Title: The Snowboy Part 2: Last Impression

Author: Eärillë

Rating: PG

Warnings: (implied) Character Death, First Draft

Summary:
Nature does give warnings… if only one notices them and interprets them well. Sequel to “The Snowboy Part 1: First Impression.”

Genres: Character Study, Ficlet, Tragedy

Place and Timeline: the Bay of Forochel, Middle Third Age

Characters: OMC youth

Words (in MS Word): 780

Point of View: First Person, Present Tense

Challenge: Day 12: Falls of Sirion:
Elves are one with Nature. What about Men? Hobbits? Dwarves? Write a story or poem or create artwork where the way different races relate to Nature is shown.

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I stand flanked by my parents, heading the congregation of our tribe, and the outsider and his clan gather before us in readiness to go. They persist that they leave now, even though many people have warned them of the Foul One’s grasp on the sea at this time – as if they wish to escape some chilling welcome! (What do they want exactly, then? What did they expect of us? That we would worship them?)

I have been taught, since quite an early age (or so Mother claims, exasperatedly), to recognise the signs of the Foul One’s activities on the clouds and in the winds and on the ice. (I was too active for them to track down and guard, venturing to places most adults would baulk from ever visiting.) And, from all the years I have been watching the warnings of the weather, the words were never as clear as they are now. – Fat grey clouds march menacingly from the North-tip and the dwelling of the Foul One. The wind blows from the same direction, mild in seeming but feeling sharp on the body and smelling so on the nose, laden with the promise of a blizzard. And the ice shifts occasionally, cracking and thinning at some places; uneven, jagged, as if the sea and earth below are preparing for a matching turmoil. And the air itself feels both heavy and surreal, as it seldom was.

Kéil’s and Kinai’s fathers, alongside several other men, will be pulling our reluctant guests to the edge of the water with their sleds. It is the last thing we can do for them. (It is their own business if they choose to doom themselves to a miserable death.) Some kind of sea monster is waiting for them on the edge of the water, ready to take them… and perhaps swallow them all. They call it a large water-sled; but water-sleds are never that big or many-armed!

Those men depart anyway, in the end, despite our last attempt at warning them. The man who his always talking to my father, “Ar’h-pé-dih,” gives a small, glittery something he has been wearing on his fourth finger to my father. He says it is an ancient… something; but we cannot use it! Foolish man; we did tell him and his people what we need, when they were approaching us for a temporary sanctuary, when they tried to barter their pretty, colourful trinkets with our precious foodstuff. – But still, a gift is a gift, and we are not about to throw it into an ice-hole or bury it in the snow. Mother blesses the departure of those men, although I note uncertainty in her usually-strong voice; and we gather and watch till the sleds reach the edge of the water, and those men go out to the water-vessel (our ordinary water-vessel, apparently) that was coming to meet them when they were sledding.

We do not have any chance to see what is next, because the impending blizzard is nearly upon us, and we have to take refuge in the large ice-house the adults have been constructing for this very purpose since several days ago.

We do not come out of it until the weather is clear again, and by then the men that go out first must dig out a tunnel through the snow that has been covering the ice-house on all sides. And afterwards, we busy ourselves mending or replacing the damaged things the snowstorm has caused, and I am given the task to mind my two little sisters (who have decided to celebrate their freedom from the confines of the ice-house by playing snowball fight anywhere and everywhere).

Actually, they are the ones to find out about the fate of those men we sheltered for a time. They stumble on pieces of broken wood, as they try to find another playing area, evading my notice (and hence my capturing them, and bringing them to our parents to be reprimanded). From the size of those bits, I guess it is what became the sea monster on the jaws of the Foul One’s temper. I am just glad we find no bodies… yet. As irritated as I was with them, I do hope those strange, rude outsiders found a quick death.

I herd my sisters back into our reerected tent. But when they are distracted, I turn back briefly and bow towards where the wreckage is buried. Those men were rude, but they were also noble and gallant; foolishly so, perhaps, but we may not speak ill of the dead.

Farewell, Star-eyed Longshanks. Fare you all well wherever you rest waiting for the day of the Eternal Spring.