Rating: Probably PG. I'm so ashamed.
Pairings: Elrond/Gil-galad
Summary: Gil-galad, death and the Dead Marshes.
Warnings: Uh, apart from a little artistic licence taken with canon concerning Gil-galad, none.
Notes: Written in oh, about 43 minutes, for the contrelamontre taste challenge.
The Dead Marshes of the Emyn Muil crept slowly across the plains. For a thousand years or more they spread, an insidious disease, their foul waters poisoning a once fair land until few remained who remembered what had gone before. Some saw the Marshes as a living entity, sentient, purposeful, self-serving and single-minded. Perhaps they were right. All along the Marshes seemed to possess a kind of malicious direction.
Few were left to mourn the fallen when at last the marshes engulfed the graves of the Battle of Dagorlad. An age had passed since the days of the Last Alliance and though remembered still in myth and legend, those who had fallen then to save Middle-earth were all but forgotten. Even the brave Ereinion Gil-galad, last High King of the Noldor and valiant leader of the Elves, had passed out of memory. But he had not passed from the earth.
Beneath the water he lay, dead, unmoving, for a hundred years. His armour gleamed as it had the day that he died, his long black hair suspended about his head as a dark crown, shifting with the waves. His great spear Aeglos lay in his hand. Beneath the water, beneath the sky, he seemed peaceful.
He woke. In a moment of panic he could not remember his name, and he flailed in the waters, tried to call out, but quickly the panic subsided. He breathed in the water of the Marsh and fell still.
He frowned, the first frown to crease his brow in millennia. He opened his eyes and through the water he saw the sky overhead, blue and cloudless. Behind his eyes he saw flame. He cringed. His skin burned. Every inch of him was on fire, burning, cooking right there on the bone… he still smelled his burning flesh on the air, tasted it sour in his mouth mixed with the smoke of the battle, the taste of roasted fat and fresh blood thick on the air. He breathed and felt his lungs fill with flame. He felt sick. He was dying.
No, no – he was dead. He had died there, that day, there on the battle plain. He had died, burned to death by Sauron’s terrible heat.
He shivered, took a deep breath to calm himself and breathed in water instead of air. For a moment it tasted foul, stagnant, and he almost choked. But then it changed; it was sweeter then, sweet as any wine he had ever drunk. He drank it in, felt it breathe new life into his charred lungs, soothing his burned body. Soon the burning was gone. Soon he had almost forgotten that it had ever happened.
He lay still. The sun set in the west and he watched as it rose again in the east, day after day. He lay beneath the surface of the water and felt the midday heat and the stony chill of the night, gazed through the mist and up into the stars. He felt the rain as the water rippled against his motionless face. He had eternity to remember, and eternity to forget.
He never recalled his name. He never recalled the names of those who had died at his side, or the names of those who survived. It seemed important for only a moment, before the waters told him that he need not be troubled. He had seconds of panic followed by years of calm as he lay there, thin memories of nameless faces dancing before his eyes.
An Elf with dark hair and dark eyes, strong, a fierce warrior. He saw himself there, lying on the field, passing a ring into the hand of this Elf. There were tears in their eyes and he could not see the face clearly for them. A hand touched his face before he passed. He remembered. This would be his one memory for eternity, his death reflected in the Elf’s eyes, a vision blurred by tears.
At night he lit a candle beneath the water. He held the impossible light in his cupped hands and stared up into the sky, longing. There was so little that he remembered before the heat, and then the water, that he could not put a name to that for which he longed, but he felt it sharply in every instant. This was the reason that he lit his candle. He did not understand, not until a shape moved above him, and his heart, long still, leapt in his chest. A traveller. At last, a living being!
He longed. He ached. If he had known the names of the deities he would have prayed. He stared, anxious, hoping, until the figure came closer. It leant over him, the pretty one, small one, a pretty ring about its neck, further, further down, coming closer… Then it tumbled, was in the water with him, and his hands were tangled in its clothing, pulling it closer, pulling it down. He had never known such joy. He wanted to keep it there with him, company in his cold eternity.
But it was pulled away. Beneath the water his shriek was hideous, and the pain was unbearable. Only for a moment. The Marshes calmed him. Wait, they said. There will be another. He lay still, and waited, dreaming of gleaming gold armour and of long, dark hair.
The Dead Ones waited there, alone and together, never aware of each other’s presence. They waited to snare a traveller, to pull him down, to keep him with them there to alleviate perhaps a little of their empty solitude. Their lights in the darkness call to the living, a symbol of everything that they lost, that death and the Dead Marshes stole from them. The Dead Ones will never move on. Their eternity is there, in that light, beneath the water, far from everyone they ever loved.
Gil-galad never recalled his name. In time, its importance waned. In time all that mattered to him was the lighting of the candle, and the sweet taste of the water in his mouth.
The End
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