Disclaimer: "The Lord of the Rings" and all related items belong to J.R.R. Tolkien. This is merely an excursion into Middle Earth as it transitions from a land of hobbits and elves to the domain of man.

The Dark Forest – Part XI

There is movement at the edge of my vision; a soft blur that somehow sweeps across from my left side to my right. I try to follow it, but cannot, for my eyes seem…closed. And yet they ache so; they ache so terribly – it is my head that is burning from a fire, or is it but the memory of that fire?

Such pain in my back, a stabbing wound, a stake that drives itself in deeper each time I seek to know what is wrong; and then the weariness that seeps through my bones and settles in my limbs until I feel that I will drown in a sea of white bedsheets.

I breathe in, slowly, letting the breath float down into my stomach, or somewhere like that, and then I exhale, parting my lips ever so slightly. The air that issues forth from my mouth feels cool and refreshing, and I wish that I were blowing it back on myself, so that I would not feel the tiny tongues of flame rising all over my body and dripping into sweat. I moan, softly, and the letting-go of sound relieves some of my tension. Amazing, that a sound can give one relief from pain. And so I hum, deep in my throat, just a long, tuneless note – a note that one hums as one awakes from a very deep sleep, as one absorbs the warmth from the bed and gently presses down into that source of heat for one more tide of relaxation before sleep ebbs away.

I want to open my eyes, and I do not. If I open my eyes I will have to face something new – perhaps a new dawn, perhaps a new day, a face, a place, a race to run until I can sleep again. Still, I feel different, as if the gods have given me their hands and carried me into another realm – at least for a little while.

I swallow thickly, stickily, and try to coat my mouth with some saliva. I am thirsty for pure water, fresh from the spring at the edge of the village. I remember the spring before the village grew; when it was more than a mere trickling brook. Clean in the winter, and rushing. Sweet in springtime, with the faintest taste of honeysuckle and rosebuds. Sweet until the late spring rains, when it became muddy and dark with overflow, and coated with washed away leaves and branches. Then, for a little while in the summer, crisp, and clean as the most delicately and lovingly made juice. My mother makes juice for us in summer, and stores it in a small hollow that I discovered under the spring. It is good water until the high heat of summer, when the younger children who are not aiding their mothers and fathers in some manner of work steal away to play in the refreshing water. They kick up the bilge and dirt on the spring-bed beneath, and the spring becomes clouded and foggy. I do not go there in autumn, when the water has nearly dried up. Mother told me that we must let it replenish itself – she told me when I was much younger, but I still believe it to be true. I have not been very many times this summer. Mayhap I will go when I return home…

Return home…gods, aid me on this. Why must I return? Have I set out on a quest? Here I lie in my bed, pained…pained for what reason? I do not seem to recall…anything – although I see him, painted behind my closed eyelids like an icon of beauty, like a private, private secret.

I must return home. I must return home. Then I am not in my bed, and I have a need to be somewhere else.

What I must do right now is open my eyes. I feel prepared, although my head-pain is not lessened, and though the fire under my skin burns even more brightly. The blur shifts across my vision again, like a fine white light filtered through a murky bluish shadow. Blue is the colour I see when my eyes are closed in the early evening, after twilight has passed and the sun has disappeared beneath the Dark Forest. So it must be evening. I should be able to tell by the feel of the air on my skin, but it seems that I am covered in a thin layer of sweat, and beneath the chill of that, the heat of my own skin rages against me. Gods, let it go away! Make it go away!

I am not one who bears pain or illness with no complaint; I feel both as much as any one else. Yet I keep forgetting about this pain. It drifts in and out of my mind without any invitation, without any elegance, with…my thanks. I am grateful that it does not always plague me, even in this short time.

I will open my eyes.

I breathe in again, a hugely deep breath, as though I am going to leap into the Six-Mile Lake from the short cliff that stoops out of the water. My brothers beg me to take them there each summer. I wonder whom they will ask now, now that I am – no longer at home?

My eyelashes cling to my cheeks for a moment, and then my eyelids slide upwards. Everything is blurry, everything is white, almost blindingly so. I squint, and then things come into focus. Everything is still fuzzy about the edges – or perhaps it is meant to be that way. I do not know what everything is.

A chair? standing near to my bed; a curtain? twining about my bedpost, that whips in the wind from the wide open, glassless window on my right side. I wonder if it is the source of the whiteness that has been flitting across my vision. But the gauzy, feathery looking material does not billow far enough. And then I hear something, from somewhere else…footsteps, and then soft voices in that same lilting accent…

That same lilting accent. I close my eyes again, as if this has been too much, and I feel the tide submerse me in a terrible, silent peace.