Across the Grinding Ice

We saw fire on the horizon and the ships did not return. We would not go back, could not go back - not then, not ever. We vowed to fight the darkness, to find new lands across the sea.

So many died, so many of my people. Grandfather led the host and it was the duty of his sons to bring up the rear. I would not leave my father, even though he commanded me to join the children where it was safest. But that word was a myth, for there was no true safety in that dreadful place. There was only cold, cold beyond imagining, and pain and death. And with the cold came snow and ice.

I remember snow in Valinor, covering Tirion in a beautiful cloud of white. But on that freezing wasteland there was no white, only bleak greyness stretching from horizon to horizon. Lumps of rock reared out of the ice and fragments lay shattered upon the ground.

Our path was marked by a trail of bodies – less frequent by then, for all but the hardiest had died. We could do no more than lay them down and leave them. The young children were the worst. The cold was too much for them: that cold that seemed to pierce your very bones and try to rest the fëa from your body. Their mothers would not leave them; they would give up their lives on the barren ground with their children clasped in their arms.

My mother is gone. The ice cracked beneath our feet as a crevice appeared, a chasm that seemed to reach down to the very foundations of Arda. She fell as I scrabbled backwards. She reached out to me as the blackness swallowed her. I can still see her so clearly, so very clearly. I saw her fear. I will remember forever. Only my father is left to me, and the curse that shall bring all to ruin.

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Disclaimer: Tolkien’s world and all his characters, belong to Tolkien Estates, New Line Cinema, etc. This is done for the purpose of enjoyment only and I receive no money for playing in his sandbox.