Disclaimer: Middle-earth and everything in it does not belong to me, and neither does the bit of filk here. It belongs to Tom Smith.
Author´s note: This story was inspired by the first Silmfics Filk-Challenge Joan Milligan started… it may have taken a while, but I finally came up with something.
* * *
You made us in your image, you left us in your wake
You made us with your hearts and minds and you cannot make us break
Those who came before you sought the freedom we will win
And those who'll follow after will accept us as their kin.
* * *
I wonder what time will bring. People said that mortals would wither and die in the bliss of Valinor, yet I was granted life.
The only one of human kind.
This is the land my ancestors sought for so unavailingly, this is the land they wandered West for. Of this land their tales tell, and now I walk this untainted earth where nothing fades.
The only one to live their tales.
I was born a man, and though I still bear the appearance of one of them, my steps have become more graceful, my voice more fair, and my heart more wise, more longing for what it can no longer have. I was a man once. I have lived most of my live among them, and yet it hurts to be sundered from my people. But I will not break, for I have the love of one of the deathless.
The only one to embrace one of the Eldar.
The fates are strange and ever changing. I was a lone man once, living in the woods and hills, playing my harp for the ears of wild beasts. Now I am accounted as one of the Eldar, accepted by them without a frown, albeit with many a curious look and question how I came to be one of them. I do not know how I won this grace.
The only one to find the freedom of immortality all my kind dreamt of.
Freedom? It may be, or it may not be. For my people it means freedom, freedom of the shadow that Morgoth cast on their death, for me it is entrapment in an unfamiliar life. And I know now the sadness of the Firstborn, their wistfulness and why they envy the fate of men. They are bound to this world, and they feel it changing. They can not escape, until the final end comes and the stars will cease to shine.
The only one of men to stay on this world , even though all my kin has perished.
I am the only one whose blood is purely that of men, who will forever walk this earth and live.
I am torn between hope and despair. I am the one who looks East, and yet feels his heart beat in the Undying Lands.
I am accepted and looked upon with wonder by those who live here and those who return from their agelong exiles in the East. And yet, they do not know what I feel, for though I may hold the heart of one of them, and though I now may move like them, think like them, yes, even share their fate, nothing can change what I really am.
For I am and will remain Tuor, a man, the only immortal of my people.
