The Spirit of the Mountain by Elrond's Library

When we came down to Eä, we knew our purpose. My place was in the land, my siblings to the water, and the air, and the firmament between the stars. I drifted through stone and grass until the Music compelled me to stop, to breathe. 

I sung to the heat, building it to higher and higher tempos, until it finally crescendoed into the night air in a blaze of molten rock and ash and poison gas. I sang to the stars again as it cooled, and they sang back, urging me on. 

I grew tall, and strong, and I waited. 

The First Enemy came, and walked my mountain. He sought my thoughts on the Lamps the Valar had built. I shrugged as I escorted him away from my mountain, my heat. Let them shine; I cared little enough. I wanted to sing. 

They fell, and the world was changed. 

The land to the north and to the east shuddered. I rose higher, and higher, and it was not my doing. It brought me closer to the stars, to be sure, but it was an unearned growth. Unnatural. My grasp on the heat under the earth was lessened, and I poured more and more of my song into the growth of my mountain, but it barely mattered. It became difficult to climb, nigh impossible to find the release of ash and smoke. 

So I waited. The land would change. I was patient. 

Oromë slept at the precipice, and whispered to me as we lay together of the Children he was looking for. He asked me if I knew ought, and I knew naught that could help him. Only the screams that echoed from Utumno in the far north. He sighed, and kissed me, and told me that the Powers in the West would raze Utumno as soon as the Children were found and kept safe. I wished him luck, for I wanted nothing of this war. 

It wasn’t long before the North shook with their efforts. The First Enemy was chained, the winds whispered, and captured, and would not be set free for a long while yet. 

And so I sang, and grew, and waited. 

The First Children skirted the base of my mountain and slept among my hills, but they did not stay for long. I invited the spirits of the forest to my hills, hoping to shelter them, but it was in vain. They did not stay. I watched them leave, traveling west in the darkness under the stars, and I mourned. I understood, then, why Oromë had wanted them to be found. Ilúvatar had blessed us with them, and I wanted to keep them safe. 

I sang my last growth in the time between the Chaining and the Return. I was tall enough now, to sing easily to the stars, and to receive the snows in the winters. I was content to keep the fumes and the heat away. I still wanted to invite the Children to my mountain. 

In time, I hoped, they would come. Stone is patient. 

He came to my mountain and looked to the North with pain and fury and sorrow in his heart. He looked East, at the plains, South, to the rivers, and West, back the way he had come. And he stayed.

I came to him in his dreams, and he begged my leave to build a fortress on my mountain, tall and strong, to better face the Darkness that had held him captive. I asked if he would invite destruction to my mountain, and while he could not promise peace everlasting, he promised song, and strength, the will to drive back the Dark. He seemed so lost, alone and desperate. I held his scarred cheek and bid him and the rest of his folk welcome. 

He named me then, Lady Himring, the Ever-Cold, and smiled. 

We built his fortress together. His people toiled, long and hard, to build the edifice of safety. 

In the night, I sang strength and patience into every stone, every brick, every metal nail and wooden board. The scarred-one’s kin sang with me, sometimes, his voice weaving feelings of love, protection, and relief. He found his guilt easing, bit by bit, as he promised never to abandon his kin again. 

I showed them how to find the caves I had built, and they carved them out further and laid stores of food to outlast the winters and then some. I showed them my greatest delight, and they turned my source of heated water into a place of peace and relaxation, of warmth from the bitter cold which he had named me for. 

I wrapped them all in what little warmth I had, and we were content, together, at the top of my mountain. 

The scarred-one stayed, but the others of his kin flitted in and out as need drove them. Some, the fiery twins, the silver hunter, and the weaver, rarely came, but the smith and his son stayed for a time, and the singer came every winter with new songs and a smile. I knew every one of the Children on my mountain, by their Music if not their name, and they knew me. 

I greeted the blue-and-silver prince when he came to visit with delight, for he eased the scarred-one’s heart and mind in a way that even I could not. He spent many a winter night cursing the cold, and if I Sang to keep the worst of the wind away in those winters, who would accuse me of favoritism? Surely not the scarred-one, who wrapped himself around the blue-and-silver prince and whispered declarations of love and devotion in his ears.

I held the scarred-one in his dreams when the prince left for the West. His heart mourned, and I yearned to comfort him. He never shook me off.

The years passed. Winters came and went and came again. 

The fire and smoke and putrid breath of dragons came from the north in a rush. The singer retreated to me, the Music of his heart discordant. Anger, frustration, fear. But we held strong, and they retook the pass even as the dragon razed the lands claimed by the singer and the weaver. Spring came, and the pressure eased, and I retreated into the heart of the mountain to rest. 

The scarred-one sought me out, then, years later. He explained he was leaving, taking his people east, to meet with the blue-and-silver prince and push the Dark back for good. He would try to return when he could. A small group of the Children would remain, to keep the fortress safe. To keep me company. I thanked him for his consideration, and swore to him then, in Eru’s name, that I would not allow Himring to fall to the Darkness, or anything beside, if he did not return. He smiled, and shook his head, and whispered that surely I knew better than to swear Oaths. 

He left. 

He did not return. 

Orcs and men came, and the Children I had known and loved were slaughtered as they fought to defend me. I tried, Oath-bound, to keep them out, but they did not fear us now that the scarred-one was nowhere to be found. They came, and they plundered. I kept them from the scarred-one’s tower. I did not allow them to destroy the one place he had found happiness.

They knew no peace within my walls. Their dreams were dark and angry. They fought and killed each other, and eventually they too, left. 

The stars whispered of a fire in the West that would not go out. The winds whispered tales of war and valor. The earth shuddered as the dragons stomped, and were slain, crushing other mountains under their bulk. The waters whispered of blood, and the Children, and the fell deeds of the scarred-one and the singer. I wept to hear them. How far they had fallen, my Children, from the heights we had raised together. 

The First Enemy was chained again. The land was a ruin. 

Ulmo came to me then, in the underground baths I had shown my Children in the early days. They had delighted in them, and Ulmo did as well. He told me the tales of the war in the West. The Oath my scarred-one and singer had taken could never be fulfilled, for only the singer yet lived, and he was too broken by it to seek the third. He told me the land was doomed, that my siblings would be swallowed by his waters in due course. 

I told him of my own Oath, that I could not allow the waters to take me and my mountain. 

And so I became an island, in due time, my Children’s fortress standing proudly above the waves.

Being an island was different from being a mountain. 

It wasn’t as cold, for one. My name felt ill-suited.

But above all, it was lonely. 

I heard the singer's voice across the waves at times, and I sang back, supporting his grief and his anger and reminding him of love and devotion and safety. He didn’t seem to hear, so strong was his guilt. 

When Ossë visited my shores, and Uinen too, I pleaded with them to allow the singer to cross, to visit me, to take comfort and shelter in the place he had once loved. They would not. I begged, then, that they would watch over him, to ensure he did not fall like his brothers. They agreed.

Explorers came. Map-makers and shipwrights, Children and Aftercomers. I told them my story in their dreams, and they wrote them down in the light of day. In time they too, left, but not before renaming me “Tol Himling,” as if a single letter could change who and what I was. 

The Men of the White Tree explored the ruins of the scarred one’s fortress, and I let them. He wasn’t coming back, what use did he have for the trinkets and baubles of the blue-and-silver prince’s love? Their story and mine slowly passed out of time and memory. I slept more often than not, waiting for something. What it was, I knew not. 

The world was changed once again. 

The bones of the earth expanded, connecting, wrapping around itself in an act only the One could have accomplished. Isolated as I was, I knew not why Ilúvatar was angered, but only the result. The Island of the Men of the White Tree fell beneath the waves, and my brethren in the Uttermost West became distant, a shadow in a different plane. 

I was alone, well and truly alone. 

I maintained the scarred-one’s fortress, singing to it to keep it standing. Keeping its memory alive, if only for myself. 

And then I slept the ages away.

I felt it when the last of the First Enemy’s supporters fell, when the flame-bright spirit of Mairon became like ashes in the wind, too broken to hold a form. I awoke from my dreaming, shocked to find my little island much changed. 

The Children had come. Ragged stones rose amongst polished stele, names and memories carved into every surface. Ribbons hung from the tree branches, sigils stitched in hues of red, blue, purple, and faded black. Gold and silver and mithril gleamed, stones of every color and shape glittered in the starlight. Helmets and swords and shields lay in orderly rows, bearing crests familiar and strange. Stars abounded - four-, five-, six-, seven-, eight-pointed ones everywhere I turned.

In the center of the courtyard stood a circle of stones, clustered together. A heavy granite plinth bearing the names Finwë and Míriel stood above the rest, with Fëanáro and Ñolofinwë below them. Another for the scarred-one and all his brothers–Maedhros, Maglor, Celegorm, Caranthir, Curufin, Amras, Amrod–leaned against them haphazardly. Another stone bearing the names and Houses of the Lords of the city of Gondolin were close. Lists upon lists of the dead were carved into the stones: of Alqualondë and the Dagor Bragollach and the Nirnaeth Arnoediad and Doriath and Sirion and the War of Wrath and the Sack of Eregion and the Akallabêth and the Last Alliance and the War of the Ring. The dead lay piled on each other in ever-expanding rings around the great stone of Finwë. 

My mountain had become a memorial to the Children. They had come whilst I slept to pay homage, to remember, to say goodbye. 

My heart wept to see the names of so many of the Children lost. No handmaid of Nienna was I, but I cried for them all.

A song whispered on the wind, the familiar mournful cry of the wanderer on the beach. I found him in the ruins of the tower, and we mourned the passing of time and the fates of the Children together in song. The watcher and the repentant.

Eventually he too took the journey to the Uttermost West, and I remained, tending my garden of stone and memory until the Last Music.