Disclaimer: Tarondor, Osgiliath, and everything else of Middle-earth mentioned within is the creation of Tolkien.


Osgiliath was no longer a place fit to be the home of living men.  They had done what they could; the burnt remains of the plagued dead had long since been cleaned away.  Some of the dead, Tarondor knew, no doubt had not been quite dead when the plague-wardens came to halt the spread of the sickness, torches held aloft, holding the crushed leaves of athelas to their faces in some vain hope that Asëa Aranion would somehow be able to do what the best of Gondor's healers could not – stop the spread of a sickness that took who it wished, leaving the survivors bewildered that their life remained.

This was the home of ghosts now.  The tombs of his family were empty but for ashes – not even for the King could that necessity be ignored.  Uncle, aunt, father, brother, mother, cousins – all these he had lost, yet Tarondor had lived.  And despite all his efforts to revive it, Osgiliath was dying too.

Those who remained were only those without the means to move elsewhere; those unfortunates, and Tarondor, without the strength – yet – to abandon the home of his youth, even as it crumbled around him.  The White Tree was dead; its strength had failed the day the King died.  But there was a sapling yet, and a home awaiting it in Minas Anor, where his wife and son, in the summer-house of the King, awaited Tarondor also.

He sought council now, in the stones of the place of his birth, but the only Stone that might have given him clear answers was lost now, and although he bore the blood of Númenor in his veins he had none of the foresight the Kings of old were famed for.  "These stones will be home to many ghosts more." he told the cold night air, "but not to living Kings.  For today the sun rises in the West, and the stars must yield to her coming."  Neither the air, nor the stones, nor the ghosts who haunted him deigned to answer, and the crown that he had so coveted as a child felt suddenly as heavy as lead.

"My King?"  He recognised the face of the man who spoke, but for the life of him he could not recall his name.  Echoes of his cousins and he, playing warrior games, and tracking mud through the halls.  The way his first real sword had felt in his hand, and the taste of the dust that went with the first defeat the weapons-master had dealt him.  The scent of the roses his aunt had grown… how could he remember all these, these things of the dead, and yet not remember the names of the living?  "The escort has been assembled.  Are you ready?"

"No." he replied, "But I shall take my leave of this place nonetheless."

No living King again came to make Osgiliath his home, but during the reign of Tarondor, long and blessed, it remained as ever the guardian of Gondor, the fortress of stars of which many songs have been sung.  And one more King would take his place there in the end, for when Tarondor's strength failed him, and he passed beyond the circles of the world, they bore his body back to the place of his birth, and in the tomb of Kings there he was laid to rest.


A/N:  The Stone Tarondor is thinking of is the Osgiliath-stone, which, the greatest of all the Palantiri and too heavy for a Man to lift, was lost in the River Anduin during the Kin-strife.  Osgiliath was not entirely abandoned when Tarondor moved to Minas Anor, and it continued as part of the defenses of Gondor, but it continued to decline until, by the time of the Ring War, it was nothing more than a ruin.