And Last of All by

Chapter 1

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A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you
is that a fact or a weapon?

* * *

It didn't matter to me that I could not swim, and that, if I had succeeded in casting myself overboard, I would have drowned in sight of land.

Had I made it ashore, I would not have been safe from Pharazôn's soldiers who'd come in desperate pursuit as we boarded the ships. They were almost still children, armed with red knives, who had been deemed unfit to conquer Valinor with him and were all the more desperate to prove themselves to the Zigûr, so they would not be excluded from the quest for glory the next time - if a next time remained.

After he had conquered Aman, if he conquered Aman, what more was there?

They crowded onto the pier, and for a breathless moment before the terrible noise began rolling in - a hundred storms as one that pressed into my eardrums until they hurt - I was unsure of what their purpose was. Pursuit, or flight? The temple fires still were burning, but Meneltarma rumbled as it so often had of late, shaking the land, and a drowning darkness rolled in from the west.

A wave.

They would no longer have the chance to seize anybody. The temple fires vanished behind the curtain of watery darkness, and the smell of acrid, fatty smoke mingling bitterly with sea-water, different from the smell of the iron smelters that littered the coast of every wharf, swept into my nose.

But there was another stench on the air that made me think of the name that many surmised had once been the Zigûr's - Sauron, the putrid, stinking one. Sulfur and molten stone.

If the wave was the wrath of the West, then this last thing was his touch.

Meneltarma erupted into a cloud of fire and smoke. The sacred hollow on the peak was swept away.

Ránë, Amandil's wife, held me as I sagged, and I hung in her arms like a child when the crest of the wave toppled and fractured the bloody sunset behind it. Its fingers swept over Númenor, foam that ran red in the glare from Meneltarma and water that swept dark like blood.

"Míriel," I breathed. "Míriel."

The land shielded us from the cataclysm as the distance grew. I could no longer see the child-soldiers.

The ship bore us away. Us, and the souls on eight others. The last ships to leave the island. There would be no survivors but us.

I thought back to Míriel's smiling face and stifled my weeping.

* * *

Míriel was smiling when I picked her from the floor.

She had fallen in the deserted hallway to our quarters. All her handmaidens but me were gone - home to Rómenna, for the ones she trusted, like obedient Sandannë and mischievous Ilmairë; she could no longer protect them from the Zigûr now sprawling unopposed on the King's throne. It left no one else but me.

I would not leave her even though she pleaded.

I refused. I loved her, and she was my task to fulfill.

And what was more, Míriel's fits had been coming more frequently. Where they once - so she claimed, she never divulged very much even if she remembered her visions - had been harmless and near inconsequential, they had become sharper and more accurate as the Isle grew darker around us. Her first, I think, although I was not sure she herself remembered it, had been a premonition of Isildur stealing the fruit of Nimloth that was now hidden in Rómenna and growing into a handsome sapling.

Her father's gift of the Sight was becoming revealed in her. Her fits grew more violent, and she woke aching more often than not. I feared one day she would not wake at all.

"He will take Lady Azgaradûn to the temple today. She will go willingly, believing that he intends to make her his priestess. He intends to make her burn. Her husband displeased him over some trifling thing."

"Surely not!" Azgaradûn was one of the Zigûr's most fervent supporters. She had given her daughter to the flames, and her colourless viper's eyes rested always on him when she sat in council. She had even gone so far as to forsake her name. Once Gimiladûn, she no longer looked to the stars, and much rather opened her family's coffers wide for the sake of Pharazôn's armada.

"You will see. He is a monster and a tyrant, and you know as well as I do that now that he has achieved his desire, he will only grow more cruel - but I hold out hope. Perhaps Aman will cleanse Pharazôn's mind. He is of the blood of Eärendil as I am, and he may understand that yet. I bear him no love, but he may yet be our saviour."

I had my doubts and held my tongue, although I reported my words to Ránë and Amandil, saying that if any would save us, it would be Míriel. Once, when we had gone bathing in Andúnië after the inspection of Pharazôn's fleet, a fit had struck her, but she had assured me that all would be well, as all things must, and she had been glad, elated even, until we settled into bed that night. It had made me wish to cry, rage, and scream with a terror I could not name. Instead I hoped, prayed, and waited.

As of yet, nothing. Perhaps the smile as I found Míriel would finally herald the end of this evil.

Míriel's eyes opened when I lifted her, despite the protests of my aching back. She was the one who had lain twisted from spasms in her muscles and would be sore later; my older age mattered little. I still was strong, and she still was small and slight.

She smiled at me again, her arms went around me for a firmer hold as I carried her the rest of the way to our bed, and rested her head against the side of my neck, like a child, and was still, and my breath nearly stopped for love of this strange woman.

I laid myself down beside her into the comfortable hollow that my body had worn into the bedding over time, and although she moved closer to me, she seemed not to wake.

It was quiet, as so often lately. The island had been stripped of its lords and husbands and sons, its farmers and slaves, and all men that were neither too young nor too old to sail, but more than that, all living things had grown hushed. Not even the Cirinci piped their high birdcalls in the gardens, and all the Elven-birds had been seen flying west, my sister in Eldalondë wrote me. It was the silence at the end of times, I had heard someone say passing in the street, for Númenor often lay under a cloud these days, and it issued from the summit of Meneltarma as though even the holy mountain bore us anger for our neglect, and its wrath had reawakened the fires from within the earth that had once given birth to the island, three thousand years ago.

It had been thirty-and-eight days since Pharazôn had taken his ships into the west.

I had come to the palace out of love for the Line of Kings with no feelings for Míriel, but that had changed swiftly when I saw her endure the hardships of her marriage and watched Pharazôn cut himself to shreds on her resilience as though she were the diamond she'd been named for. I could not tell when I had first thought I loved her. Perhaps after my charade had come undone before her - I had not come to her to raise my eligibility as a marriage candidate; I was already too old at that time for any man to still consider me, nor did I desire it, and she had not dismissed me for the lie. In fact - she felt much the same.

It made my task much harder, for I had been schooled in acting, deceit and subterfuge, but with Míriel it was honesty that served me best, and so I was truthful with her, although I kept much to myself. I wrote letters when she slept, observed the shifting of the guards around Nimloth from the terrace outside Míriel's quarters, listened into the Council of the Sceptre after Amandil had been disgraced and cast from his seat, swirled through balls and watched my fellow Faithful burn after the completion of the monster's temple while armed guards stood about me that made me fear they would lead me to the altar next.

And I watched as my love for her grew - and spelled the ruin of my task. Isildur had been successful, and against hope he recovered from the many wounds at the time Nimloth's sapling first broke from the earth the past spring, but if the Line of Kings that I was sworn to serve were to continue, then Míriel would need an heir, and she tolerated no one's touch, not even mine - much less a man's after Pharazôn had consummated their forced marriage on her; not even the drugs she had taken then changed that.

I cannot count how many times I prayed to the Lords of the West for forgiveness and did not let her see my distress. I spent the night of Isildur's theft of the fruit of Nimloth in bed with Míriel, sleeping with no more intimate touch than my hand on her head and her fingers in mine. It cast me entirely into confusion. I had expected him to fail, just as I expected news that the sapling was withering any day when I laboured to undo the keys that any letter from Rómenna was written in, innocuous and sentimental only on the surface.

The news I expected did not come. Instead I could tell Míriel that Amandil, even before Pharazôn had gone, had endeavoured to break the ban and plead aid as per the words she had spoken to me. Perhaps I had expected her to relent, then - for surely that meant hope! And I knew that, even though old age was not far from her then, she still bled. She might still conceive an heir and continue the line, and we could flee the island, for even a life in exile meant that I had not failed the Faithful and the One we served.

She was as stubborn as I was, and only that same morning, we had spoken of it again - and she had denied me again. "Even if I humbled myself - and you ask much of me, beloved Nénumë, and it is made no easier knowing that you know how much - the Zigûr would hound us to the ends of the earth and beyond its rim if I were willing to do as you ask," she told me. "I do not think he will cease unless none of the Line of Kings survives. Even if we could raise some hope in a hidden exile, what life would that child lead? A Queen or King of wilderness with no people to look for, and far from the Land of the Gift…"

Her eyes went wide and dark, and almost I feared another fit, but she merely sagged before her mirror, shook her head as though to clear it, and shrugged my touch of her. "Not yet. I have no hope left in myself to give to the Dúnedain. Not me."

"Then who, Míriel? Who shall give us hope?"

My purpose shattered when she shook her head. "I cannot see her face. The mists of time lie long between us."

What weapon was I, destroying all I had been taught to care about and all I had come to love? There were others in the Line of Elros, and it was said that Elrond his brother lived still in the Outer Lands, but there were none on Númenor of the same unbroken descent. A child of Pharazôn? I resolved to drown such a child if it should have being, if Pharazôn should return out of the West or an heir were revealed against expectation, for it was no secret that the Zigûr, in his gain for power and plot for destruction, had offered himself as a vessel for Pharazôn to spend his seed in vain.

That was no secret. And what better was I? All the relief that I had once felt when Míriel admitted to sharing my feelings and concerns turned to ash. All was lost. I understood why Pharazôn and the Zigûr had not had me sacrificed. I had kept Míriel complacent. Lying in bed beside her, I touched her silvering hair and prayed that history would not remember me.

Míriel smiled again at my touch, and I could not bear to take my hand away.

At last, with the coming of the swift nightfall under the wings of the Eagle-clouds, I slept.

When the next noon came, the curtains to the balcony were billowing like wings, or clouds, or waves, in the storm that was rushing from the west. When I stepped outside, with the flagstones wet and cool under my feet and rain falling dirty with the reek that had hung over the city, I craned my neck to the Mountain for a moment of prayer. The unease of the past night had clung like a shroud to my mind through the morning, and I hoped that that would clear my head.

The summit was shrouded under the wings of the Eagles. I could barely see them in their entirety, although where their eyes should be were slits of Manwë's blue sky, and their gaze was trained on the palace.

From behind, arms encircled me, and I could feel the warmth of Míriel's body. She kept her distance as always in waking, but having my attention she laid her free hand on my cheek; in the other she held a scroll.

"Nénumë," she said, following my gaze upward. Her voice was, to my astonishment, calm, peaceful, glad as I had not heard it in years. "Narîka 'nBâri 'nAdûn. Do the Eagles of the Lords of the West fill you with hope or with dread?"

That she spoke Adûnaic amazed me. It had never been her tongue, wrapping around the complicated syllables with the accent of those that had grown up speaking Quenya and only perforce took the language of the people - and her tone reminded me of the time on the coast in Andúnië. She had been hopeful over some madness. I had been terrified, and the feeling struck me again like a stone falling from the Mountain. My hands clenched the bannister against the sudden onrush.

"They terrify me," I admitted, and my voice rang faint in my own ears.

Míriel gently reproached: "Although they should not. We have ever served them; what have we to fear in this life or beyond it?"

I could give many answers, my thoughts of the past night foremost. "Beyond it? Do you think that we shall die, then?"

"We? No," she said in wonder, and with her hand still on my face tipped my head down to herself to rest her forehead against mine as she had so often done. From the corner of my eye I could see our blowing hair mingle around our faces, silvering-dark and white. "You shall not die, at least not before such time that was appointed to you. And I shall be the last of all, last Queen that I am for good or ill. I know your sorrows over this, but in the love I bear I hold you blameless. I am Queen; the fault lies with me." I made to object, but Míriel held up her hand. "But there is no time. Something comes, and I would have you bear a message to Rómenna and the ships that brooks no delay."

She handed me the scroll. "It is of the utmost importance. I had a dream that foretold something they must know, and I know no surer messenger than you. These are evil days and I would trust no other. Do not open it until you can deliver it to Ránë's hands, or Elendil's."

"I shall go, and return with all speed," I said against my reluctance. I dreaded to even turn my back to the West.

"When you do," Míriel answered, "look for me on Meneltarma. I would see if the Eagles are a sign to me as they were to the Kings of old. But go now; the hour is urgent."

I went without a farewell and came unopposed until Rómenna. The hooves of my horse stirred up a carpet of wet ash on the ground that had been raining down for the past hours, and the people had taken shelter in their houses, save those that could not afford to remain inside, but even so it might have been a city of ghosts, or submerged underwater, for all the sound there was.

It was though the land, having breathed in, now was breathless before the exhale.

I ran afoul of the child soldiers near the quays, but before they could seize me I had found a boat and rowed desperately toward the ships at anchor outside the harbour, and was pulled aboard by Faithful hands, watching them crowd on the quay.

Ránë, who had been the one to recommend me to the palace all those years ago, took the scroll from me and unrolled it.

It was blank.

The moment it took me to understand was the last before doom struck. The island exhaled. Meneltarma burst. The wave came.

And my Queen had deceived me to save me, knowing that for all my love would never leave her willingly for anything other than for duty.

I thought back to Míriel's smiling face and stifled my weeping.

 

* * *

And last of all the mounting wave took to its bosom Tar-Míriel the Queen, fairer than silver or ivory or pearls.

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Chapter End Notes

Many many thanks to Lórien, Kiraly and Anna for their help, encouragement and open ears to my yammering. <333 The poem quoted at the beginning is by Margaret Atwood.