Daer wasn’t much of a find.  What about Númenor?  She put the atlas away carefully.  The name of Númenor certainly sounded familiar.  This took a little more hunting, but she found after a little while The Tale of Númenor, which was a children’s book she had not seen in some years.  As soon as she opened it, she remembered what it was about—Númenor was the island of the Big Folk that had sunk beneath the ocean.  After a moment of panic, she ran back through the memories and found that Lilóteo and Nimruzimir had fled from the island, so they had not sunk into the ocean.  That did give her a clue—she would just have to start looking for stories or histories about what happened after the end of Númenor.

At first, she tried to be organized.  She made a pile of books she thought might be useful on the right side of the armchair and books that needed to be put away again on the left.  The left grew discouragingly faster than the right; most of the books she could find about Númenor seemed to end when the island sank.  After the second time the left-hand pile fell over when there were only two books in the right-hand one, she stopped trying to be so organized and just started searching for anything.

Those two books turned out to be the only ones that she could find that said anything about Númenor after its fall at all, though, and they seemed to mostly replicate the same information.  One of them was a thick history printed on thin, yellowing paper, with a note inside the front cover proclaiming it to have been a present some years ago from Belladonna to “her dear Mirabella, because I know you have a head for such things.”  

This particular one was quite difficult to read, not just because it was thick and more dryly written even than the sorts of things she had to study at her lessons, but also because Mirabella appeared to have scribbled all sorts of little notes across all the pages, and they were clearly not the sort of note that had been intended to be comprehensible to another reader after the fact.

After trying for too long to make her way through the section on “post-Númenorean colonial diaspora”—which she really wished she could understand better, because it sounded quite interesting, and also as if it might have some information she was looking for—she found that the second book seemed to be Mirabella’s attempt to rewrite the first book in a slightly more storybook fashion.

This did help, and she got on rather better with this than the first—it also helped much more than the scribbly little notes with understanding what the first was talking about—but she soon found that the only names that really seemed to appear were Elendil, Aquandil, Isildur, and Glorfindel.  Everyone else seemed to be discussed in rather broader sorts of terms.

So that was it.  Nothing else.  She’d been through all the information she had, and the Buckland library was one of the best in the Shire.  It was possible that there was more information somewhere, perhaps down in the vast libraries of Gondor, where Elanor might go soon enough, for she was to be a lady-in-waiting to Queen Arwen herself.  

But Chalcedony would never go there—Boromir could not go there.  Boromir’s place was here.  And suddenly, whether it was the blackness of the storm outside or the heavy stillness of the air within or the things that Sam had said the other day or the feeling that had been building, for days now, that she was trapped within her own skin and that she was rapidly approaching the end of everything—suddenly, she was weeping, throwing her mother’s apron up in front of her face and howling with some feeling that wasn’t quite fear and wasn’t quite anger, either.

She scrabbled at the necklace, tightening her grip, trying to find an anchor somewhere that she could hold on to—and she must have tugged too hard, because the tension against her neck was there one moment and gone the next, as the necklace snapped, and the beads catapulted out of her hands, landing on the floor in a muddle of sudden rattling noises.

“Oh no,” whispered Chalcedony.  “Oh, no, no, no.”

She was down on her hands and knees before she could think, trying to gather up the beads, but they had rolled every which way, scattered as soon as they hit the ground.  It wasn’t an omen, she tried to tell herself, it didn’t mean anything, but she was breathing hard and her vision was blurring—drops of moisture hit the ground near the backs of her hands.

She felt sick.  She felt trapped.  She had to get away somewhere—anywhere—she found her feet moving before her thoughts had even quite caught up.  She wasn’t running, exactly, but she was moving quickly, even with the apron still up and half-covering her face.

Still sobbing, she made it to the cellar and slammed the door behind her, moving down the stairs in darkness.  She was surefooted and knew the steps as well as she knew her times table, but she was shivering when she reached the bottom; it was too close to winter to be anything like comfortable down here.

She stumbled over, hand along the wall, to light the little kerosene heater that was set against the far wall.  The flame sputtered a little, then caught, glowing a comfortable orange-red.  Sniffing and shivering, Chalcedony curled up next to it, then turned it up, trying to heat herself as quickly as she could.  She would need to watch it, of course…you weren’t supposed to let it burn too high for too long…but she was so very tired from all the crying.

She could just shut her eyes for an instant—just an—