Disclaimer: I do not own any part of LOTR.


So. Anyone who has read my story 'Flowers of the citadel', in its various forms, will certainly know about my liking for the family of the Steward, and for Denethor himself. I can't help it; there's something about that dysfunctional unit that tugs at my heart strings.

It tugs, I tell you.

However, I don't know whether I'm sorry or not to say that 'Flowers' has hit a dead end. I simply can't make it work any longer. I can't escape the fact that my original character simply doesn't work as well as I thought that she could. I've been writing her since 2005, and she's still as much a Mary-Sue as ever, despite my attempts to make her misanthropic and generally unappealing, and therefore real. I've thought long and hard, and she had to go. So she did.

Bye bye, Nienor. We hardly knew thee. (Seriously; we never even made it to the end of Book One!)

However!...again. I have not given up my goal to write and actually complete a story about Denethor and what counts for his emotional side, and this idea has been rolling around in what counts for my mind for quite a while. If I couldn't give him a daughter, I reasoned to myself, then I could at least find out who his wife was, and what made her tick. What exactly was behind that beautiful face, and in that gentle heart? Don't worry, my faithful readers; Finduilas will not be Nienor repackaged and resold as a supposedly different product. She is her own woman, not the woman that I originally imagined as her third child.

So, an attempt at a love story that won't have any love in it for a long time, between two not very sociable, relatively quiet people, who have trouble with the unknown. And a whole lot about words. Because words can do more than hurt you. Used rightly, they can make, shake or break the world.


He carries the words upon his shoulders, and it is as if they are piled so high that they could form a crown to his head if only they could be seen as well as heard. They say such things about him, and perhaps they mean for him to hear them and perhaps they do not. It is not even what they say, so much as what they do not say, or what is absent and present in their words.

So there is the pride in his father's words and the admiration in the gossip of the ladies of the court and the love, the love, in the voices of the men, of those who should be his men but who belong to another now. There is the praise of the citadel, of the city, of what seems to be the whole of the realm of Gondor, all for one man. And what is there left for him? What is there left?

What is there?

He says nothing. What can he say? There are no words for this, no words that will rectify this, no words that will change this injustice. He will not be the one to protest. If he has not the skill to make those who should love him do so, then how would he win their love back to himself? If they could so easily change their hearts, then their loyalty means nothing. They are worth nothing. How easy it is for the words of the people to change, to coil upon themselves and become something new, and then to bite!

He must satisfy himself with keeping deep the knowledge that there is one - if only one - that does not love that man, that Thorongil, and has never loved him from when their eyes first met. And he will never speak of it. Never. What would he say? He has no gift with speech. He never has.

The words weigh down upon him, and he can find none of his own.


She carries the words at her waist, as so many young ladies of the city do, and she sits in quiet places and reads from her book of the day, or days if it is a good work. She prefers those that she reads to those that she hears; she knows always what they will do, what they will lead to. They will never deceive her, they will surprise her but they will never take the ground from beneath her feet. They will never lie to her or become something else.

She loves the taste of them, to hold them in her mouth and savour them even as she releases them into the world. She could shape them again and again with her lips and whisper them in her mind, behind her eyes as she looks at things she does not see. Her favourites she will say and never tire of, ocean, blossom, spirit, conceive, child, escape. She likes the hiss and the breath, the sigh as they are sounded and said.

Words from the mouths of others she does not like so much. When she says the words they are good, but when others say them they can be wrong, harsh, limpid, insipid. When they are whispered they irritate her, when they are shouted they alarm her. And when she speaks words, to herself and only herself and for her own pleasure, people stare at her, and when she does not see them they sigh and whisper, whisper.

Of all those around her she likes the words of her family best, for she always knows what they will say, and they need to say nothing. As for the rest, she listens to those she deems worthy and turns away from those she does not.

How hard it is for the words to come! Why is it so easy for her to speak those that others write, again and again, and yet when she tries to speak her own they leave her?


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