In My End Is My Beginning by Lilith

The King’s Garden

Tar-Miriel explores the King’s Garden in Armenelos.

Written in response to the prompt showing the image of a partially-open blue door.

 

Miriel found the gate leading from the King’s Garden to the slopes of the Meneltarma slightly ajar. She wondered at it; few people realized where the gate, which resembled more a peculiar blue door than any typical gate, might be found or knew that it was a gate at all so little used it had become in recent years. The gate had been installed many years earlier during the reign of Tar-Aldarion. He had ordered the garden built and, later, asked that the gate be installed in order for the royal household to have a direct path from the palace, nestled at the feet of the great mountain to the shrine at its peak. The gate and the path, much like the gardens themselves, had been designed for the use of Erendis in an effort on the part of her seafaring husband to create a space for her to love and in which to be content in Armenelos. In the days in which Erendis had lived in the palace, the garden, if garden it might be called for the grounds were vast, had most resembled a small farm, complete with vegetable patch and sheep and even a small house, made very like to Erendis’s White House in Emerië, perhaps in the hopes of ensuring she stayed in Armenelos.

But the garden had not made Erendis happy. She had left and it had fallen into decay. Aldarion, having chosen the sea over his wife, had paid little attention to the garden or the house. He had, Miriel thought, probably not wanted the reminder than he had not been able to compel her to stay. Her daughter, Tar-Ancalimë, had not wanted a reminder of her mother’s unhappiness and so had not maintained it. The walls had fallen into disrepair, the garden run wild and the sheep, as it happened, had run off. Only several years later, under the reign of Tar-Minastir had the garden been reclaimed. He, having seen and envied the gardens of the Eldar, had begun to reclaim the garden from the wild and rambling space it had become. The landscape grew more carefully tended, crafted into carefully rolling lawns with elegantly and intentionally planted groves of trees and then the equally-carefully tended ruins the place Erendis had been given to pretend to be what she had once was. This had been the garden Miriel had known and had loved in her youth. She had spent hours in it, wandering through the groves of trees and sitting within the ruins of the home and imagining what Númenor had been in its prime before envy and shadow had fallen upon it. 

The garden had changed again upon her father’s death, her own marriage and Pharazôn’s ascension to the throne. In his many travels with Amandil, Pharazôn had encountered a very different sort of garden, a highly and elegantly manicured form of garden, and so the garden she had known and in which she had walked had been pruned and trimmed, shaped and transformed into something quite different, into something tame. Hedges had been planted and shaped, formed and cut into mazes. Trees and bushes had been pruned and twisted into unnatural shapes. Benches had been laid out. Paths created. Fountains placed on the grounds. Flowers, in complimentary colors and artfully placed in symmetrical patterns, had been planted. Elegant birds walked the grounds. Everything perfectly in order. Everything perfectly neat. Everything perfectly designed. But it hadn’t lasted. Ar-Pharazôn, being who and how he was, had brought many of the beautiful plants and flowers that he had found on his journeys to this once free and now tame garden, and, for a time, they’d seemed very beautiful. But he had known so little of the nature of the plants, how they grew and what they needed, and he had spent so little time learning of the places in which they had been found. As a result, the plants had often grown much faster and wilder than anyone had expended and frequently pushed the older trees, flowers and plants out of their accustomed spaces and forced the gardeners into something of a battle where they attempted to force these newcomers into their allowed position and to maintain the garden in its immaculate spender despite the slow and ongoing assault of these colonizing plants from areas which Pharazôn had colonized. It had devolved, Miriel thought, from a war of attrition in which both sides expended great resources and neither advanced to one in which Pharazôn and his army of gardeners increasingly found themselves into a slow and steady retreat. No matter what the king ordered or how hard the gardeners worked, the strange and beautiful plants from these conquered areas continued to advance slowly and steadily so that once artfully pruned trees and hedges were now covered in heavy vines, where more the beds of old and favorite flowers were increasingly consumed by rapidly multiplying newcomers and where the once-beloved and familiar birds were less common and seen less frequently than the exotic and somewhat threatening creatures he had brought into his home. To an extent, Miriel found it fitting and amusing that Pharazôn had not been able to impose his will and had been defied by the things he’d brought to show his strength. But, to another degree, she wondered if there would be any remnant left of the garden he had created, much less one she had known before.