2. Eternal Return
But what of the second side of the blade, or the coin if we were to be more peacefully inclined?
Yes, it might sound awesome to live a long life, to see firsthand the great wonders that had passed into legend - or altogether into oblivion, so thoroughly were they wiped from existence and the fickle, malleable human memory. The Eldar's remembrance is more of a sure thing, but as rotten luck would have it, not many of our kin, not many at all, have remained long enough to witness the beginning of the recorded history of mankind, and only a handful have stuck until the first vestiges of modernity.
The reason is simple: there is such a thing as too long a life. At some point, there is nothing that can touch your heart anymore; thoughts and memories of the past accumulated in the far reaches of your mind compress into literal dead weight dragging you down, and unless there is a very compelling reason for your continued existence, you start literally falling through yourself like an old star collapsing into its own core. Though unlike the stars - which, in our language, share the core of their name with our very race - we do not give radiant, explosive birth to something new and wonderful after the self-collapse had passed the point of no return - we simply fade out of existence. Forever.
Surely, there are things to keep the best - or at least, the most prominent - of us anchored to this world instead of blanching out and becoming intangible, incomprehensible - inconsequential. For some, it is love for another, for some, duty, for someone else, vengeance.
For me, it was penance.
Beats me, though, why none of this is relevant to Aman. Does the air there contain some weird X molecule to preserve us as we are, or is there a Z energy field yielding the same result? A few times over the millenia I have been idly pondering the question, discounting it as theoretical mind-sport since there would be no way, I believed, for me to ever be welcomed back. I would forevermore be sailing the strait between the Scylla of my repentance and the Charybdis of eventual fading. As years were going by, I was made ever more certain that I was comfortably forgotten, but that did not grant me an ounce of freedom. Around me, the pyramids were erected, Rome got sacked a few times, the violent riders under the Great Khan's banner raped and pillaged half the known world, and it only went downhill from there. Genghis would have been proud of his spiritual inheritors that erected the metaphorical skull piles that veritably dwarfed his own. I knew, since I was in the trenches of the Great War and then in the Red Army when my unit liberated Auschwitz.
I've seen this world and I got the shirt.
It was tempting at times. Not to take my own life outright, of course - my dearly beloved brother Maitimo did just that, and it shocked me to the core - but to allow a storm, a sword-blade, a bullet, a beast-fang, a cloud of radiation to end my earthly path. Whither would I go from there, would I awake in Aman as had all my deceased brethren - disembodied but very much still existing (I just prayed Maitimo was not an exception)? Would I thenceforth be confined to the halls of Mandos for all my crimes, never given a greenlight to be reincarnated - or worse, would the winds of the metaphorical West rise up and deny my spirit the passage to the hallowed land? I knew this was what happened to Curumo when he was killed. I was not there at the deed, but a reliable witness had retold me the story years later.
No. To cut short this journey before me would have been to attempt at skipping penance. The gavel had descended millenia ago on the shores of Belegaer, and there was no parole to be handed. That word was, most likely, not even in this version of the Penal code.
All of it changed one day, when I realized with ironclad certainty that I was given the go-ahead to return. Don't ask me how. I simply knew - consider this an epiphany.
Note: the chapter name is from a song by Therion (from Deggial album, 2000)
