An Endless Watch
By Stargazer Nataku
It is cold, as it always is in the high places. Perched high above the clouds, in the damp and the cold of the air, I have sat for nigh on twenty years, endlessly waiting. I know the cold and the emptiness as well as I know myself. The men who wait beside me have come and gone as their lives move on to other things, to greater things, but I haven't ever had an opportunity to leave my high seat behind.
The duty itself takes only an hour of my day, and the rest of the time is spent waiting, endlessly waiting. To pass the time, I think of the seven hundred years that this beacon has sat, waiting for the day that need becomes dire and the beacons will burn once more. It has not happened in recent memory, and it shan't happen for as long as I shall sit here. Time shall pass as it has day after day, year after year, in an endless repetition of the same day, again and again, the only change coming as I, myself, grow old. It has already begun, as the cold and the wind and the waiting wear at me, stealing my youth and aging me before my time. I know it will happen, for I saw the scars of the mountain etch themselves deep into my father's face as he spent his lifetime waiting for a duty that was never required.
The irony of my life, the joke of it all, is that even before I came to this desolate place, I was waiting…waiting for the days my father was allowed to descend from the mountaintop to the valley below, waiting for manhood to come so that I could find my own path in the world, waiting as my father slowly succumbed to illness, and finally, waiting in solitude and silence on top of this Eru-forsaken mountain.
It has been hundreds of years since the beacons were lit. Hundreds of years that people like me have sat here, doing nothing, staring off into the emptiness of the world, miles away from any human contact, save the other man who shares your meaningless watch.
I remember the first time I ever came here, in the days of my youth when the watch was not mine but my father's. I recall begging my mother, pleading with her to allow me to go, to spend some time with the father I scarcely knew. It took months, but finally she conceded to my pleas and, at twelve, I climbed onto my rocky perch for the very first time. It was a wondrous feeling, that first golden day, as I stood and gazed upon the distant lands with the eyes of an eagle. It was high summer, and it was a clear, bright sunny day with no clouds to block my vision of all that was before me, shining green and golden in the brilliant summer sunshine. I imagined that not even the great Manwe himself, gazing from the heights of , would have feelings that could compare to my own, insignificant young mortal that I was.
We did not speak, my father and I, nor did his partner, a faceless man whose name I no longer remember. Instead, we sat together about a small, lightless fire in the hut beside the beacon, wrapped in enough robes and cloaks to fight back the chill. Despite the memory of the wrappings, however, I do not remember feeling the cold. What I do remember is seeing the sun slowly sink behind the western horizon, night falling like a thick black blanket over us, only to be pierced slowly but steadily by millions of Varda's stars. I watched them come with childish wonder, far more crisp and brilliant than they had ever been from the ground, an eternity below us and a lifetime away.
I remember too the exact moment my father spoke, for his soft, low voice shattered the silence as brutally as a war hammer shatters bone. He spoke in his no nonsense manner of his duty, of the honor that came from being chosen for such an important position. He did not speak then of the cold that seeps into your aching bones, making you feel as though you would never be warm again. He did not tell me of the endless nights of monotony, when there are no words to speak and no stories to tell. He did not tell me of the difficulty of keeping the beacon in a condition where it could easily be lit, despite the damp and the cold of the thin air.
All these things, I came to know in time. The past twenty years have spoken to them more eloquently than my simple-spoken father could have. The aching of my arthritic fingers reminds me better than anything he could have repeated to me.
Duty, I find, is a word as empty as the maddening silence of the mountaintop, yet it is as inescapable as the years of endless waiting that I have endured, that I continue to endure. Fulfilling a meaningless duty is a cold comfort to one who yearns instead for the happiness of home and family, warmth and light, laughter and joy. Those things are not to be found here, they are facets of an entirely different world, one that I no longer have any part of.
They say that the mountains will change a man, that once he has spent any amount of time in them, he will never be the same. I know this to be true. The boy I was, filled with wonder and laughter and cheer is gone. Perhaps he grew tired of waiting for the dreams he always dreamed to come true. Perhaps he could not bear the ache from the cold, or the agonizing silence that falls between two men when they find that all their words, whether important or no, have been said, leaving nothing but silence behind them. Perhaps he could not bear to look at the face of eternity any longer, the world stretching out cold and dim beneath him.
I know not. The only thing certain is the utter truth that tomorrow will be born, live, and fade away to death in the same manner as the day that was before it, and the day before that, and the day that shall be after it has gone. It shall continue on, each day sliding quietly away into the next, until another seven hundred years has silently come and slipped away without any change in the endless experience of days.
It is, perhaps, its own version of immortality, but that is a cold comfort now.
Author's Note: Thanks for reading! This was inspired by some of the ROTK:EE DVD Cast commentary. It made me laugh, then it made me think, and then the plot bunny attacked. And here it is. Please review if you have the time.