TITLE: White as Snow.
AUTHOR: Adrienne-in-Berkeley.
RATING: PG.
DISCLAIMER: Tolkien's, not mine.
Once upon a time, we were seven. We lived in a house deep in the forest; inside the house with us shone the sun, whose fire brought light to our world, and his father the moon, and three shining stars. We lived there long in happiness, but no happiness can be everlasting. The moon turned to blood, and the sun burned out, and the stars were stolen, and the seven of us were sundered far beyond the sea. We searched long for the stars, for there was nothing else left to light our darkness.
We did not find them.
Now we are two, living again in the woods, deep in a cave; alone, yet surrounded by many. Always with us are the shadows of the five who are far away, and the shadow that is the absence of the sun and the moon and the three stars.
The girl comes out of the forest one day, darkly cloaked and brightly beautiful. Her hair is the black of the sky on the first night to fall in ten thousand years, when the first sun and the first moon fell down dead and the stars were obscured. She is white as a corpse, and her lips are as red as blood, but her eyes are the gray of the ocean during a storm; they are living things unto themselves, and shine with the light of the stars.
She looks like an exquisite corpse, but when she moves, she could not be more alive, and more bright: she flashes like sunlight through the trees; her hands flutter like doves' wings or cats' claws. When she dances for the court of the city of caves, she is like a fleeting deer in the woods, like a pack of wolves streaming after it, like a thunderstorm's first drops of rain exploding onto dusty ground after a long drought.
She speaks to the steward of the city of her father the king, of a quest, of the city's own, absent, king. Mostly she speaks of her lover, speaks of warmth and truth and depth, of a man of virtue and courage and faithfulness, a man of the skies and the forests, of the changing seasons and of death. But the people cannot see her lover as she does, and her songs of power do not sway them. Perhaps they sense her lover's closeness to death on her lips, clinging to her like a scent; perhaps they are made sick with fear of the warfare that listening to her words would inevitably bring. Powerful as her pleas may be, nobody pays her heed. She tries long after she knows that their ears and hearts are closed to her, but eventually, she falls silent, and the light in her eyes goes out. She is like a glass lamp with its candle unlit. Her body is here in the city of caves, but her soul, which does not deign to consort with those who would spurn her and her mortal lover, resides elsewhere: perhaps it is dancing among the stars of the night sky, piercing and far away.
She stays in a room that we have built, a lamp for her flame, with walls of glass and jewels set all within. She does not speak, and rarely moves, and her eyes, when they are open, are no brighter than the diamonds set into her walls of windows. The room of glass is a coffin, and she, who danced like a storm, who sang like the crashing of the sea, and in whose eyes lived our three lost stars, is dead.
One day I try to kiss her back to life. Our lips press together, mine nearly-living, hers nearly-dead, and as we move together I feel her returning to life, even as I grow closer to death. She pushes me away violently as soon as she awakens, with all the considerable force that a storm-dancer can muster, and her eyes are flashing with starlight and furiously alive. We lock gazes for a moment, but she says nothing, and I reply in kind. When I finally leave her, it is in a cage, not a coffin, and I cannot help but wonder which is better and which is worse.
By the next sunrise she is gone.
NOTES: Fairy tale for Cirdan: happy birthday! Inspired by the Philosopher at Large's Leithian Script, whose Beren I am essentially describing, and, um, more scriptitude: I am not sure that anybody in Nargothrond actually knew that Luthien was interred there besides Celegorm and Curufin. The description of eyes like the sea during, or after, a storm, is from the Princess Bride.