"From the sky came dropping down on high

a music not of bird,

not voice of man, nor angel's voice;

but maybe there is a third

fair kindred in the world yet lingers

beyond the foundered land.

Yet steep are the seas and the waters deep

beyond the White-tree Strand."

J.R.R. Tolkien "Imram"

Gerion

Gerion was awakened by voices: a maiden's and a man's, speaking in a tongue he did not understand, as strange as it was beautiful. He realised that he was no longer lying on the soggy log, but dry and warm boards that were swinging slightly, single specks of sand slipping through every hole in the remnants of the clothes he was wearing, and someone was shaking his shoulder lightly. He slowly opened his eyes and got so terrified that it seemed to him that his heart was about to jump out of his chest.

Two faces were leaning over him, as strange as they were beautiful, and so, so bright it seemed he was looking straight into the sun and would go blind at any moment. He closed the eyelids back and clenched as hard as he could.

I have died, he thought frantically. I have died, and the damn gods exist.

"Do you hear me?" the man's voice changed the language to the Common Tongue, and its owner shook Gerion's shoulder once more.

I'm dreaming or I'm dead, there is no middle ground here, and the latter is strongly likely... Get a grip, you cowardly lion! I do not seem to have ended up in hells, and if those septon fools are to be believed, the gods are able to be good from time to time and supposedly don't wish Men so badly after all. Mayhap we may reach a settlement...

He cautiously opened his eyes again. The man-god's face was still leaning over him, and (Others take him!) it was impossible to tell whether it was old or young. It was pale and smooth as milk, dark hair, long and straight, bordered it, and eyes like two sapphires stared at Gerion as though they could see without the slightest difficulty every darkest corner of his soul.

"Are you well, master Man?" the man-god asked.

Well?, Gerion mocked inwardly. Was this some customary formula of the gods to ask Men after death about their wellbeing? If so, there was perhaps a hint of a chance that the gods had at least a shred of humour. His heart was still pounding like mad, yet nevertheless he was slowly getting used to the brightness of these beings, just as a man who stays longly in murk gradually gets used to the glare of the sun.

"Chanced I've been better." He curled his lips in what he assumed was a half-dry, half-pathetic smile. "But given the circumstances, I am not complaining, I bethank for your kind interest, my lord."

Afterwards he shifted his gaze to the girl-goddess and knew not whether he ought to regret it at once and look away so as not to go mad for the rest, or continue to stare at her in blissful delight as a green boy, gradually beginning to bless this day of his death. She was lovely, and even those few Essos maids that Gerion had once found stunning could never compeer with her...

His gaze must have seemed greedy to the girl, though, for she lowered her eyes... shyly? Gerion came to his senses a little and furrowed his brow. During his life and back in Westeros he had thought many things of the Maiden in the sept: that she was quite winsome, probably very naive, and mayhap quite kind, yet shy under the weight of a mere Man's gaze?

Yet her odd shyness gave him the strenght to lift himself up on his hands (albeit uncertainly) and look ahead. This he regretted immediately. "Seven... bloody... hells..." he stammered in a plucked whisper, breathing heavily, and his eyes nearly went out of their orbits.

They were on a boat, and still at sea, so peaceful, especially compared to the stormy waves that were Gerion's last memory, and the sun's rays were reflecting off its sheet, making it shimmer like little daytime stars. Not afar was a land, and yonder, on the left stood a tower as a white, luminous arrow, and its spire shone as though a second sun rested there like a jewel in the tower's crown. Gerion could hardly bear this light, so he lowered his eyes swiftly, yet below was not much better...

Midst the rocky tongues of the coast he beheld a harbour, scarcely less white and less fulgent than the tower, and swan-ships, with long necks and the grace of the gods themselves, rode nearby or stood moored at the wharf. What ships they were! The most ferly ones, of which Gerion could only think they were beautiful. They seemed whiter than the seagulls circling over the sea and the quayside, whiter even than the tower, and glowed with such unheard-of radiance that perhaps had not even Brightroar of the Valyrian steel, and floated on the waves so subtly and lightly as though not touching them at all. They reminded Gerion of true and awesome swans about to take flight, straight out of some daft children's stories his wet nurse would tell him once he had been a little boy.

Gerion admired ships dearly and now he might have stared for hours, enchanted, had their brilliance not begun to reel in his mind... He tried to shift his gaze, yet in vain: woods, mountains, and still the same, still scarcely better... How could one sight, the most wondrous he had ever seen, arouse both such affright and such bliss, a happiness greater than he could have imagined? The woods, the mountains... and those seagulls, those damn seagulls aloft, over the harbour, over the sheet of the water and over himself, and then in his head, and then in his soul... Those seagulls everywhere, huge swarms of whiteness, each one like a scrap of bandage sent to soothe, to heal every, even the littlest wound of his soul... I shan't bear it, damn birds, damn brightness!, Gerion closed his eyes, tightened his lids again... and suddenly all drowned in blackness as he fainted and sank back unconscious to the boat's floor.

When he opened his eyes again and the awareness of his situation slowly returned to him, he was lying on a narrow timbered bed placed beside a window with the shutters open wide, wherethrough the branches of a young birch peeked. A swallow sat on the sill of the window frame, tilting its head and looking directly at Gerion, the blackness of its wing glittering in the sunlight.

"Even you shine like a lighthouse here," Gerion muttered to the bird, rolling his eyes.

Yet eftsoons he suddenly remembered something and began feverishly rooting in the pocket of his tattered hose. It's still there!, he thought with strange relief as his fingers came across his stone, which he then pulled out and spun around awhile in his hands. It was now gray and utterly ordinary, indistinguishable from thousands of other stones, yet Gerion still remembered how strangely it had shone that day long before whenas he had found it on the quay of Lannisport with his nephews Jaime and Tyrion, caught in a net by fishermen along with a pile of stinking fish...

The wooden door creaked and swung open. He hastily slipped the stone back into his pocket ere a man entered the room. He was as brightly beautiful as the gods with whom Gerion had been on the boat before, but no longer frightened him like those. The power of inuring. One can even get used to being dead after all, he thought, albeit still far from calm was he.

"You have awoken," the man said, having looked at Gerion and smiled slightly. His hair was long and dark, and he seemed young, younger than Gerion himself, yet there was something in his eyes that made them look elder than the sun and moon.

Therewithal, the eyes of these gods made Lannister shudder and he liked that not.

He rose on the bed and watched with a furrowed brow as the man-god walked to the table and poured water from a jug into a cup, then sat on the edge of the bed. Gerion glanced at the cup distrustfully as the man held it out towards him.

"Go on, drink!" the man encouraged, so Gerion hesitantly took a small sip at first. The water was cold, delicious, and he suddenly realised how thirsty he was and that water had never tasted better. He took the cup from the man and drank to the bottom.

"I am Beleg," the man-god told him in the meantime. "Lord Círdan and Nellas, who found you, brought you to my house, for I live anigh the shore."

"Am I dead?" Gerion asked directly, wanting to be already done with it.

Beleg chuckled and the sound rang like soft bells. "Dead? You are not, obviously. Not in the meaning Men apprehend death," he said.

"Where am I, then, if I have not died?"

"Still on Arda, albeit in a land whereto Men have no access, bating a few exceptions whom the Valar themselves have given their consent."

"You are in Aman," he clarified eftsoons, seeing that Gerion was not grasping. "Perhaps this time it has been their will for you to come here as well, although the circumstances of your arrival are strange and astonishing to us."

Gerion must have made a face so confused and uncomprehending that Beleg became even more puzzled. "Is the name already unknown among the Men in the world?"

"I've never heard it, and I am no fool," Gerion muttered, his Lannister pride (that he still had within himself, even if he himself claimed otherwise) resented the indulgence of Beleg's gaze. "Who are the Valar? Are you the Valar?"

He at once realised, though, that he had now truly asked like a fool, so to make Beleg forget the question, he turned hastily on the bed towards the table and, having put away the empty cup, began to draw an invisible map on the wood of the tabletop with his finger and explain the route of his ship from the day he had left Lannisport and fared westwards months before, and now probably even longer...

Erelong he felt the same indulgent gaze of Beleg on himself, and as he looked up at him, the unnerving eyes of the man-god were laughing.

"What?" Gerion found himself unable not to snap, cursing the sudden embarrassment that had seized him.

"What year is it now and what age as per the reckoning of Men?" Beleg asked.

Gerion furrowed his brow at him suspiciously, yet answered, "It was 288 year After Aegon's Conquest when I set sail, so I would guess it's 289 now, or 290 mayhap as months have passed. So?"

Beleg smiled slightly and moved his gaze to look thoughtfully at the trees outside the window. "Here in Aman, Time flows at its own rhythm, and what is an age for you is oft merely a brief while for us. Yet I am still well aware that it was thousands and thousands years ago when I did live in your lands. I wot nought of the lands they have become, yet I am sure they must have changed far more than I may have ever imagined."

He then lowered his eyes to stunned Gerion and went on, "Scarcely more I may wit of your maps and your Mannish names, yet I see that coming hither was not what you intended nor was it the conscious desire of your heart."

"Wait!" Gerion laughed nervously, unable to bear it anymore. He still tried to treat this whole thing as some sort of not-so-good jest. "Thousands... and... thousands, you say? And you are still claiming that we are... still alive? So what was here?" He pointed to the empty cup on the table. "The potion of immortality you're wont to drink daily?"

At that moment, the door creaked open again and the two whom Gerion remembered from the boat stood before him as well like fulgent spectres: the man with his face thoughtful and serious, and the girl hiding behind his back and peeking out from behind it with a slight smile and eyes glittering with curiosity.

Beleg glanced fleetingly at them, then shifted his puzzled gaze back to Gerion and asked, "Have you not recognised that we are the Elves, not the mortal Men?"

"Elves?" Gerion echoed, feeling that he was looking utterly helplessly at their faces, one after another. "And who, in seven hells, are Elves?"

Ty for reading! :) Next POV: Brandir, and we're going back to the main trio