In My End Is My Beginning by Lilith

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The Downfallen

March 13: “…your kingdom is gone. If it is to be restored, which I doubt, it must be from small beginnings.” (Unfinished Tales, Part Three, III, The Quest of Erebor)

 

 

 

Elendil and Mairen, separately, life after the drowning of Númenor.

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Elendil paused for a moment, adjusting the oxen’s yoke.  They’d made room for two pair on each of the ships, along with the horses and mules they knew they’d need to move the supplies from the ships.   He didn’t intend to move many goods from the ships tonight.  There was time for that later.  There was time.  But he understood that his people needed a place to rest on the cool and stable ground.

 

 

 

It was not what he would have chosen, he knew.  He would have chosen Númenor, always.  He would have chosen Númenor, but she was gone beneath the sea, and he and they were left with Middle Earth -- this strange and new world from which he and his sons would need to carve their realm.

 

 

 

*****

 

 

 

She pulled herself from the water and spat, hissing as she saw the blood mixed with foam.  She’d not expected that.  She’d not expected the fire and the wave.  She’d not expected Numenor to sink below the sea.   But then she cursed herself for a fool.   The Valar had been content to allow Beleriand to sink below the seas if it meant Melkor were defeated and their revenge had.   The loss of land and of homes and of people meant little to them with their endless view of time and their unbending sense of righteousness.    

 

 

 

Why would the Valar object if innocents were sunk beneath the sea?  If women and children who’d hated Pharazôn passed along with those who supported him?   

 

 

 

And this — this — when she herself had survived, when she dragged herself, ribs broken, skin burnt, but alive from the cold sea. — was far more than she could tolerate.   

 

 

 

If they’d chosen to rid Númenor of her or to have buried Pharazôn and his armada beneath the waves of the sea, that she’d have understood — that, indeed, was that she’d anticipated the response to be if there were to be one.   

 

 

 

She wasn’t even sure if she’d have minded.  

 

 

 

Oblivion had its appeal; it could be little different than the long days and longer nights alone.   

 

 

 

But she lived and the people of Númenor, good, evil and between, lay sunk below the sea, gone farther than her friend, the one she'd loved, who’d died at her own hand and whose absence burned more fiercely than the salt upon her broken skin.   

 

 

 

She looked at her hands.   The rings remained.  The One, plain and beautiful, sat upon her left hand while the other, the ring he’d made with her and for her, sat upon her right hand, a reminder, as much as the sunken land and lost lives and the burnt and damaged skin of her hand, of what she’d chosen, what she’d lost and how little she gained.