"The Drowning of Númenor"

Alaenor-Skybird

Fin. 12/5/08

I was in the city when the wave came. 

My city, Nindamos, the bustling center of my small, petty world. It wasn't much more than a town, really, just a few leagues from the coast. Quaint, by most standards. It was just downriver from our home, though, close enough for me to walk to market by myself to buy the food for our table.

The fish was poor, a day old at best, and I was in a mood to be feared as I left the market and made my way out through the city gate. 

The day was hot, rather muggy. And the people were skittish and afraid. Energy seemed to pound through my limbs, making my movements jerky, my words fast, making tempers short. My head throbbed. The sky was dark, and I did not look upward.

I was sweating my way back up the road towards home with the basket in hand and my skirts around my knees when I  noticed the sound. 

I paused there a moment on the hilltop over the town, listening, and I turned my head back, looking for the source. It was very quiet-- a soothing, shushing kind of sound carried on the thin breeze-- like a teakettle's whistling as it comes to full brew, or the high-pitched hissing of waves on a pebbled shore.  It was a an disquieting, keening breath, a sound that fit well into the nervous background of the day, and might have at first gone unnoticed by many. But it was an insistent note, and it was hard not to notice once it had been heard. 

I was peering down in confusion at an old man on a wagon below me when I heard the panic in the city begin.

Looking down from my perch on the hill I could see everything. The whole city, it seemed. I saw the people beginning to panic, slow and confused at first, some in the streets angry at the men and women who ran past, knocking them aside. Then, as they looked up too and began to see to hear, to hear, I saw them realize. I saw the knowledge spread like a fire, overturning the city as easily as a nest of ants who home is pulled open by an overturned rock. I saw their desperation as they realized that these minutes were their last, and they saw their fear confirmed in their neighbor's eyes. They were banded by an animal kinship, every man fighting for his own life, the same thought on every face. They beat on doors, begging for sanctuary. They fought like madmen. They ran and they prayed, crying for the gods and their families. The streets were in chaos. In the market district, a knot of humanity broiled and thrashed. People were trampled, and carts overturned. I saw a whole load of bright cloth go flying up into the wind; red, blue, green-- I'd passed that stall just a little while before. I saw a woman crying on the ground, beating her fists in the gutter, in helpless fear. A cart collapsing. A pair of horses, hitched together, galloping through the streets, throwing people aside.

I hadn't even bothered to say goodbye anyone when I left. I thought I'd be back in barely an hour. That's what I told my mother.

Everyone was trying to get away. Pushing and shoving, scrambling up the road toward me. I don't know what they were thinking. There was no hope for it anyway. 

But maybe that's what caused it in the first place: not thinking. Not believing. Being too afraid.

And I was standing there on that windy hilltop, just watching, looking out, over, still panting a little from the climb, my breath aching and dusty in my throat. And that last image is burned into the backs of my eyelids for me to see each time I close my eyes, every detail as clear and stinging as flames. Seeing it that first time it felt so odd, detached from me somehow, as I stood looking down at everything in my horrible, ebbing confusion. It all seemed like the product of some strange imagination, a fever dream. The screams I heard were the imagination of some poor, tortured soul. Not real. But there was an awful, heavy, horrified feeling growing inside the pit of my stomach and I wanted to scream too. 

Even if I didn't want to understand, the moment I saw it bearing down on us I knew what it was. I knew where it came from. And I knew why.

I'd never been religious. I didn't believe in anything at all, really. I didn't care enough. I mouthed along with the prayers to the god my parents told us to pray to, and that seemed well enough to me.

I was not Faithful. 

The Gods were just words to me-- Melkor and the Valar both. I was afraid of the sacrifices, of course, and the priests in their far-away towers. I feared them, at least in a distant sort of way. I came from a steady, respectable family, after all. A good family, god-fearing, king-fearing. I'd certainly never given much thought to the actual gods. I thought they were only a story! Stories, to frighten children-- a bedside tale with chain around his neck, who delivered his master enough fear to burn those who displeased him, enough fear to rule a people. Men could be danger, but not gods. Gods, I thought, were nothing.

And did that make me worthy of death? I ask you, did it? 

I was just a child, then. Perhaps I will always be a child. 

Ah, but a poor excuse that may be! Did it matter, did it make a difference? Well, it didn't to me-- I who thought myself a woman grown! It certainly didn't to them. No, no difference, then. For we were judged together, all the people of Númenor as one: the great and the small, the good and the wicked, young and old, wise and ignorant. So many people died that day, and I was older than many. Older than my brothers, at least, and old enough to remember-- to know what it was I had done wrong, what it was that had displeased the Gods so terribly that they set loose so great a destruction upon us. Old enough to hate the Gods, all of them, for what they did to us. Old enough to hate them for it, hate, hate with every piece of me that can feel hatred.

But I hate myself too. Even I should have guessed. I should have paid more attention to what was happening. Politics didn't interest me. They were hard to hear much of, for a bumpkin girl-child like me, but still I could have tried.

My stupid, irritating brothers with their sticky hands and their ringing, quarreling voices. The hens I fed every morning, squawking and flapping copper wings when they saw me. The smell of my mother's lavender-soap dress. My room under the eaves, and the box beneath the bed where I hid my secrets and the new, much-studied letter that promised me the chance for a first taste of romance.

I see it, but it is there no longer. The timbers of my house were water-rotten splinters ages hence. And I am gone to pieces too.

And still... why can I not forget? Even now, I am afraid. Always. And it is eating me up from the inside, every moment, every word. Every breath, in a place without breath, I am afraid. 

And I hate the fear. 

More than the dying, I am afraid of the fear. Because it's part of me, and it always will be, and I cannot stop it. My death came quickly. But it left something behind that changed me forever, and that is more of a punishment than any brief physical pain. I am afraid, always, forever, and I don't want them to punish me again. It's the only thing I can think of, sometimes. My torture is etched onto the backs of my eyelids. It cannot be forgotten. It devours me. Again, it devours me.

Everything, my world, was falling apart. 

Inside me, things were breaking. 

And there was ice, frost burning and aching in my throat, pimpling my skin-- freezing my feet to the ground--

I wanted to make it stop. Make it stop-- please-- stop everything, just make it real again-- but I could feel the horror growing in me, and I could see it, on the horizon-- and it was far, far too real. The dice of my fate were cast, and there was nothing I could do to change them.

Until that first moment I saw the sea-- black and roaring like a tide of monsters from the depths of hell-- rise upward, none of the Gods meant anything to me, none of it was true. 

Until they were. Unexpected, suddenly, they were-- it was. Until with my own eyes I could see it: that black, inarguable wall of water, growing higher-- oh, help us, so high-- on the horizon, rushing over the churning depths of the sea. Only a swelling line on the horizon at first, unnoticed, but then rippling upward, cresting high like muscled lip of vast monster until it was poised to devour the world. Spanning leagues in seconds, rushing over the coast, thundering over fields and towns and woodlands, in a single terror-struck second of crashing, raging, water-- crushing trees and barns beneath it's roaring bulk. 

It was so very fast. The moment between life, and knowledge, and ending, swallowed in a single frightened breath.

I couldn't believe the size of it, truly. It reached from horizon to horizon, as tall as the mountains, I swear high enough to blot out the sun. Bigger and louder than anything in my world. Howling--  it was so loud I felt it's tremors vibrate in my chest. The wrath of the Gods themselves-- !

It sucked away the air for leagues in front of it, the way the little waves I played in at the shore used to pull back at the sand. It sucked the very breath out of my lungs, turned the air still and empty, echoing flatly with screams.

I did not scream, though I wanted to. That is some small point of pride. I did not try to run. 

I think I did weep.

But even then, seeing the wave with my own eyes, I didn't really believe. I saw it coming, and I was afraid of course, so very afraid. So afraid I thought the fear would crush me apart before the wave ever had a chance to. I knew, of course, that it was not a dream. But I did not believe it could be real, either. 

Things like that do not happen. How could they? There are no such things as miracles, no magic in the world. Not in the world that I was born into. There are no gods that reach down to brush the earth with their breath and fingertips. The universe does not change like that-- so suddenly become something strange and threatening and unreal. I knew that it did not.

And so I thought somehow, even as I watched the destruction, that none of it would really come true-- that at the last moment, somehow, we would be spared. That the next dawn would rise over a world the same as it had ever been.

It was so very simple, that last judgement of the Gods. Unstoppable. Powerful. So very clean. 

They wiped us clean away. 

I still marvel at it. As easy as a child sweeping ants off the stoop. One simple action-- Uncaring. Unavoidable. A wave that swept over us, above me, past me, rushing around the fiery peak of Meneltarma itself. No where, no time to run, by the time we-- that I-- saw it coming.

And so I simply stood, watching. A frightened, tiny girl standing all alone in the riotous crowd on that hilltop, clutching at the woven handles of my basket. And I stood and watched my death, that black line on the horizon, coming closer and closer-- 

'Till suddenly it was just there, over the hill. Just there, a wall faster than thought-- just there, 'till in a burst of crushing dark!-- 

It swallowed up my world.

~ o.O.o ~

EDITED: 1/27/10

Disclaimer: I do not own Nindamos, Númenor, Melkor, Meneltarma, or any of the Valar. They are canon places and beings, and copyrighted by the fantastic JRR Tolkien. All credit for inspiration goes to him.

Note: This isn't meant to preach on either the horrors of godlessness or fanatical religion. I think it more reflects my views on people who have the power to end wars, or global warming (or any other world issue) but who choose to ignore it, and the innocent people who suffer for that. Plus, my idea of what the tsunami in India several years ago might have felt like. That's the worst way to die I can think of. I had nightmares for weeks. 

Reviews are appreciated.

Thank you. :)