Until the final flicker of life’s embers by Quente

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The end, and what came after

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What pierced through his shock first was the noise. Menegroth had echoed with the screams and cries and clanks of steel before, when the dwarrows of Belegost came and slew his grandfather in his own city.

Dior had striven toward the hope that it would be the last time. He’d studied Melian’s defenses, and with the Silmaril’s aid, he’d shored them up – hoping desperately that it would be enough. But those defenses had frayed, along with Melian’s other workings, despite his strongest efforts. Even with a Silmaril and his mingled blood, he was not Maia enough to save his land.

And now it had come again: the screams of death-agony, the blood of his people mingling with the water in the carven rills, spilled beneath the stone birds twittering on the stone trees. All signs of his own failure to protect them, his realm, his people, his family.

Woven into it all was the Silmaril’s own voice, urgent and throbbing in his head: it needed to get away, far from the darkness that threatened it.

The urge was receding now, thank the stars, as Daeron and Elwing fled with the Silmaril in her little pack, but Dior knew the doom he’d chosen to separate himself from that power.

Now there was nothing but chaos in the deep-carven throne room. Dior pulled his sword out of the red-clad Golodh before him, and wiped the sweat from his eyes. Nimloth still fought, desperate and faithful, before the door that led to their children’s quarters. She was in the green gown she’d worn that afternoon for the midwinter festival, but the blood-smeared sword in her hand was her grandfather’s; last night it had been a dusty decoration on their wall.

In hard strokes, Nimloth slew an elf who sought to move beyond her, but then one with red hair below a dark metal helm strode forward. “Do not force my hand,” he warned her, defending easily against her blows.

“Morgoth has twisted your minds,” Nimloth cried, her voice breathless. “The Silmaril does not want you. Stop!”

Dior knew with a sick certainty that the one combatting her would overmaster her. He could not look away, nor could he reach her, blocked as he was by a ring of dark-clad soldiers fencing him against his grandfather’s throne.

Numbly, Dior saw the bright Golodh steel fall. Then a strange silence descended as all watched the Queen of Doriath stagger to her knees.

“Go,” Nimloth choked to Dior, but he knew that there was no place he wished to go, not now that they were to be parted forever. He watched as she slumped to the floor – at least the slice through her chest was clean, and her end swift. He hoped her rebirth would be just as painless.

Blinking away the sudden shock of tears in his eyes, Dior turned to those who assailed him, elves in the livery of Fëanor’s sons. They faltered, perhaps halted by the darkness in his eyes. Now was not time to spare himself, not when Nimloth was dead.

Dior’s only hope was that his children would survive, and that the jewel would continue onward, out of the grip of those whose oath twisted them to Morgoth’s purpose.

One came near him, hair bright below his helm. This brother was the mighty hunter, Dior remembered – legends told of him riding in Oromë’s retinue before the sun rose. Dior would never have been able to best this one in combat, not with his grandfather’s blood alone, nor even mingled with that of men. Well, no matter. Dior drew upon his grandmother’s legacy to show him the best end, and time went strange.

“I send you to the void,” Dior said, his voice sounding warped in his ears, “A mercy for you. I shall not see rebirth, myself.” He moved forward, watching the Golodh’s slowed movements and looking for a weakness in the armor. Ah, there – through the seam of the armpit and sideways, into the heart. His death would be swift. “And for that, I would curse you, if you were not already cursed – for your kin has sundered me from those I love, til the end of time.”

Dior was alive for long enough to watch the surprise blossom slowly over the face of his foe, as if he never thought he would be overmastered in battle – and then the wave of agony as he recognized that he was dying. But Dior did not see the arrow until it pierced his own flesh, a hard thrust of a point entering his back and blossoming out of his heart. The pain of the wound, and the feeling of his body in uncertain panic around it, was almost secondary to his curiosity.

Now what?

Dior felt strangely detached, as if he had stepped out of his body. He watched himself fall over the body of the Golodh he’d slain. Dior had worn no helm nor armor that day – and he saw his hair fan out to cover them both. They died together in the dark cloak of it.

As Dior felt his life flicker out, the solidity of Thingol’s throne room melted away. Slowly, the scene faded, even as Dior saw the water in its carved rills run red with blood, and the birds on the trunks of trees freeze to never sing again. He felt something then – not anything from his body, for that felt far away now. No, most of all he felt the harsh pain of regret, for the shortness of his span of years, and for all that could have been.

Dior’s eyes closed, and all was dark.

~

And then Dior opened his eyes – figuratively, for he was unsure that he had eyes anymore – and looked around him, immediately perceiving that he should not have been able to do such a thing.

He was standing on one side of a hallway of statues, in a vast building of fair stonework, shoulder to shoulder with his father Beren. On Beren’s other side was Dior’s mother Lúthien, fashioned to such a pure likeness that Dior felt she might glance sideways at him at any moment.

Across the corridor from Dior was a row of statuary that he was familiar with from tales and rumor, and a chance meeting or two: the family of his father’s cousin Baragund, Baragund’s daughter Morwen, and her husband Húrin. Beside them was one that Dior had met in passing at Menegroth, a woman holding a child, her stone face streaked with the smallest of carved tears. Niënor.

But next to her, face frozen in a paroxysm of grief and rage, caught as if he was in movement, was one that Dior knew not. Rumor had reached him, however, and he surmised that the figure must be Túrin.

Time, or whatever was happening in that hall, passed. At first, Dior felt at peace. Here he was in the death-fastness of his forbearers, memorialized. His statuary body held no pain, and seemed to be a vessel that did not do much to anchor his spirit.

The peace of the halls was profound, almost like a heavy blanket lying upon his spirit, whispering to him of eternal things. Starlight and moonlight, it whispered; the first dance of the great powers upon Arda, the very last battle for it, before all would be remade in beauty and endless glory.

All who slept there were caught up in this dream, and for a while, Dior found it was enough, and let himself shut his eyes again.

The visions took up his spirit in the great music, and time passed.

But then, something troubled him – it was a strange longing, as if part of his soul was elsewhere – and Dior opened his eyes again. The weight of suggestion, that he lose himself in the dream, did not seem to hold him as strongly as it had. He was not entirely at peace; he was not entirely whole. And so Dior cautiously unmoored himself from his statue-shape and drifted outwards.

Dior saw that he was a cloud, now, a blue mist shot with stars. Well, no matter, he could move, at least. He let himself wander, and look, and piece together from memory the stories of those he saw. At the very least, it might cure him of his restlessness.

One statue that arrested him was a woman garbed as a warrior, surrounded by a guard of other women. They were dressed in the garments of the earliest men of Arda, in rudimentary leather that bore little of the stamp of the Golodhrim upon their design. Haleth, Dior thought, contemplating her. Haleth and her retinue of shieldmaidens, flanked by men who seemed to gaze upon her fondly: her brother Haldad and her father Haldar. These were all in the row that ended in Túrin and Niënor, and Dior took them therefore to be distant law-cousins of his.

The statues were varied in composition, all in accordance to the subject’s nature. Túrin was crafted from the darkest of stone, and polished so that the white veins that ran through it twisted about his face and clothing like scars or rends – beautiful, he was, Dior thought, and somehow all the more so for his grief.

Haleth was carved from stone that came from a long-petrified tree, as if to reveal that she was the root of her house. The wooden grains still trapped in the stone adorned her like lines of age and stress and work, and gave her a sense of ancientness as she stood at the foot of her line.

Drifting in the softly lit halls, Dior passed by a woman carved so that her body was twisted to look upward and back, out of the high windows to gaze ever upon the stars beyond. Dior paused – stars? Indeed, he could see them faintly glowing in the strange light, as if he observed the lightening of sky just before morning.

For a while, Dior looked from window to window to see if he could identify any of the constellations and thus place himself within the world, but he soon realized that all was a puzzle. It was as though he looked upon the familiar stars from a different angle, from somewhere far beyond the realms he knew.

Putting aside that thought, he returned to the woman who looked upward. She was part of his line, standing near his father’s father’s father… She must be Andreth, sister to Bregor, father of Barahir.

Dior understood her expression, then. She too longed for one who would never be laid to rest in this place of silence and drifting silvery light. And it was then, caught in that moment of contemplation of his ancient aunt, that Dior knew he also would not be content in the Halls of Men.

Nimloth was not here – Nimloth, who held the other part of his soul.

And yet, what could he do? Drifting closer to his own statue, Dior observed it. They’d managed to capture him for what he was, those hidden makers of this hall. It was hammered from a three-part metal alloy. Instead of wood or stone, they’d smithed him out of iron, silver, and mithril. The metals mingled in some places, and formed veins in others, swirls of silver and pale white and dark that surely represented his three natures. He was clad as he was when he died – in his robe from the midwinter festival, standing in defense of Doriath with his sword in his hand.

The memory of that moment was of despair, and Dior wondered why such a moment of bitterness was allowed to mar this hall of contemplation – which led him to suddenly wonder why he had not run into any other souls drifting this way and that, in similar meditation.

Was he the only one, of mingled blood as he was, with part of his soul too tied to Arda to find peace outside of it?

No. Dior knew that there was another. He drifted to the statue of his mother Lúthien, caught as if on a spring day in the height of the power of Melian’s girdle. Her arms were lifted in dance, and she was made from the clearest of pale marble, mirroring the glowing brightness of the nimphredil wrought in mithril, twining about her feet. Dior peeked into her face, hoping to see some sort of expression in her eyes.

For many long moments it seemed as if his wait was in vain, but he had tremendous patience in that space beyond the world. He let himself go still in front of his mother, waiting.

Finally, as if she tired of pretending she was resting like the statues about them, he saw the eyes of her statue go bright, and then the spirit of her – a velvet thing, like the shadows at dusk – formed around her statue, and she came to him.

“My son, why do you not sleep?” Lúthien asked, but let him see her joy as brilliant flashes within her unshaped form. “And why do I not sleep, as I promised Mandos I would?”

“Are we two the only ones that are awake here?” Dior asked, touching her gently with his own mantle of energy. “Surely it is due to our mingled blood.”

Luthien was silent for a moment, and then said, in a frustrated tone, “You must have the right of it. Long have I wondered if I alone would be awake unto the ending of Arda. But here you are, and if you are, then likely the rest of our lineage, if they have Beren’s blood as well as my mother’s.”

“Lineage? So my children survived?” Dior could not keep the pain from his voice, and Lúthien let her gentle light lap over him.

“Of that, I know not, dearest son.” Lúthien said. “I only heard rumor of Arda once, when the sculptors came. And when I saw who they were creating, my son, I grieved!”

Dior imagined her here for an endless span of time, drifting and lonely, with only the still faces of Beren and his forebears as her companions, until the craftworkers entered the hall – only to confirm that her son was dead. “Would they speak to you?”

“I did not speak to them – I wondered if they would remove me from Beren for stirring from my rest before my time, and I did not wish to be parted.”

“But Emil,” Dior said slowly, but this explained his mother’s reticence to greet him. “Surely they must find elsewhere for you to be, for us to be, if we are not at peace in the Halls of Men.”

Dior looked up at the face of his father, captured in the strength of his years. The sculptors had performed a mighty work for Beren – the pale marble that housed his form was inlaid with mithril, down to the cloth that bound his truncated hand. Even in death, Beren’s form reflected his deeds, and Dior wondered if his own statue faithfully recreated the wounds given him by the soldiers of Fëanor. He drifted closer to his father and tried to sense his spirit, but felt nothing.

“I greatly desire to be at peace beside him. He is quite asleep here,” Lúthien said, and her tone had a longing in it that twisted Dior’s heart. He remained silent, thinking of Nimloth – feeling again the anguish of being sundered from her forever, beyond the ending of the earth. The ties of marriage within him were truncated, and he ached.

“Ah, my Dior,” Lúthien said, perceiving why he did not speak. For a long moment they leaned their forms against one another. After a time, Dior opened his mind to her, and shared memories to ease the pain in his heart.

“Nimloth died bravely,” Lúthien said, watching the moments that he showed her. “Mandos will not let her linger long. She will surely rise again to live and dance under the stars of Arda.”

“She never liked dancing quite so much as you did, Emil,” Dior said, smiling at the memory. They’d done many things beneath the stars of Arda – but Nimloth’s desires turned more to long rambles beneath the trees, or hunting orcs, or lying within the circle of Dior’s arms. The memories made him ache again, and for a long while he let himself be lost in them.

~

A span of time flowed by swiftly in the softly lit halls. Lúthien remained beside Dior as he mourned and remembered, her own thoughts turning to her time in Arda. Memories flowed between them for a while, and Dior felt glad that he had this time to spend with his mother. He’d thought her lost forever when she died, along with his father. This time by her side was precious, and their different perspectives on the Silmaril was – strange, and troubling.

Lúthien examined his memories of the Silmaril, comparing them to hers. “It had strong opinions, did it not, about who could wield it, and how,” she said wryly. “Even in my waning days, the stone compelled me to urge Tol Galen to put forth fruit and prosper.”

“It is in the hands of my children now,” Dior said bleakly, “And I know that trouble will surely come of it.”

“The Silmaril has always preyed upon the minds of our family, from the very moment my father learned of it,” Lúthien said. She shared with him then her memories of the Silmaril, the threads that led to her father’s challenge to Beren — and then how it caught up Finrod Felagund and the Sons of Fëanor in its snare.

“I slew that one,” Dior said, feeling rage like a lightning storm as he watched the sons of Fëanor and their deeds against his mother. “I cannot bring myself to feel sorrow for it.”

“Perhaps. And perhaps they did no more than my father sought to do, when he imprisoned me.”

Dior thought on her words, recasting his grandfather Thingol as one of the villains in her tale. But he did not proceed far down this path in his thoughts, for there was a sudden commotion in a distant part of their hall.

Figures – elf-like, or maybe man-like – flickered into being at the edge of one long twilight-filled corridor, entering the hall carrying various materials.

One pulled a cart with a man-sized block of granite, and alongside it were workers who took the forms of many of the houses of men and elves, carrying chisels and whetstones and soft cloths. They came to Dior’s side, and his heart quailed – would he see his sons, or his daughter, being wrought slowly out of granite until their death was confirmed?

Beside him, Lúthien shared a wordless and gentle comfort: Men died; that was the nature of his father’s race decreed by Eru Iluvatar, their deaths a blessing that brought them closer to Him. Still, it could not have been so very long since Dior had died himself.

But instead of a form in the likeness of any of his children, the sculptors raised a massive and forbidding shape. The face held some trace of Dior’s likeness, but not as much as his own sons would have. The figure dwarfed Dior in size, and the face, when it was revealed, held nobility and age. This king, at least, had lived full long in Arda before his demise.

”This is not Elúrin, nor Eluréd,” Dior said quietly to Lúthien. “I see little of us in him.”

The placement of the statue was curious. It did not stand directly by Dior’s side, but instead in the middle of a joining of three hallways, clearly signifying a joining of three lineages of men. The statue’s right palm was held outward as if in warding or warning, and in the left was a mighty sword.

And when at last the craftsfolk retreated, Dior was struck by something. “Emil, he has our hair.” Sculpted out of granite as the figure was, they’d carved his hair loose to flow down his back, and carefully shaped the lines of it with a dark portion of the rock. The length and grace of it was like Lúthien’s, and Dior’s.

But the sculpture’s eyes were simply stone, and Dior knew with a strange intuition that there was no restless spirit trapped within.

“If he is of our blood, why does he not wake and speak with us?” Dior asked.

“I know not,” Lúthien said, staring at him. “But however he came here, he did so at peace, and of his own will. That I sense.”

Dior was struck by urgency. “Emil, if we two are the only ones – if only we two awaken here – then we must go forth. Before they go, let us follow the sculptors.”

Lúthien hesitated, and Dior could sense that she was loath to move from Beren’s side, but Dior turned. His answer did not lie in the Halls of Men, and he knew that they must make haste.

Drifting behind the creators, Dior found that the halls became strange, as if the workers had made them out of thought that unraveled the further they went toward the edges of the light. When the makers reached the edge, the form they took changed – they became shapeless energy like Dior and Lúthien. And then they drifted toward something that looked very like a tunnel out of the light, a darkness that took them in, one by one.

“Emil, come with me,” Dior called, “We must depart. I would not leave you here alone until the end of all things.”

Lúthien held back. “I vowed to remain with him, and I would not break that vow or be parted.”

“The mortality in your nature remains with him still,” Dior said. “Yet for the part of you that is still alive, we must find Arda again, or suffer.”

“Perhaps,” Lúthien said at last. “Perhaps I am not meant to linger here, not this part of me. But will Mandos allow me to return, should I leave? Still…” For a moment longer she hesitated, staring up at Beren. But then she looked down, and turned, and they both moved toward the tunnel. “My husband is dead and will remain so; if I am awake, I would spend this time with my son, at least, before I return to him.”

“Can you hide from Mandos like you hid from grandmother, when you fled Menegroth?” Dior asked.

“I will try.” When they came close to the dark tunnel, Lúthien spoke softly to him. “Now, I believe we must sing. Hearken to me, Dior – learn the song that put Morgoth to sleep.”

Lúthien began to hum it, and the shapes drifting toward the tunnel seemed to pause, and slow, and still. Dior joined his mother in a harmony, a low counterpoint to her lullaby, and they passed within the mouth of the dark tunnel, and beyond.

“We pass as a shadow at the edge of dawn,” Lúthien sang, and Dior with her. “We are a breeze in the darkness, a scent of flowers at dusk, the gloam of a deep wood in the afternoon.”

And somehow, as they moved through the tunnel, their formless shapes coalesced into a physical form. Something of himself was left behind, Dior felt – and wondered what he would be like, with his mortality left carven in the Halls of Men.

What would he be like, without his mortality?