. . .
Water Like Blood
. . .
Gwindeth feels sick; the evil of the Angmarim seeps into the water, and flows there like sickness flowing through veins. She has considerable power, which was enough to sank the city at its king's behest, but she is not powerful enough to destroy the invaders.
The city has been long dead, and now it is nothing more than a faint ghost of the past and a stone skeleton, white towers stretching up into the sky like bones half-buried under the ground and the Dúnedain Wardens wandering the shadows across the ruins like lost memories. Gwindeth wishes the waters of the lake which she commands had the power to revive the city, or at least maybe cleanse it; but they have not, and the city remains dead, with only the Rangers and weeping willows mourning its lost glory. The Angmarim walk the streets where every flagstone is a tombstone to the history buried there, and Gwineth wishes she could raise the waters of the lake and wash the enemies away, because death is what they deserve for desecrating this place.
The Rangers would like that as much as she would, and they are trying their best to defeat the Angmarim and drive them out of the city, but they are not strong enough, and the only thing they can do is keep on fighting. So they fight, dripping sweat and blood, and putting so much effort into regaining a street or a building or a square, only to lose it a few days or even hours later.
Those whose posts are not in Annúminas are more lucky, lucky enough to worry about the wider world, or about others, and sometimes about those who do not need to be worried for, like Calenglad, one of the Rangers of Tinnudir, worries for her. He has never said so outright, but she has been living beside children of Men long enough, and she knows. Some years before, when he was younger, she would have laughed at him mercilessly, though without malice, just out of pure amusement at the concept of a mortal wishing to protect her. But he has learned his lesson many times since then, and he is a good man, so Gwindeth keeps quiet, and only sometimes when she is alone she shakes her head. Brave, honourable, and oh so foolish Calenglad, who forgot what everyone knows: that water does not have a heart.
But she has memories, and every wave that moves the lake echoes within her, and the heart she does not have is buried in the tomb of king Elendil. The tomb is empty, and so there is no heart where there is no body, and somehow it is fitting.
Gwindeth remembers brighter, happier times – she has no heart, and therefore does not know happiness, but water can laugh, and so can she – she remembers the times when she used to laugh. She remembers: the sun, warm on her no-skin and warm on the surface of the lake, and the water is sparkling with sunlight like laughter, and king Elendil is kneeling by the lake and he touches the water as if he were briefly stroking a cat – Gwindeth knows what a cat is, for she has been watching children of Men for some time – king Elendil touches the water, but to Gwindeth it feels as if he touched her hands.
She remembers the surprise at discovering that his palm was warm, and she remembers laughing. And she remembers seeing the ripples spreading over the surface of the water, and the feeling when tiny waves echoed inside her.