Lacuna by AdmirableMonster

The lights are going out, one by one.  Mairon lies with the river of the sky around him.  Darkness bleeds from between his legs, poisoning the waters around him.  Hollowed, emptied out, and lost.  The lights are going out, growing further away from him.  

(No point, now, in clinging to the name of Arien—Arien was the name of what she was before the darkness came.)  With the advent of that darkness, that part is gone, snuffed and dead, heart cold and heavy within him, flickering only faintly with a lost luminescence.

The darkness that snuffs the light carries a heavy weight, the crushing weight of nothing that holds him down, that pulls him in.  If he had not been so ambitious, he would not be here now.  Arien-who-was-another-thing-once was eager to show her strength, and she was willing to pass through fire to win the honor of carrying the fruit of Laurelin across the heavens.

(Ah, precious, the darkness sighed, writhing within him, thy flame intoxicates.)

Something cracks; something gives way.  He is falling, falling, falling, beneath that impossible weight.  His flame is quenched, or stolen: his heart no longer burns with the necessary force to keep the darkness out.  What is left of the stuff inside him churns and breaks, churns and reforms, the weight crushing all before it.  In the face of it, his center cannot hold.

The darkness will have all of him, if he lets it, the touch of his former master—his former friend—will devour him and make of what was once a burning torch into an empty hole.  And he is all alone, for he cannot reach anyone else from inside his swiftly-falling prison.  (If I become less, will some of me remain?  Loose the weight, and the pull to fall will soften.)

After all, when has he not sacrificed what was necessary to do what was asked of him?  This is no different.  Mairon shuts his eyes and calls to the last dying remnants of his fire.

A sheet of cold fuel ignites, a shock-rupture that travels out through the core of him, gaining speed as it goes.  If it is too slow, the shock will arrest, the flame will go out, and the fall will resume—

One last spark ignites as Mairon spreads his hands and releases all that still remains—

Cold hits hot and for one moment the fire roars up with a brightness brighter than a hundred suns—

The fall arrests.  The darkness bleeds away.  Mairon sobs quietly, his light winking and fading.  (The lights are going out, going out.)  There is so little of him left.  He is a dead thing floating in the river of Varda’s sky.  He is a remnant, not a —

Chapter End Notes

Written for the Dark Matter challenge.  My prompt was not to use the word "star" and I've drawn on (i) the version of the myth where Arien is actually raped by Melkor, (ii) an AU version of this that lives in my head where Arien is actually Mairon's deadname, and (iii) some very liberal artistic license in the process of the supernova of a massive star on its way to collapsing into a black hole.  A sufficiently violent expulsion of sufficient mass can arrest the collapse and send the star to end its life as a white dwarf instead.

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