Disclaimer as above, no copyright infringement intended, no ownership of LOTR characters or related indicia, no money being made, yadda yadda.
I'm seriously touched that you hardcore LOTR people are actually a) reading and b) enjoying this. Hope is on the way. Slowly and painfully (this is an angstfic) but it's on the way. Read and see.
The first two things Legolas sings are from Tom Bombadil; the third is all me, baby. I think, anyway.
Oh, and although we are here committing the mortal sin of inserting a lesser ficdom into Tolkien, I think this poem from Dragonlance Legends is more than appropriate to the subject.
Water from dust, and dust rising out of the water
Continents forming, abstract as colour or light
To the vanished eye, to the touch of Paladine's daughter
Who knows with a touch that the robe is white
Out of that water a country is rising, impossible
When first imagined in prayer
As the sun and the seas and the stars invisible
As gods in a code of air
Dust from the water, and water arising from dust
And the robe containing all colours assumed into white
Into memory, into countries assumed in the trust
Of ever returning colour and light
Out of that dust arises a wellspring of tears
To nourish the work of our hands
In forever approaching countries of yearning and years
In due and immanent lands.
**
Legolas paced. It was an excellent place for such activities, was Rivendell; the elfcity huddled in the embrace of its forested valley as gems huddle in rock, but there were verandas and promenades skirting all the chambers, and there were many courtyards sheltered by fragrant trees in which to pace. Currently he was measuring the western wall of a balcony that leaned out over a waterfall. Golden leaves trickled down through the soft air; the constant gentle laughing of the water should have soothed its listener, but he found no ease in it. Every now and then he would pull a slender arrow from the quiver strapped across his back and send it winging out into the forest; already an ancient birch tree sported ten arrows in a neat ring stuck in its bark. Eventually, when his mood eased, Legolas would go out into the forest and reclaim the arrows, closing the holes in the birch's bark with a murmured word, but for now he paced with his bow tight-strung in his hand, and wondered if he had enough accuracy to write an inscription in arrowpoints beneath the ring.
Behind him, footsteps approached. His fingers tightened convulsively on the bow's strapped grip, but he knew the footsteps, and he forced himself to turn slowly and greet the newcomer. "Sam," he said, quietly. "Is there any change?"
Through elven eyes, Samwise Gamgee had never been particularly prepossessing; a stocky, solid hobbit with a shock of unruly ginger hair and a broad, honest sort of face, he was easily ignored and more easily underestimated. Legolas had known him long enough to make neither mistake.
The hobbit sighed and sat down on the edge of a flight of stone steps. "They won't let me in to see him, sir," he told Legolas. "They're terribly busy."
Legolas nodded, pale hair falling across his forehead. "They would not let me in, either."
Sam looked up at him. "Sir............is Mr Frodo going to die?"
Legolas put down his bow and walked over to Sam with the strange catlike economical grace the hobbit had never quite gotten used to. "Sam," he said softly, kneeling down and resting a hand on Sam's shoulder, "if I could answer you, I would. I do not know."
Sam nodded, rubbing at his face, searching for a distraction, and found one. Someone had left an Elvish harp perched on the parapet of the balcony—a harp missing several strings and with its silver inlay dull and dark with age, but still a lovely thing. "Can............can you play that, sir?" he asked dully.
Legolas blinked, lifted the harp in his arms. "Once, a long time ago, I knew the way of it," he said. "My fingers may have forgotten their skill."
"Would you play, sir?" Sam asked, and Legolas heard the note of pleading in his voice. "I always did like to hear an Elvish tune...."
Wordlessly Legolas settled himself crosslegged on the steps with the old harp in his lap, and closed his eyes. His fingers, bow-callused and lacking the elegance of Elvish music-makers, crept across the strings, and a deep ripple of sound suddenly hung in the air.
Beside him Sam gasped and closed his eyes. Legolas sighed and let himself relax, trying to remember the harp-lessons his much younger self had struggled through, hundreds of years before, in the forests of Lothlorien. His fingers began to move, slowly at first, then more surely as memory and skill returned, stroking a low dark melody out of the harp that seemed to drift along the ground like fog in the morning. Words came out of memory.
"I walked by the sea, and there came to me,
as a star beam on the wet sand,
a white shell like a sea-bell;
trembling it lay in my wet hand.
In my fingers shaken I heard waken
a ding within, by a harbour bar,
a buoy swinging, a call ringing
over endless seas, faint now and far......."
He blinked, trailing off, the melody still hanging low on the air. Sam was watching him silently, tears glinting in the corners of his eyes. "Go on, sir," he muttered. "Please."
Legolas nodded once and struck a different tune out of the strings, not knowing where it came from, hearing each note only as he played it and not before.
"There was a merry passenger," he sang, "a messenger, a mariner,
he built a gilded gondola
to wander in, and had in her
a load of yellow oranges
and porridge for his provender;
he perfumed her with marjoram
and cardamom and lavender.........."
The song rose and fell, its self-referential intricate rhymes drifting lightly on the still air, like the notes of the jade flute he had heard once in the woods. Beside him, Sam swayed lightly to the rhythm of his playing, but said nothing; he seemed very far away, sailing with the traveller to the archipelagoes of gold, riding beside him with sword of emerald and habergeon of crystal, and Legolas found that he himself could almost smell the salt of the seas the song held in it, and with the deep longing of all Elves he thought of the starlight on the Western Seas, and his fingers fell silent on the harpstrings.
Sam murmured something, but Legolas could not hear; he was no longer seeing the drifting gold of the autumn leaves, nor feeling the light breeze lift his hair; he was watching grey ships disappear beyond a horizon, and straining his hawk-sight to catch the last glimmering of a captured star's light in a crystal vial. Without his knowing it, he lifted the harp again, and began to play; and this time what he played was not quite beautiful.
"You cannot know, all you who dwell
beyond the fiery setting sun
what you have left behind you;
to those you left as daylight fell
and nothing was but was undone
the passage served to blind you.........."
With an effort he stilled his fingers on the harpstrings and set the instrument aside, quelling the urge to throw it violently over the balcony. The images that last song had burned into his head were not fair; the leavetaking had been a permanent one, and those who had been left behind were left with nothing but their sorrow and their memories of those gone on before—those gone on into the light and the far green shore, forgetting their old friends.
Sam reached out and tentatively touched his arm. "Sir.....?"
Legolas sighed, letting go of the memory—whatever it had been—and ruffled the hobbit's hair. "I am sorry," he said. "The harp awakes strange thoughts in me."
"It's what's going to happen, isn't it?" Sam asked quietly. "What you saw."
Legolas closed his eyes for a long moment. "I do not know, Sam. Let be."
Sam nodded, got to his feet slowly. "Thank you, sir. It's been a long while since I heard Elvish music."
Legolas felt a helpless little smile tug at his mouth. "Come, Sam, and let us see if they will allow us to visit Frodo."
**
I told you I would win, little Ringbearer. Can you not feel the world fading from you? Can you not feel the tides of your blood drawn slower and slower through your heart?
--Let me be. You will not pass to another.
Oh? And you will stop me? You have not the strength to speak, let alone to stop the others from coming close. I shall pass to them on your last breath, little one. The irony is delicious, is it not?
--I could not destroy you before. I will not let you rise again. I will not fail twice.
You don't have a choice in the matter. Soon I shall grow strong again, and my armies shall darken the face of Middle-Earth, and my Eye shall burn unchallenged in the East. I shall have accomplished what I set out to do three thousand years ago, little Ringbearer, and you—yes, you—shall have helped me on my way, as much as if you truly had kept the One Ring and allowed me to have you, last time we met.
--I have warned them. They will not let you cross over. You will die with me.
Ah, you are so very young, little one. I keep forgetting. I am as old as this world, Ringbearer. I cannot be destroyed; I am creation's shadow. I will never die.
Frodo, lost in the flowing burning darkness, reached out for his captor.
Yes, it hissed, the voice thick and rotted. Come to me. I shall have you in the end, anyway. Come to me of your own choice, and I will make your end a quick one.
He hung in the void, in the voice, his body nothing more than a collection of agonies, a weight upon him, and he reached out for the thing that was eating him, and for a brief and brilliant second he touched it. Those watching by his bed drew back in horror, for it seemed that bright fire blazed along all his veins, making his pale skin glow, and his body arched up from the pillows, then fell back; and all was as it had been. They could not know that in that moment when Frodo had touched the thing that wore the Eye of Sauron, he had learned a truth.
--You lie, he managed. You were not always thus.
I am eternal. I am unchanged. It sounded angry, as if he had touched a nerve.
--No. You were eaten by it as you are now eating me. You were not created so.
Be quiet!
--You were once mortal, weren't you. As I am.
Be quiet! it howled again, and raked its claws, and in the mortal realm Frodo's body curled up in helpless coughing. You know nothing! Nothing! I am eternal!
Strangely, the knowledge made it easier for him to hang on. The distant pain of his body dying didn't seem to bother him so much now. He hung in the blackness of the Eye and waited, for now he was sure that the thing holding him was not as powerful as it had always seemed. Memory and sensation fell away from him; he was merely a mind in the darkness, hanging there, waiting.
**
Iriliath and Gerylon had torn apart the City's libraries searching for the myths that surrounded crystal tears. They had not been seen on Middle-earth for almost three thousand years, and they had become myth, and legend, and vague memory. Only the High Elves, and those with High Elven blood, had the capability of producing tears that hardened to pure crystal as they fell, and then only if they wept for true grief—not frustration, nor sadness, nor anger, but true and selfless grief of the sort that blinds and deafens and bends the griever double with its weight. A single crystal tear was worth many hundred times its weight in gems.
They had a cup full of them, a drinking-cup hastily borrowed from the Council chamber. Both of them had told Arwen—and each other--not to hope too hard, that this was nothing more than a chance, and that it had been so long since the crystal tears had been used in healing that they might not find the legends teaching them the way of it.
They did not have a great deal of time. Frodo's fever had risen, and risen again, until he was so hot it was painful to touch his skin for very long. None of the Elves' most sovereign remedies had done anything for the fever, nor for the terrible choking cough that stained his pillows with scarlet and echoed nastily in the vaults of the chamber. Once or twice he had opened his eyes, staring blindly around the room, and they had noticed with a sick chill that now there was a faint red glitter in the depths of those unnatural eyes.
All day they had been searching through the lore, and the shadows of the rowan-trees were leaning in through the Library windows when Iriliath let out a startled cry.
"I have found it," she said simply. "We must have pure water and athelas, and heartsease, and needfire."
Gerylon rose and gathered up the scrolls he had been reading. "Make the fire. I will bring the other things here."
Iriliath stripped off the silver diadem she wore, the rings, the brooch fastening her cloak, and the belt of silver and pale gems that held her kirtle at the waist. Needfire had to be kindled without jewellery. As her brother hurried out of the room, she sorted through the woodstack by the fireplace and came out with a twig of oak, one of ash, and one of rowan, and she knelt down in a splash of low sunlight, and she began to make a fire. This was old, old magic, had been old before ever the Elves came to the shores of Middle-Earth, and she had never been trained in its use; it was only by chance that she and Gerylon had learnt the making of needfire, for they had been curious, as elfchildren, and the lore of the Library had been within reach.
He came back with handfuls of herbs still warm and fragrant from the day's sun. "What now?"
Iriliath sat back on her heels. "A silver bowl......and we must bless it, with the old blessings of the Liiri and the Maradhuin. Take my hands."
Brother and sister knelt over the pale bluish flame of the needfire with a silver basin in their hands, murmuring the chant and counter-chant in the tongue so old neither of them understood its words, though they knew them by heart. It seemed as if no time at all had passed when the blessing was complete, yet the shadows of the rowan thicket had moved across the floor, stretched out, and the light had dimmed and reddened with the closing of day.
They dropped their hands, and the silver bowl floated gently on the air a few inches above the licking flames of the needfire. Quickly, wasting no time, Gerylon poured spring-water into it from the glass flask he carried, and together they crushed handfuls of kingsfoil and heartsease into the water as it began to steam.
"What now, sister?" Gerylon asked. Iriliath kept her gaze on the seething water in the bowl as she reached behind her for the drinking-cup full of crystal tears.
"The writing called for only one," she murmured. "But this is no ordinary poison."
Gerylon, in a completely uncharacteristic move, closed his hand gently over her wrist and tilted it. The tiny avalanche of crystal spheres glittered and ran together as they poured in a rush into the silver bowl, all of them, every one. Neither Gerylon nor Iriliath considered that they had held the ransom of every king ever born on Middle-Earth in their closed hands, and had let it slide away into the boiling water. All either of them could see was the faint, faint red glow that had started to light the darkness of Frodo's slitted pupils. A tiny pinprick of red back in that darkness; tiny, but getting bigger all the time.
Together, they peered into the silver bowl. White light had begun to gather in its bottom; they could no longer see the swirling crushed leaves of the herbs Gerylon had gathered, nor the transparent glitter of Arwen's crystal tears; white light filled the bowl, swirling a little as the liquid moved. As they watched, the clear water became white, opaque, pearly; and in another moment it was liquid pearl, bright brilliant nacreous white, glowing gently. The scent of rain and green apples filled the Library.
For a moment neither Healer breathed; then Iriliath said, softly, in awe, "It is the Life."
"The Life," echoed Gerylon. "I had thought its secret lost long ago, many thousand years before our ancestors came to this land."
"Then the wellspring.......?" Iriliath began. He shook his head.
"Not now. If this is truly the Life, we must hurry, sister. It is sorely needed."
He preceded her; she held the precious bowl in her hands, feeling the warm tingle as its power licked through the pure silver and into her flesh. This was their last hope. If Frodo did not respond........
But Iriliath put away that thought, and walked steadily into the sickroom, the light of the bowl she carried filling every corner of the chamber, banishing the strange shadows that had seemed to grow and move around as the day went by. She sat down by Frodo's bed, unable to repress a sigh at the sight of him. Brown shadows smudged every hollow of his face; he had gone beyond pale to grey, and fever-sweat plastered his dark hair to his forehead. Gerylon smoothed it away as Iriliath dipped her ring finger in the swirling pearl and let one drop fall in the center of his brow.
Frodo's small body jerked in spasm, arching up from the bed, and as quickly relaxed again. His breathing came in little ragged gasps. Iriliath made her finger steady itself as she murmured the words of the spell and let the second drop fall.
This time it took all Gerylon's strength to hold him down to the bed; his eyes were open, staring, and that foul red light was brighter than ever. It seemed to them as if his teeth had grown sharper, and yellowish. Iriliath raised her voice and let the third drop fall to set the spell in motion.
Frodo screamed. It wasn't the scream of a hobbit in agony; it was the thin grating scream of a Ringwraith. They held him firmly as he twisted and thrashed in their grip, screaming, his eyes glowing scarlet slits. But although the thing that writhed in the bed was not Frodo, had not been Frodo for some days now, Iriliath felt him trying to come back. She imagined that the red light was fading a little, and perhaps it was.
"Frodo," she said urgently. "Frodo, we are about to give you the Life. You must cast out this thing inside you, do you understand? You must cast it out."
His cracked lips moved a little; she bent closer. "..........can't.....let it out...........it will enter you........"
"No," she said calmly, nodding to Gerylon. "We are protected, Frodo." Beside her, Gerylon lifted his finger and gently dropped three drops of the Life on her brow. It was warm, like sunlight after winter. She did the same for him. "We are protected. It cannot enter us, and it is too weak to search for other hosts."
Frodo's terrible eyes rolled up, and he went limp in her arms as he retreated to struggle with the thing that was fighting inside him. She was about to lift the bowl to his lips when the door of the chamber flew open behind her, banging off its hinges with the force that had moved it.
"My lady—" Gerylon began, but Arwen stopped him with a glance, standing in the doorway, her hair lifting about her as if whipped by a wind.
"Let me be here," she said simply, and her voice had the overtones and harmonics that had made Elrond a leader to be followed. Both Healers bowed, slowly.
"My lady, let me prepare you," Gerylon said, softly. Arwen nodded once. Iriliath could feel the power surging within her, the power that had called down the flood on the Ringwraiths, the power that had kept Frodo alive once before when he would have died of a Morgul-steel wound. Gerylon applied the three drops of the pearly Life to her forehead, where they sat in a row like gems on a diadem too fine to be seen. She joined Iriliath at the bedside.
"Do it," she said.
Iriliath once more lifted Frodo from the pillows, trying not to wince as his skin burned her fingers. Gerylon supported him from the other side as she raised the vessel of the Life to Frodo's cracked lips. She tilted it a very little, and some of the liquid pearl trickled into his mouth, and he was just conscious enough to swallow. It brought him a little further up, and she gave him a little more, and a little more, and then suddenly he threw his head back and screamed.
Arwen shuddered and took his hands in hers, remembering the last time she had heard that scream. It went on and on as he thrashed and writhed in the grip of the Healers. "Frodo," she heard herself say. "You must get it out. You must rid yourself of it. Do it now."
And Frodo curled forward in their arms, his eyes squeezed shut, and began to cough. At first all three of them thought it was nothing more than one of his terrible coughing fits, that it would be over in a moment, but he kept coughing on and on, deeper and harsher than before, and now instead of bright drops of blood there was something like black smoke curling from his lips with each cough, something that seemed alive, turning its tendrils this way and that, sniffing for somewhere to hide. More and more of it came out of him, a cloud of the stuff, thick noisome black smoke with things like red sparks dancing in its depths. At last the flow of the smoke trickled away and Frodo's desperate, hysterical coughing eased its way off into weak retches, and they held him until he could lie back against the pillows, exhausted. The cloud was hanging over the bed, searching. One by one it approached them, retreated, swirling angrily, as it felt the protection of the Life on all three Elves, and on its erstwhile host.
Arwen's face was white and set as she rose to her feet and faced the cloud. She dipped the fingertips of both hands in the Life and began, slowly, to trace outlines of runic letters in the air. Faint glowing lines hung where her fingers had passed.
Both the Healers realized what she was doing, and they, too, began to draw the letters in the air. The cloud shrank back from them. Arwen's clear voice fell like crystal bells on the room as she began to chant, and a moment later Gerylon's and Iriliath's voices joined hers. The white letters circled the cloud, slowly swirling around it, and their pale-lit words went on and on, unceasing, unmerciful, inescapable. The net of runes they had woven between them grew smaller and smaller around the cloud.
Realizing it was trapped, the thing began to scream again in fear and rage, a thin high scream that set their ears on edge and made their hair stand stiff. They did not pause in their chanting, nor did the cage of words halt; it tightened and tightened around the cloud, crushing it further and further down. Arwen's chanting intensified, her words hissed through the air, sharp-edged and hard as obsidian. The air seemed to thicken around them, to grow darker; they swayed, but did not pause in their work. The cloud was nothing more than a pinprick now, glowing with the runic cage. The room darkened further; the air weighed like water on their shoulders.
And suddenly it was gone. It seemed that there was a flash of blinding light and a thunderclap that deafened them all; yet none could remember hearing anything. Air rushed back into the room with a dull rumble, and the light sped back up to its normal pace, and the unnatural shadows retreated.
All three Elves turned as one to look at Frodo. He lay crumpled against the pillows, hair tumbled over his face, his eyes closed, and for one awful moment both the Healers and the Lady thought that they had gone too far; but even before Iriliath's desperate fingers closed on his wrist, his eyelashes fluttered and parted, and great luminous blue eyes looked up at them sleepily.
"I feel awful," he said. "Where am I?"
to be continued.........