The Price of Freedom

By Erin Lasgalen

FORWARD AND WARNINGS: R for content. This story is an AU. With the exception of the first chapter it is set post-ROTK. It will contain heavy violence, the mention of rape though no actual depictions, and sexual content—again, no gory details. DISCLAIMER: This story was written solely for the purpose of non-profit entertainment. All canon characters and places therein are the property of Tolkien Estates and New Line Cinema.

Chapter 4----Sun, Fire and Shadow

She woke with the sunrise, bleary-eyed and sluggish, her head pounding. She shifted against the warm body that lay curled about hers, burying her face in the smooth skin of his chest, willing the burning behind her eyes to subside. They lay on their sides, face to face in a warm tangle of limbs, her head pillowed on his arm.

"Legolas," she said faintly. "It is dawn." She jostled him gently and winced. The wounds in her shoulder had stiffened up. She touched the two sets of bite marks and felt the heat of infection in the punctures. She was light-headed and feverish and every muscle felt as though it had been pulped with a mace.

He made a muted sound of quiet anguish and lowered his head, gently removing her hand from the inflamed wounds. "I hurt you," he whispered against her hair. "I am sorry."

He set his mouth against the wounds there, as though he thought he could kiss it better. She knew little of Elves, but she was sure he had no such power. The warm press of his lips on her skin did not sear away the infection or erase the physical battering and blood loss she had sustained during the last two days, but it did much to distract her from her discomfort.

She shuddered with reaction as he moved his mouth along the line of her collarbone. His arms had curled about her, drawing her body closer, and she clung to him. His warm hand was beneath her tunic, gliding up her spine and down again. He rolled them both a bit so that she lay halfway atop him, freeing his other hand to touch her. He set both hands on either side of her waist and laughed softly in her ear when he found a ticklish spot just above her navel. She gazed down at him in a daze of breathless heat, thought and sense flown like hummingbirds in autumn, as he ran one finger along the flat plane of her stomach, his face a flushed portrait of mischief. She realized distantly she was now sitting astride him like some wanton brothel girl.

There was something wrong here, something important she had forgotten. She frowned, trying hard to think. She took his hands in hers, stopping their upward exploration of her body before she lost the capacity for anything remotely resembling rational thought.

His eyes were wide and full of sorrowful apology. "You are angry with me." Their normal deep gray had darkened to indigo with worry and regret.

"No," she said. She ground her teeth, her head swimming, trying to remember what it was she had forgotten. "There was something we needed to do at dawn. I cannot remember what it was!"

His eyes dimmed and he looked troubled. "Yes," he said slowly. "I---I have forgotten as well. But it was important, I think." He ran one hand up count of her ribcage in a thoughtful, almost absent, caress.

As he did this, his fingers brushed the side of her breast and she jerked against him in reaction. She held his eyes, her breath quickening as, hesitantly, and with exquisite gentleness, he cupped her breast in his hand. Heat exploded inside her, burning upward from the juncture of her thighs, sweeping away all her worries of forgotten chores left undone. She leaned down and kissed him fiercely, rocking her hips against his in a slow, sliding rhythm, reveling in the way he arched and gasped beneath her. He was speaking to her in his own tongue, uttering the beautiful alien words in a raw, breathless whisper.

She smiled against his mouth and pulled her tunic over her head, shedding it in one quick movement. She set one hand on the ground beside him, pulling at the lacings of her breeches with the other. And as she did, she felt a sharp prick against her palm. She winced, holding up her hand. She had cut it on a sharp bone shard----

Bones shards---

They were lying on a mountain of crushed bone!

Oh, gods of Earth and Sky!

The cold clarity of recollection was like a bucket of ice water down her spine. Which, she reflected shamefully, was apparently the very thing they both needed at the moment. She met his eyes, and somehow, her sudden change of mood communicated itself to him. He froze beneath her, his face suddenly creased with a frown of confusion. Then his eyes flew wide.

"Eowyn!" He gasped. "What---what are we---?" He trailed off, his face suddenly flushing to the roots of his pale hair. "Nay, do not answer that. I know what we were doing. Or what we were about to do. Eru! I had forgotten our danger and very nearly my own name! What---what is happening to us?" His voice was soft and a little frightened.

She realized with a flash of sudden insight that this---this taint of evil, this slow downward spiral into darkness, terrified him more than a host of morgul beasts. He had no fear of death in battle whatsoever, but this internal attack upon his soul, this plague upon his very essence, was the stuff of nightmares to him. In that respect, they were very similar.

She eased her body off of his with as much tattered dignity as she could manage under such circumstances and hurriedly pulled on her tunic. She turned away from him, hearing the gravelly crunch of bone debris as he sat up carefully. She folded her arms around herself in mortified humiliation, as though she were still half-naked.

"It is part of the change, I think," she said quietly, trying to keep her voice even, trying to act as though nothing had happened. "With all of the other Hunters, Simiasha’s blood changed their bodies, but it also---" She searched for the right words, hearing her voice crack like that of an old woman. "---blurred their memories of their lives as living beings. And upon this blank slate, she remade them in her own image, infusing them with her own evil."

Oh, gods, what must he think of her! It was not only the shameful memory of how she had somehow taken physical pleasure when he had bitten her last night. As an Elf, whose body never warmed to desire without the catalyst of love, he must feel sickened, perhaps even violated, by what they had---what they had almost---

She could feel him watching her closely. She finally found the courage to turn around. His face blank of any expression at all. He swallowed slowly. "So---so, without Simiasha’s influence, our memories of who and what we are still continue to dim?"

She nodded. Her hands were trembling, so she clenched them tightly. Even if they lived through this, he would surely never be able to bear the sight of her again. His friendship, one of the most important friendships of her life, was lost to her. "Only without her imprint, we become like wild things. Or in my case, like---like an animal in season." She turned her face away, not wanting to see the sharp, bright flash of hurt that leapt out of him at her harsh words. "Legolas," she said tightly. "I am sorry! I know you would never---I---I know that you must be horrified---"

"If I remember correctly," he said softly, carefully, "You initiated nothing. It is I who should be asking your forgiveness." He seems to shift indecisively where he sat, as though he wished to move closer, but feared what she would do if he did. "Do not say ‘animal’, Eowyn. Say rather, like a child who is a year or two past learning to walk. That is what it felt like to me, at least. There was no thought, no care, no fear of consequence. I saw that you were soft and warm and as fair as any Elf maid ever born. I felt that you were dear to me, as dear as the two brothers of my heart. And so, I took you in my arms. My sweet friend, we are stained with evil, but in the memory of that act I can find nothing but light and joy!"

She doubled over, one hand on her stomach, feeling sick with relief and---and everything! She thought longingly of the dreamy, almost drunken euphoria she had felt an hour or two ago when she lay in his arms in the aftermath of the blood letting that had freed his soul from Simiasha’s thrall. She had an unwholesome sense of pressure in her chest, a feeling of something inside her approaching overload. She felt like a water skin that had been filled beyond capacity. She felt ready to burst. Legolas edged nearer, kneeling before her motionless, in an agony of indecision. Finally, he reached out to her, caressing her hair and face tentatively. The mere brush of his fingertips seemed to quell the greater part of her distress.

"I suffered loss of inhibition and memory moments ago, but otherwise, I was still myself. I said things to you last night that I cannot unsay," he told her gently. She raised her head up to meet his sea gray eyes and saw that they were shining with unshed tears. "But having spoken, I cannot find it in my heart to regret having done so."

She could not think about all that his words implied. Not now. She turned her mind away from it, shaking her head. It was too much. She lay her hand against his mouth, softly, before he could say more. "Do not speak further!" She nearly pleaded. "There are too many things at war in my mind and heart. If you add one more thing to the brew I may fly apart!"

"That I understand all too well," he said softly. "I know we are both at the limit of what we can bear. But we must be strong. We will see daylight this day, Eowyn! I swear it!" He turned his face into the hand she had rested on his cheek and kissed the palm of her hand, almost reverently. "We shall speak of these things later, with the Sun on our faces."

"Yes," she agreed, smiling back at him feebly.

She sat up straight. It was too soon to fall to pieces. She would have ample opportunity for that later. She groped on the ground for the fire bottle she had found in the dead girl’s hand and held it up. "We must find more of these. They are tin bottles full of a liquid distillation of Fallah’s burning powder. No one used them at the battle of South Pass because there was no time to light them. But Fallah passed them out to many of the Watch that night. The---the other bodies of the women who were taken that night may yield several more of these bottles."

They searched the scores of the newly dead, a grizzly treasure hunt. The bodies of the women of the Watch yielded half a dozen more bottles. They might have found more, but after an hour of this, Eowyn could search no more. She had turned over too many decomposing corpses with familiar faces, all of whom she had led to their deaths.

Legolas took her hand and simply held it, offering no word of condolence as she stared down at the face of Ibasha of Bent Bow Watch House. Suni had said the girl would have turned eighteen on two months.

"These six bottles we have will be enough," he told her. "We will give her and all the others here a burial of sorts very soon."

She turned her head upward, craning her neck back to see the seemingly endless well above them. Beside her, Legolas lay his hand upon the wall of the Pit and tore away a tatter of brown lichen-like growth. He lay his hand against the uneven, pock-faced stone beneath. "We will have to climb out of this Pit," he told her. "We must not start any sort of fire before we reach the top." He crumbled the lichen in his hands. It was as dry as saw grass. "If this coats the walls all the way to the top the fire will catch us up before we can climb out."

She found a provision pack lying beside one of the Gondorian dead and loaded the bottles into it gently, slinging the satchel across her back. Beside her, Legolas was speaking to another soldier of Minas Tirith, murmuring a soft apology in Elvish as he removed the Man’s boots and tunic, donning them hastily. If they managed to escape the Nest, the Dustlands west of the Crags were harsh desert scrub. He would need to be clothed and shod if the Sun did not finish them both off when they emerged from these caverns.

She balled up as much dry cloth from the older bodies as she could stuff into the pack and, after a moment’s consideration, added the femur bones of what must have been a large orc.

He smiled grimly beside her. "Let us finish this, Eowyn!"

They begin to climb, hand over hand, foothold over foothold, in an agony of slow, painful ascent. If she thought her body had ached when she woke, it was nothing compared to the sawing torture in every joint and muscle that grew steadily with each cramping yard they achieved.

Time passed, and she had to fight not to lose faith in their progress as the Pit receded by infinitesimal degrees. However far they climbed, the top was never visible. There was only an empty sea of black above them, as dark as the skies of Arda before the stars were woven into the heavens.

After an endless, silent progression upward, the face of the Pit’s walls smoothed away to sheer, featureless perfection. She paused briefly, craning her neck back. As far as she could see, the rock face above her was as polished as a river bed pebble. She closed her eyes briefly, steeling her heart against what she was about to do. She held one battered, filthy hand aloft, showing Legolas her solution to their predicament. She did not have the voice to speak it aloud. She concentrated, finding muscles and tissue that had not existed three days ago. A dozen feet away, Legolas watched in half-terrified fascination as her hand shifted its shape subtly, growing slightly larger and immeasurably stronger. She extended her nails like a cat unsheathing its claws with dry sob of horror. Then she drove her claw into the stone, making a purchase where there had been none. After a moment of silence, she heard him do the same. She did not look. She did not want to see the soft, warm hands that had caressed her body an hour ago change to the clawed talons of a monster.

They moved upward in dead silence, hand over hand, like two large felines scaling the side of a great black oak.

"Eowyn!" He said suddenly.

She stopped, seeing he had stopped moving. He was peering upward. His fair face was strained but alight with relief. "I can see the top!" He cried. "They have covered the mouth of the Pit with the dead as they did when we first entered their hunting ground."

"We will have to punch our way through just as they did," she said, trying not to imagine what that would entail.

"There is something else," he murmured, quiet fear shot through every nuance of his voice. "Can you---can you sense them? I do not know how to describe the perception, but I can feel them. They are all around us!"

She cast about, extending her senses. She swallowed, cold with fear. They were everywhere, dozens, hundreds of them. But where?! She could see nothing. The mystery was solved a moment later when Legolas put his head through a netted veil of dry lichen. He tore the veil aside to reveal a man-sized recess in the rock, perhaps three feet high and as deep. The hanging moss hid the individual sepulchers the Hunters has torn out of the Pit’s sheer walls. The dead thing Legolas has uncovered stirred irritably in its sleep, but did not rise. Morsul had indicated that only the eldest and strongest of Simiasha’s army of the dead could move about during daylight hours. Eowyn prayed that all of them had been slain when the Huntress had exterminated her High Court in a fit of rage.

They skirted the boltholes as much as they were able, climbing toward their destination through the ringed catacombs of little tombs. The only sound was their labored breath and the rattling chink of breaking granite from each new handhold they tore out of the wall. Little by little, the roof of crushed carrion grew closer.

They stopped a few yards from the top. There was a leather tarp drawn over the maw of the Pit, another layer of shelter from the sun and from possible daylight interlopers. Eowyn swallowed bile as she realized belatedly that the leather of the Pit’s cover had been harvested from neither deer nor cattle.

"We shall have to---to dig our way out," she moaned softly.

"Meleth-nin, you---" He said gently. His brow creased with terrible strain but he tried to smile at her. "Mellon-nin," he began again, altering the Elvish word slightly, "Stay strong! We are nearly out!"

She set her jaw and began to climb. She found the ledge where the tarp met the floor of the hunting ground chamber. She pulled herself upward, swinging one leg over the edge. And with a low groan of horror, she ripped through the shroud of human skin and began to dig her way out, up through the crushed hill of corpses above them. She held her breath, not wanting to breathe or swallow as she clawed her way up, out of the grave Simiasha had buried her in. After an eternity that could not have been more than five minutes, her hand pushed through to open air. And with that one taste of freedom, her nerve broke. She scrambled up through the last few feet of the rotting dead and emerged into the Haint Chamber gasping like a suffocated miner. She tore her leg free, the last little bit of her still trapped within the press, hearing as though from a great distance the animal noises of broken panic coming from her own throat.

She rolled off the hill of human debris and tumbled to a stop on her side. She lay there, straining for air, blanking her mind of what she had just done so she would not fall to shrieking. She lay there, not moving, feeling the flesh and bone of her hands shift back to their normal state. The immediate world around her began to withdraw in some strange, dreamy fashion. She wondered idly how much more of an assault her mind and heart could withstand before she tumbled into some bottomless abyss of madness. She wondered if madness would be a welcome relief when it finally came. She lay and listened to the sound of her own heartbeat, feeling as though everything that had troubled her was growing distant and unreal.

Someone lifted her limp, unresponsive body with exquisite gentleness. A warm hand brushed her hair back from her eyes, wiping some nameless black sticky substance from her face. He was speaking to her in his own tongue, murmuring soft lilting phrases she did not understand. But his voice was a comfort to her and his arms around her were a balm to her wounded soul. And slowly, it began to tow her upward, out of the deep waters of numb shock, back to her senses.

"I will carry you from this place," he told her finally in the Common Tongue.

"No," she croaked. Her blurred thoughts snapped back into focus. She kicked her feet feebly for he had already lifted her and was making his way across the cavern room, toward the tunnel that led upward to the Temple Chamber. "No!" She said in a stronger voice. "Set me down. We must destroy the Pit!"

He stopped and carefully set her on her wobbly feet. Her legs seemed to be made of jelly. She leaned upon his unfoundering strength, cursing her own squeamish weakness. As she rummaged through the satchel still strapped across her back, he sank to his knees, drawing her down with him. That was better. She could kneel if she could not stand on her own. She withdrew the six precious bottles one at a time with shaking hands. After a moment’s thought, she set two aside. For Simiasha.

"We do not need to uncover the mouth of the Pit," she said hoarsely. "If we set the mountain of bodies afire, the tarp will collapse and carry the fire down to them."

"Aye," he whispered.

She grasped the flints, trying to spark a flame as Legolas wrapped the dry cloth she had brought around the femur bone that was too big to have belonged to a Man, fashioning a crude torch. After an eternity of missed strikes, her wavering hands hit a spark against the dust-dry cloth. They fanned it with their breath, nursing the little blaze. It caught the ancient fabric and began to burn merrily.

Legolas held the fire bottle between them, his gaze burning like the golden flame of the torchlight that was reflected in his eyes. "Set them all to burn, Eowyn!" He breathed.

She lit the wick of Fallah’s little tin bottle of distilled burning powder and Legolas threw it toward the center of the mound of dead with all his might. His aim was perfection. The bottle struck the crest of the hill that sheltered the Pit and ignited in a brilliant shower of flame. The small explosion scattered the bits of liquid fire about the chamber and---

It was like a torch tossed into a dry hayloft. Everything caught the blaze and ran with it.

"One more!" Legolas said with grim delight.

She lit the wick of another bottle and he lobbed it into the center of the blaze. The concussion was deafening. The cavern ceiling above their heads trembled. The mound that covered the pit had fallen in a bit. It was sagging in a slow concave progression. It looked like a sinkhole about to give way.

Below, deep in the black womb of the Pit, the hunters were stirring, snarling in their sleep with fear. They could smell the bonfire above their tombs. They could sense the terrible danger, but they were helpless to move or act. Simiasha, in her wasteful, foolhardy at of rage at her High Court, had destroyed the only children who might have risen to defend the thousands who slept below.

The tarp buckled and gave way and the mound above collapsed, falling into the Pit, bearing the fire down to the Hunters. Eowyn listened with pitiless satisfaction to their shrieks as the dry moss shrouds over their nests brought the fire to each one of them in his own little tomb.

"They are burning!" Eowyn almost shrieked, caught somewhere between hysteria and joy. "Legolas, they are burning!"

"And so shall we if we do not move!" He said urgently.

The fire was almost upon them, sweeping everything away in its cleansing path. "Back up the tunnel to the Temple!" Legolas cried. He pulled at her hand as she scooped up the remaining fire bottles. He practically jerked her to her feet and dragged her back sharply, just as the leading edge of the fire licked at her trouser leg. "Quickly!"

They ran for the tunnel exit. Or he ran, one hand locked around her wrist, dragging her behind him. She found her legs were working again quite well now. It was amazing how the prospect of being roasted alive could restore one’s strength. The flames ran behind them, nipping at their heels. They scrambled up the steep grade of the tunnel and the fire kept pace with them. Almost too late, she realized why. One of the fire bottles was leaking, trailing liquid firestarter behind them as they ran.

"Get down!" She shouted. She tossed the fractured bottle behind them.

It exploded, knocking them off their feet, for there had been no time to duck. Eowyn raised her head, coughing and saw with horror that the fire was now behind and before them. Legolas bounded back to his feet, his hand still locked upon her wrist in a death grip. He lifted her off her feet without a word, while she touched her head dazedly. Her hand came away bloody. Legolas slung her over one shoulder as though she were a sack of grain and sprang forward, tearing through the gauntlet of flame before them that barred their escape. She was choking on smoke now, suffocating on the burning strength of unnumbered bodies. Her smoke-burnt eyes were streaming and she could see nothing. He bore her through the fire, unflinching, unfaltering, his voice a soft hoarse melody as he prayed under his breath.

She squeezed her eyes shut as she was suddenly blinding by an eye-searing world of light. They had stopped moving. She was lying on her side and he was striking her left leg with quick, desperate swats. Her trousers must be on fire, she thought with vague worry. After a moment or two he stopped beating at the flame and collapsed beside her. He was breathing in great, labored gulps of air. He must have put out the flames in her clothing, she concluded reasonably. She was positive she was not on fire.

Little by little, she came back to herself again, rising again from the peaceful lassitude of mild shock. They were in the Temple Chamber. She sat groggily. A thin stream of blood from her head wound was stinging her smoke-reddened eyes. She wiped it away absently. Legolas was lying on his back. His breath had slowed to an even rhythm. His face was covered with soot and grime, but he smiled up at her faintly.

"That was a bit of a close call," he said.

Her mouth threatened to curl upward. "Just a bit," she agreed.

She gazed about them, trying to get her bearings. At the mouth of the tunnel, a steady river of black smoke was pouring forth. "Simiasha was not in the Pit," she said grimly.

"No," he affirmed. He sat, then stood with painful deliberation. She slowly climbed to her feet as well. He seemed to be scanning the chamber, searching for something. Slowly, his face drained of color. "She is near," he hissed. "Can you sense her?"

"No," she said. She clutched the flints in one hand and held the three remaining fire bottles to her breast as though they were fragile children. "I do not feel anything."

"Perhaps I can sense her because she forced her own blood upon me." A visible shudder rippled through his body. His eyes grew unfocused. He slowly raised his hand and pointed to the throne dais at the far end of the Temple. "She lies there." His hand was shaking. His voice was soft and fearful, like that of a terrified child. "We must finish her, Eowyn. This is more important than either of us. She---she told me what she plans for Aragorn and Gondor. For the whole world. She does not wish to kill Estel. She wants him for her own as she wants me. With him as her creature, she will cover Middle Earth with her kind. Those she sent West she gave leave spawn others from the young and strong of every village they overthrow. They have already spread West of Emyn Muil and deep into Near Harad. If Aragorn is truly on his way to Rhunballa, she commanded them to let him pass, but to close the way behind him and cut off his return to Gondor."

"Then let us rid the world of her," Eowyn said harshly.

They advanced cautiously, as though they were trodding across a field of vipers. The throne was empty, though the dais was still littered with remnants of the High Court.

Beside her, Legolas made a soft noise of terror when they were less than twenty feet from the dais. "I can hear her in my mind, Eowyn!" He hissed. "She is whispering to me, even though the shield of your blood. Even in her sleep. I---I may be a danger to you if we venture closer."

"Does she press at your will as she did when she forced you to drink?" Eowyn asked softly.

"No," he said. "But I fear she may---" He released a slow, unsteady breath, his hand seeking hers. He was shaking like a leaf. She clasped his hand tightly in hers. "She shoved herself into my soul, Eowyn. She thrust her mind into mine and poisoned everything that was me with her foulness. I---I will not survive that a second time!"

They moved forward, hand in hand, until they stood just before the dais. Nothing stirred. Nothing moved. Eowyn could find no sense anywhere of any thinking being other than herself and Legolas.

"Come, my strong, clever children. Let us talk."

Eowyn gave a gasping little shriek, hearing Legolas moan with terror beside her. The voice was in their minds, as clear as words whispered into their ears.

A low rumble of stone against stone shook the dais. They fell back, stumbling, clumsy in their fear, as the great platform divided in two halves and slid apart. A gust of icy, rancid air billowed up from the crypt that lay below. The circular mouth of the Queen’s dark bower was a black gaping void of night.

Eowyn tore her hand free of Legolas’ and knelt, fumbling with the flints.

She uttered a low cry of frustrated exhaustion as one of the precious bottles tumbled from her grasp and clattered loudly on the stone. She set the three bottles before her in a neat little row.

"Nothing to say to me, girl?" Simiasha mused disapprovingly. She sounded for all the world like Eowyn’s mother, gently chiding her after some childish tantrum. "And what of you, my Legolas?" Low soft laughter, the dusky chuckle of a sated, well-pleased woman gave her lover.

Legolas swallowed a sob. Eowyn could not tell whether he chose to kneel beside her or if his knees simply gave way. "I am not yours!" He rasped. "You are about to die, you vile, filthy thing!"

"Not mine?" A ripple of sweet, mocking amusement. "Oh, but you are, my beauty! Both of you! You have proven yourselves stronger than all my brood combined. Give yourselves to me completely, my golden son and daughter, and you shall be my generals, my winged messengers of death, as we sweep across Middle Earth!"

As she spoke, Eowyn’s hand missed upon the strike of flint on flint. She uttered a vicious, unladylike oath. Legolas took one of the precious stones from her hand and lay it upon the floor, placing the wick of the bottle over the bottom flint.

"Strike true, Eowyn," he whispered.

And then he screamed. They both screamed, as a crushing mountain of power assaulted their minds with the full weight of Simiasha’s immeasurable malice and hatred of everything that drew breath and walked beneath the Sun. For all her long ages in darkness, the Huntress had begun her existence as one of the Ainur. And though she could not penetrate the barricade of Gandalf’s protective spell, she was more than capable of smashing both their minds to pulp.

"Foolish children," the saccharine voice tittered.

Eowyn lay on her side, her hands clasped over her ears as if to keep her brains from leaking out. It was as though the house of her soul was being slowly crushed inward upon her by brute force, as though barbed hooks were clawing at her, ripping away bleeding chunks of her integral self as they dug toward her center. Beside her, Legolas had ceased wailing and lay on his face, gasping with pain. Simisha was speaking to him, her voice kind and persuasive.

"Let me back in, my love," the Huntress said gently. "Open you sweet self to me and I will let the mortal chit live. Or better, I will let her change and you both may serve me, side by side. She is in such pain! She has been in pain since you first lay eyes on her, tormented by ravishment that went deeper than a mere physical assault. Poor young thing! Did you see how she shrank from your touch in the Pit, curling her arms about herself, shivering away from your desire and her own like a terrified fawn? She is damaged beyond repair. But I could heal her, Legolas. I could take away the memory of the wizardling’s cold hands on her body as he thrust his mind inside her. You had a taste of how terrible that must have been when I broke your will last night. I can heal her, my pet."

"Liar," Legolas half-sobbed. "You are a liar!"

"I can make her immortal," Simisha offered lovingly. "It is not tragic and unfair that her golden hair must fade to gray in less than two score years? For you to want her as you do, she must have pierced you heart like and arrow shot. Can you truly bear to see one so dear to you wither and crumble to dust in another fifty or sixty years while you watch helplessly?"

"Everything you say is twisted half-truth and bile!" Legolas spat, his beautiful voice cracked with pain. "You off slavery and damnation and call it a gift! Die and be damned to the nothingness outside of creation that is reserved for the most evil of souls!"

He took the top flint from Eowyn’s convulsing hand and struck it against

its mate. Eowyn heard her own voice shrieking as the pressure in her head increased. Blood gushed from her nose as something deep inside her skull gave way. She writhed in agony, screaming until her voice broke and died in her throat.

Legolas struck a second time and a blessed spark of red flared in Eowyn’s dimming eyes. He screamed, falling forward upon the smoking wick as Simiasha turned the full force of her mind upon him.

"I will mulch your brains if you dare to raise a hand to me, son of Thrandiul!" She cawed viciously, abandoning all pretense of persuasion. "I will leave you both with no more wit than a pair of babes if you---"

"Die!" He rasped weakly. "Die, and be silent at last!" He managed to roll off the fire bottle and Eowyn saw that the smoldering tap wick had finally caught. Somehow, Eowyn moved her right arm and flicked the bottle with her fingers. It rolled forward, burning steadily now, and tumbled into the crypt with a rattling, metallic clink.

"No! NO!!! You cannot! You---"

The explosion was the most satisfying noise Eowyn had ever known. It shook the stone beneath them, bringing dust and stone grist down on them from the cavern ceiling. The rumbling went on, rising in strength with the shrill mental wails of rage and pain from the crypt. "No! No! No! You cannot! I am eternal! I am the greatest power that yet walks the earth! I cannot die, you fools! Noooooooo!"

"Burn, you monstrous bitch," Eowyn wheezed weakly. She pushed up on one elbow and rolled the last two fire bottles into the maw of Simiasha’s sepulcher. The detonations sent a column of smoke upward from the hole. The trembler went on unabated. The mountain was quaking all the way down to its foundations in the deep earth.

"You will die with me, wretched children!" The monster in the deep howled. Eowyn could see her in her mind’s eye, wreathed in flame, her façade of beauty burnt away as she writhed in her burning tomb. "Even if you escape, you shall never be free of me! You are stained, bound in blood to my darkness for all eternity!" And incredibly, she began to laugh, a high, mad cackle. "Even if I die, I will live on in you, my darlings! You shall still change and be accursed!"

A chunk of stone the size of a dray horse crashed down ten feet from where they lay. Simiasha was going to pull the mountain down around and beneath them.

"Legolas!" Eowyn gasped. She clawed her way to her knees, almost falling over him. He was half conscious, breathing shallowly. She put her head under his shoulder and wrestled him to his feet. He helped her as much as he was able. They ended up leaning heavily upon each other, neither of them standing under their own power.

"Out!" He said faintly.

"Yes," she muttered. She guided them in a meandering path across the chamber toward one of the burning shafts of sunlight that pierced the gloom of the Temple. All around them, the crumbling ceiling rained down death. Miraculously, not even a pebble struck them as they staggered toward freedom, one agonizing step at a time. They reached the chink in the outer wall and Eowyn stood staring in dumb amazement as the fissure crumbled, creating a door-sized gap in the stone side of the mountain. Beyond lay blinding, searing daylight.

"The Valar make a way," Legolas sighed.

They leapt together into the blazing light of day.

They fell in a blind, burning terror, tumbling head over heel over head, down the sheer side of the mountain. They crashed to the red, dusty ground, scraped and bruised by the half-mile drop, but otherwise unharmed.

Eowyn covered her head with her arms and shrieked. Her skin was on fire. Her blood was boiling in her veins. She held a hand before her face and saw with horror that steam was rising off her flesh. Simiasha had spoken the truth. Dead or alive, she had damned them with her blood and now the Sun was killing them as surely as if they were fully changed. Dimly, she heard Legolas’ voice speaking to her. She felt a weight pressing her down, covering her. Something heavy was draped over her, blocking the full force of the Sun. She closed her eyes, lacing her fingers though Legolas’ and waited to die.

They did not die. They did not burst into flame. They lay at the base of the shattering mountain in an endless, blistering torture of pain without end. She screamed, though her voice was gone. She screamed until she knew her throat had cracked and bled. And still it was not over. How long it went on, she never knew.

But at long last, the white blaze of day dimmed. The shadows had lengthened, but the Sun had not passed behind the western peaks. She lay for a long time, dazed, in a slowly receding tide of pain.

She rolled over, gently pushing Legolas’ inert body off of hers, staring up at the soot-smeared sky. The mountain was slowly, very neatly, falling in upon itself. It was still belching smoke in a dozen places. The fire would be visible for a hundred leagues in every direction. And more, the slow cave in of the mountain itself was hurling sand and stone hundreds of feet into the air, turning high noon into cloudy twilight.

She held her hand out again and shuddered with horror. She was swollen and blistered. Her skin was a mass of deep, red, smoking flesh burns. She should be dying, but even as she watched the burns were already healing themselves. "You will never be free of me," Simiasha had mocked them.

Eowyn glanced down at Legolas and shook her head in tired denial. She was too numb for sorrow. He was burned. Every exposed inch of his skin was blackened as though he had been charred over a roasting spit. He had lain on top of her, shielding her from the brunt of the Sun’s rays. And all the while, as she howled her agony until her throat bled, he had never made a sound. He was healing slowly, just as she was, but he was far more injured.

They had to find shelter. They had to flee the foot of this mountain before its final death throes buried them in a rockslide. She leaned down and kissed Legolas’ cracked, blistered lips. "You bore me out of the fire and held me up every time I stumbled," she thought. "I will carry you away from this burning grave."

She lifted him awkwardly, wrestling his unwieldy dead weight over her shoulder. She did not stop to think that she should not have been able to do this so easily. She did not want to know or understand why she was still imbued with inhuman strength. She stared straight ahead and began to walk westward, away from the Crags. She trudged forward, placing one foot in front of the other, not thinking or remembering. She did not think about how life and healing had only seemed to flow back into her body after the Sun had been shrouded in ash and dust. She did not think about the pain she felt now, or puzzle over why her great strength was renewing itself so quickly, or question that she could feel her body shoring up her wounds a little faster with each degree the Sun dipped toward the West. She did not recall the dying curse the Huntress had hurled at them---the promise that she and Legolas would never be cleansed of her stain even if they slew her.

When the effort of not thinking about any of these things grew too much, she quickened her pace. And when that was not sufficient to blank her mind she began to run.

The reddish sand and scrub of the Dustlands blurred beneath her feet. She ran like a wild horse tearing across the plains of the North. She carried her companion as though he weighed nothing. She ran until the soles of her boots peeled away, until each breath burned her chest like fire. She ran until the dry earth gave itself over to green and the scent of water filled the air like a breath of salvation. She collapsed, blind, burned and bleeding, falling backward into glittering fields of blue.

***********************************************************

She woke wet, feeling sweet, deliciously cool water coating her skin. A light warm wind tugged at her damp hair. She stretched, reveling in the simple, wondrous absence of pain.

She was lying on the pebble-strewn edge of a stream and the cool current was flowing over her body. Her head lay just out of the water, cradled on the firm grass of the bank. She had been very lucky, she realized, to have fallen backward in her swoon. Had she fallen forward she would have drowned.

She lay listening to the night sounds around her, hearing, feeling the teeming pulse of life from every direction. She examined her hands and face for burns. There were none. She felt warm and whole and---

Legolas---

She tried to sit and failed, flailing about awkwardly with a little splash. A warm hand passed over her brow, trailing through her soaked hair and easing her back to calm. He had been sitting directly behind her on the bank. He lifted her gently, sitting her upright before him so that her back was leaning against his chest.

"I think you are clean enough now," he murmured against her hair. "You were covered in blood and dirt and unnamable filth. I held your nose and dunked you quite a few times, then I lay you in the water to soak a while."

"Thank you for that," she sighed, going limp against him.

"It was not a chore," he said. "We both smelled very bad."

She did not speak for a while, enjoying the feel of water threading through her toes. She had run the soles of her boots off and the sturdy leather tops had fallen away in tatters soon after, leaving her barefoot. "My feet were bleeding shreds," she said slowly. "Our flesh was scorched black by the Sun. We were both a mess of wounds and bruises. Now, we are healed." She uttered a sad, sorrowing noise of utter defeat. "We are still changing. Still fouled. Either she spoke truth when she said we would not be free upon her death, or she still lives."

"Or," he said softly, "it will take time for the poison of her blood to clear our bodies. Like the venom of a spider bite, its effects will dissipate in time, after it works its way out of our system. We can know nothing so soon after escaping the Nest."

"And we did escape," she agreed, beginning to relax again. "Come what may, we are free. We are free of that place."

Neither of them spoke for a very long time. The summer breeze was warm and the water rushing over her bare feet was heavenly. They were sitting beneath the arms of a great willow that fanned out above them, filtering the brilliant, silver face of the moon and the glittering array of stars. Legolas was propped against the willow’s truck. The steady rise and fall of his chest against her back began to lull her into a dreamy half-dose.

A light tremor passed through his body, rousing her. Then another. She turned, twisting around at the waist, and saw that he was weeping silently. She did not bid him cease. Sweet Eru, how she wished she could cry with him! She wrapped her arms around his chest and he lay his head upon her shoulder, pouring out his grief in silent, wracking sobs.

"If he can see us from where he is now," she whispered, "he is cheering and hailing you the hero of the age for having destroyed the Nest."

"Nay," he said, laughing softly through his tears. "He is berating me for a weepy Elvish fool. He would not want me to mourn him so. But I shall. For all of time. I am the only child of my parents, but Gimli was my brother in all things except blood. I loved him more than my own life. I knew I must lose him one day, but---but not so soon!"

She knew no words that would comfort such a loss, so she said nothing. She only held him as the grief he had been swallowing poured out of him, growing spent and quieter as dawn approached.

"You saved me," he said softly, teetering on the edge of sleep. "So strong….I am in awe of you."

"I do not feel strong," she said drowsily. "And I did not save you. Though perhaps we saved each other."

"The memory of how she pushed herself into my soul---" He broke off, his body trembling in her arms. "It would have killed me, Eowyn. As surely as if she had used my body for her pleasure. But when I took your blood, it seemed you gave me a piece of your soul. I could feel you all throughout my being, young and bright and fearless and full of mortal resilience and strength that my people cannot hope to equal. I can still feel you. It is as though you are a part of me. You gave me your strength and---and now…." He fell asleep in the middle of a word.

And so they slumbered together upon the creek’s banks, nestled beneath the willow’s shade as the Sun rose. She woke once, nearly blind in the yellow glare of sunlight and felt a moment of elation and perfect joy. The shafts of Sun shooting through the thick bows of the willow hurt her eyes, but they did not burn her.

On the eve of their second night of freedom, she woke to the sound of Legolas’ voice, soft in the distance, raised in a song of sweet, heart-broken sorrow. She lay warm and dry upon a goose down sleeping pallet, stretched out before a guttering fire in the stone hearth of what looked to be a little Sabadi cottage. The rice fields to the east of Rhunballa City in the Deep Wells area were dotted with dozens of such houses.

She was bundled in a light woolen blanket. Before her on the floor lay a light silk shirt and lamb’s wool trousers. She rose shakily and peeled off her tattered clothing, dressing slowly, listening to the beautiful strains of Legolas’ song. It was a mourning dirge, she knew, though she did not understand the Elvish words. She felt her eyes sting.

It was a song for Gimli.

She opened the sliding wooden doors of the hearth room, passing through the welcoming chamber to the front door. She emerged into the misty twilight and wove her way through the green forest of man-high water fronds and into a bamboo grove. The wood was a shadow-dappled wonderland of color and sound and it was teeming with life. The night was alive with thousands of animals, all vibrant, all beautiful. The stars hummed a ghostly harmony to Legolas’ song, but they dimmed in comparison to the luminous creature that sang by the water’s edge.

He was clad in a soft clean linen shirt and breeches he must have found in the deserted farmstead. He stood straight as an arrow, eyes closed, head cast back. He shone like a lamp in the fading light, fey and luminescent, like some fantastical dream made flesh. She stood and watched him, rapt and breathless with wonder, as he cast his grief into the night air, making of it something indescribably beautiful. He opened his eyes, sensing her presence, and met her gaze with the incandescent amber eyes of a cat.

Her heart slammed to a frozen halt in her breast and she screamed. In denial. In grief. In cheated rage that, after having fought so hard, they should receive this damnation as a reward.

"Eowyn?" He spoke softly. The glorious, beautiful sorrow on his face had been replaced with confusion and terrible worry.

She wheeled and fled.

She tore through the bamboo break, fleet as a deer, sprinting toward the little house. There would be a weapon somewhere inside, if only a kitchen knife. Somewhere she would find something she could wield to end his life and her own. Before they changed. Before the hapless folk who had lived here returned. Before she and Legolas awoke cold and unbreathing, to an existence of never-ending night.

He tackled her from behind and they crashed to the soft ferny carpet of the forest floor. "Eowyn!" He cried, trying to wrestle her around to face him, but she swung her fists at him wildly. He planted both knees on her forearms when she would not cease flailing at him in blind panic. "What is wrong?! What has happened?!"

He was still himself. His skin shone like pale marble in the moonlight. His eyes, peering down at her with concern and fear, were the golden hue of a predator. But his was still---

"Your eyes!" She cried, gasping. She collapsed upon her back, hyperventilating, trying to quash the panic that was still tearing around inside her, deaf to reason.

"Aye," he said quietly. "Yours were the same when you woke last night. They have changed again because you are afraid. It has to do with mood, I think. Any extreme emotion induces the shift to gold. It is very strange."

"Strange?" She repeated in a strangled voice. She began to laugh weakly, feeling light-headed. "I suddenly feel very foolish."

He edged back, moving off of her nearly numb arms. She sat slowly and he watched her closely from where he knelt beside her, worry still etched upon his fair face.

"Your fear is well-founded and not foolish in the least," he told her.

"Legolas, look at me," she said softly. "How do I seem to you? Would anyone who ever knew us look upon us now and see a pair of monsters?" Her hand flew to her mouth as though she feared a scream would emerge.

"Shh!" He moved closer, laying one hand on her cheek. His eyes pierced into hers with an all-seeing intensity that made her want to turn away. He was---he was looking inside her, she knew, with his Elvish sight. "You are golden-eyed," he told her slowly. "Your skin glows like liquid mithril in torchlight. I think you may now have the strength of a score of Men combined. But your spirit is untainted! I can see it, meleth-nin! Your soul still blazes in my inner sight so brightly I am almost blinded by it pure, fierce beauty!"

"So does yours!" She said, her voice breaking. "But---but, Legolas, I may go mad waiting to know if we are still changing! If we are, we must end our lives---"

"No!" He spoke so sharply she jumped. "No, Eowyn, no," he said again, softer. "Promise me you will not take the one life Eru gave you! Not---not unless we are both agreed there is no hope."

"But---" She began. "But if we---"

"Please," he begged softly. "Please. I cannot bear the constant fear that I may turn and find you dead by your own hand. I cannot bear it."

She slumped in defeat, knowing the argument was lost. She had no strength to fight the pain in his face and voice. He leaned forward until his forehead touched hers.

"Please, meleth-nin," he implored again. He would not be at ease until he had her oath upon it.

"Not unless we are both agreed," she sighed, all her resistance fading with the faint gust of his breath against her lips. "I swear it."

The coiled tension slowly eased from his body. He did not withdraw or release her. Instead, he gently ran one hand through her hair, tilting her head back. She stared into the shining amber depths of his eyes.

"I could not bear to lose you as I lost Gimli," he said quietly. "Mithrandir told me once, when I was very young, that the deepest, dearest friendships of one’s life will pierce your heart like a lightning bolt from a clear sky---instantly and without warning. That is how it was when I met Aragorn. And though we did not take to each other instantly, that is how it was with Gimli. That is how it is with you."

"And all of us mortal," she said sadly.

He only smiled. "You are as Eru fashioned you. I remember my father was grieved over my love for Estel and Gimli, knowing I must see them die in the fullness of time. That is the reason the Eldar keep so to themselves---to safeguard our hearts against the pain of loving mortals." He lay his free hand upon her other cheek, so that he was cupping her face in both hands. "But for my part, if given the choice between the grief that must come and never having loved any of you at all, I chose love. Always."

He kissed her, light as a breath of warm summer air against her mouth.

Perhaps he had meant it as a seal of loving friendship. Perhaps, at that moment, he had meant it to convey comfort and affection and nothing more. But as his lips touched hers, the night around them seemed to pause and inhale, as though stunned motionless by the lightning current that passed between them in that single breath they shared. She sank into his arms, letting him wrap himself around her, and he kissed her again and again upon her mouth, her eyelids, her forehead, her cheeks.

He drew back, surveying her flushed face. "I should have asked first," he said critically. "Eowyn, may I kiss you again?"

She kissed his mouth in answer. It was all the permission he needed. He crushed her to him and they hung suspended in a burning, weightless bank of rising heat. At length, he broke the kiss, if only just. His breath was labored and unsteady against her lips.

"We should---we should---" He shook his head almost imperceptibly. "I cannot think what we should do. I can barely think at all."

She laughed softly at this, her voice shaky, and threaded her fingers through the bright silk of his hair.

"Wiser heads than mine would council forbearance." His voice was a soft husk of hot breath. "But if we are still---still infected, I do not wish to go to Mandos never having held you, never having---" She stopped his words with another kiss, and neither of them spoke again of turning back.

Thereafter, she could never piece together a clear moment by moment recollection of that night. The single coherent thought that played and replayed in her mind was that this was real. It was real and not a dream. It was Legolas.

She remembered that his bare skin felt like living silk drawn over hard muscle beneath her hands, though she could never say how and when he shed his clothes and her own. The smooth slide of naked flesh upon flesh, his and hers, was a wordless, thoughtless blaze of sensation as they lay upon the green forest floor wrapped in each other’s arms.

She vaguely recalled murmuring a faint little protest when he lay upon his back and set her above him, for it seemed terribly strange that she should lead in this. And to that he only laughed softly, telling her that here the blind led the blind. He set his hands upon her waist and drew her down into a kiss, murmuring into her hair that he was a selfish wretch who only wished to free his hands the better to touch her. And touch her he did. He explored the whole of her, every curve and valley, every inch of her, smiling with sweet pleasure as they learned together what response he could elicit if he pressed here, if he caressed there. And as any lingering vestige of shyness dissipated in a searing wave of rising desire, she did likewise to him. They clung together, and it was as though their bodies, of their own volition, began to gently strive against each other in a slow, rhythmic dance as old as time, leaving them poised to melt into a perfect fit.

This is real, she thought again, gazing down at him, without a shred of fear or dark memory. Legolas eyes were brimming pools of light. His face was open and beautiful and so full of unaffected wonder and sweet desire for her and her alone. His whole heart was in his gaze, laid with absolute trust at her feet.

She held his eyes, and they moved together, breaking the barrier within her body in a single swift movement, pushing through and past the doorway of her innocence and his. She made a soft, sharp noise at the tearing pain that was both sweet and agonizing.

He froze, still as a statue, his eyes wide with concern, his heart hammering against hers. "I have hurt you."

"It is pain that must be born," she said in a low, shuddering whisper. "It is only this once."

She rocked against him, a small experimental flex of her hips. He gasped and moaned softly. She smiled down at him. She moved again, watching his face, his eyes, how he shook as though he was in the grip of a rising fever each time she rose and fell above him. The pain, the deep inward driving sensation of being pierced to her very core, never abated completely. But it came hand in hand with a feeling of warm, full completion, and the flame of her desire, banked only briefly by the pain, rekindled and roared to life within her.

She lost any semblance of thought after that. They moved together in a gentle, maddening rhythm, and it seemed his heart fell into synch with hers. Each breath was drawing her a little closer to some dizzying summit. He was speaking to her, his voice soft and broken, his cheeks damp with tears, saying her name again and again like a prayer. Something was gathering in her chest, her stomach, her loins, her heart. Something was building behind her eyes, a pressurized volcano ready to crack then protective mantle of the shield she had woven around the deepest, most vulnerable pieces of her integral self. She had felt this in the Pit as she pulled her clothing on in shamed horror, when she had feared she had taken unforgivable liberty with him while they were in the haze of Simiasha’s forgetful poison. It was that bursting-at-the-seems feeling of too much emotion denied release for too long.

"I love you," Legolas said softly, his beautiful voice choked with emotion. "I love you, Eowyn."

A sob caught in her throat and her entire being, body mind and soul, shouted with joy at the sound of those words. She broke apart, every wall and barricade shattering upon the tidal wave of pleasure that lashed through and over her, sweeping everything away upon its crest. She heard him cry out her name, every muscle in his frame pulled taught, his back arched like a bent bow, as he followed her.

When she regained enough cohesive thought to know anything at all, she found he had drawn her down into his arms. He kissed her once more, a soft, warm brush upon her lips. "I love you, Eowyn," he said again.

And Eowyn began to cry.

She wanted to tell him that she was not weeping for what they had just done. She wanted to tell him that he had just given her the sweetest, most precious gift of her life. But once the floodgates burst open, she could do nothing but sob uncontrollably. She wept for her own pain and the crippling scars of what Grima had done to her. She wept for four years of dull, bottled agony. She shed her tears at last for Theodred, for Theoden, for all the friends she had seen slain in the North. She wept at last for the soldiers she had lost at South Pass, for Indassa, for Gimli. She wept with joy that she could at last give all those she had loved and lost their rightful due. She cried tears of happiness and wonder that a man had told her he loved her, and that she could take joy in his arms without shrinking away. And she laughed through her tears when she remembered that he was not a Man at all.

She wanted to tell him all that he meant to her. She wanted to return his words of love. But she could not speak. She could only cry. He seemed to understand this, to know without being told what she needed. So, he did not try to quiet her or stop her tears. He only held her as she cried herself to sleep.

 **************************************************

On the eve of the third night she woke light-headed and exhausted, feeling as though she had sicked up a river of poison. She curled against the warm body that was wrapped around hers, and he woke with a startled cry.

"Legolas!" She held him when he would have drawn away from her with a wail of anguish. "It is all right! We are safe!"

He went limp against her, burying himself in her embrace. His heart was thrumming like a trapped rabbit’s, but his breath became steady as he slowly relaxed.

"I dreamt something terrible," he murmured. "I dreamt I had---I had done something terrible, but I cannot remember what it was!"

"That is the way of dreams sometimes," she said gently. Her throat felt raw from hours of weeping, but she felt a kind of purged peace she had not known in years. "It is no great wonder that you had a nightmare."

"I do not have nightmares," he said, his fair face shadowed with vague horror. "I---Elves dream lucidly, Eowyn. We steer the dream, it does not steer us. And we do not lose consciousness completely when we sleep. Even in the healing sleep we are aware of the world around us. I was unconscious, eyes shut, mind blanked. It was like waking from a drugged stupor!"

"That is how mortals always sleep," she said.

"It came upon me suddenly," he said in a soft, frightened voice. "At dawn."

A chill rippled through her, though she could not say why. "We slept the day through again," she said after a moment. "That is a bad sign."

"Yes," he agreed. "But of---of what?"

She fumbled for the thread of some terrible memory but it slipped from her grasp. "I do not know."

He frowned furiously. "We escaped from---from our enemies. But who were they? Gimli was slain. I remember that. We---there was something we needed to do. Someone we needed to warn about----something."

He was growing increasingly agitated, so she kissed him. It detoured the troubled path of his thoughts as she had known it would. He lay her down on their bed of green and they spoke no more for a long while.

Later, they rose and bathed in the creek. They found a cache of dried fruits and sweetmeats in the cottage’s little pantry. They did not speak again of half-remembered nightmares of forgotten horrors. They did little all that night other than map and memorize every inch of each other’s skin.

As the stars began to fade toward morning, they lay together before the fire they had built in the farmstead’s little hearth. Strangely, the family’s sleeping pallets were all in this room at the center of the house. There were no windows. The lay side by side in a damp tangle, drying from one last swim in the stream, eyes drooping, limbs growing heavy.

Dawn was near.

"You are smiling," he said, studying her face as though he meant to memorize it for all time. "Even half asleep you are smiling. It is beautiful." This seemed to please him greatly. He tugged at the woolen blanket he had drawn over them, wrapping it a little more snuggly about her. It was strange that they should both feel so chilled in the heat of summer. She had felt perfectly warm until the sky began to brighten toward morning. He ran one hand down her arm and up again to her bare shoulder. "Do you know," he said drowsily, "I think every inch of you is covered in golden, soft downy hair. It is soft as a newborn rabbit’s pelt."

She was fighting to stay awake, but she managed to give him a dangerous glare, narrowing her eyes. "I do not have a pelt."

"Denial cannot undo what is," he said sagely.

She found one last burst of strength and pounced, rolling him onto his back. He stared up at her, feigning innocent surprise. And she kissed him, laughing softly. "I am happy," she said

"That is good," he said softly.

"I feel guilty," she told him, sobering. She ran one hand down his face. "Gimli should be here with us."

He smiled, though his eyes grew overly bright as though they held a faint sheen of tears. "If he were with us right now, he would run screaming into the night. Dwarves are very close-mouthed about matters of the heart and lovemaking. Gimli has---" His voice caught on the word. "Gimli had a terribly low threshold of embarrassment where such things were concerned. A year ago, I invited him to the Midsummer’s festival in Eryn Lasgalen. One of the highlights of that night is always the dance of renewal that is only for wedded couples. It is a very---" Legolas grinned. "---demonstrative dance."

Eowyn began to chuckle, picturing Gimli’s face.

"He sat through the entire ritual with as much decorum as he could muster, but his face was as red as a ripe apple by the end. My father had offered him a seat of honor beside him at the high table---mostly, I think, out of some perverse wish to see if Gimli could watch the revel in its entirety without exploding."

"Did you father---?" She stopped, realizing that the question was perhaps an intrusive one.

"You may ask me whatever you wish, meleth-nin," he said, as though he had read her mind.

"Did he tease Gimli so because he is a Dwarf or because he disapproved of any mortal who had so ensnared your heart?"

Legolas was silent. A little line creased his brow. "My mother was slain when I was twelve years old," he said after a long moment. "That is closer to five in mortal terms, for we grow slower than your folk. I told you when we first met that I had seen the women of my people throw themselves upon the swords of the enemy to shield their children. She---I was that child." How many years had passed since that terrible day she could not imagine. Centuries? Millennia? But the quiet grief was still as raw upon his face as though the wound was new. "My grandfather and my uncle had died at Dagorlad twenty years before I was born. I am my father’s only child and all that is left of his family. And because of these things, he has always been fiercely protective of me."

"And when all of us are gone," she said softly, "it is he who will have to watch you grieve forever."

He smiled through half-lidded eyes. "Gimli has gone on before us. I will keep his memory and my love for him evergreen within my heart. It shall be the same with Aragorn and Arwen and all my dear friends in the Shire." And he sighed, deep and content, as though some heavy burden or fear that had pressed on his mind had been lifted. "But you I will not lose."

"I will age and die, Legolas," she told him gently. "Nothing can change that."

He shook his head. "Mortals move through their lives in an arc of time that rises as they grow to the fullness of their strength, crests for a score of years, and begins a gentle descent towards age and death. When I look upon your folk, I can see them moving forward in that arc. Somehow, you are no longer in motion. Like an Elf, you are rooted in the stream of time and its waters flow around you. It is not possible, yet it is so."

She lay in his arms, enfolded in his warmth and the heat of the little fire in the stone hearth, and felt her blood turn to ice water in her veins. "It is not a miracle," she said weakly. "It is unnatural." Her limbs felt like led. Sleep was pulling her down into its dark embrace as the dawn grew ever closer. She fought it, but it was as though she was a drowning swimmer with an anchor tied to her feet.

He watched the play of apprehensive fear upon her features, and suddenly went stock still as though he had been heart shot with an invisible arrow. "Eowyn! Oh Eru, we are still changing!" His voice was a frightened, insubstantial wisp of shallow breath. He was fading with each passing second, fighting now with all his might to remain awake. "We must not forget again! We must not---" He sighed against her as the strength left his body and consciousness deserted him. Eowyn was sinking fast, a moment behind him, but she lived an eternity of grief and horror in that last minute of awareness as recollection poured over her, and with it, the sure knowledge of their own damnation.

Sweet, mocking laughter, far and dim, sounded in her head and she moaned in horror. "Did you truly think you had slain one of the Ainur so easily, my pets? I have called all my children home to greet your Elessar when he arrives. Olorin’s little spell will only protect you while you still draw breath. When you are cold and dead, I repay you both in full for your betrayal. I will torture you forever, my girl!"

Simiasha lived! She still lived! Eowyn cried out her defiance, her rage, even in the absence of hope. Somehow, some way, she would finish this before her heart stopped and her blood ran cold with dark hunger. They must not forget again! They must not forget!

But they did forget.

They spent all of the next few nights in much the same fashion as they had spent the last. They bathed and ate and talked and labored together to learn every way male and female could please each other. They drifted through those evenings in a state of uncorrupted bliss, free of worry, of care, of any shred of dark memory.

On the eve of their seventh night in the little cottage, they found they had stripped the pantry bare. They went out in search of food. They found only a handful of redberries in the wood and a small vineyard of fall grapes that were still green. They did not worry overmuch that night, but on the following night they woke with hunger gnawing inside their bellies like a ravening wolf.

They ran down four young brown hares and feasted upon them. They did not trouble themselves with cooking their catch. The meat was red and juicy and sweeter than confection. They lay down at dawn, feeling full and satisfied. But by sunset their hunger had returned tenfold.

They hunted together each night thereafter. They sought out larger and larger prey on each successive eve for their hunger continued to grow. The need for food had ceased to be a thing that could be left until after love and bathing. The hunger badgered them, drove them---and if they left it too long or failed to find sufficient game to quiet its demands, it tortured them with knotted cramping agony.

On the tenth night, they came upon a large game animal drinking at the bank of the creek. They chased it a while through the bamboo break and the waterlogged rice fields beyond, making a game of their pursuit until it squealed with terror. They ran their quarry far from their cottage, past the fields and into the grove of cypress that lay beyond. They took to the trees, leaping from branch to branch above their prey so that it could hear their voices but not see them as it ran of its life. For some reason, the beast’s terror seemed terribly funny to her, and she let it slip from her sight a time or three, simply to hear it shriek as she dropped back into view from a branch above. At length, the hunger took hold a little stronger and she moved in upon it, claws unsheathed for the kill.

Legolas leapt forward and plucked her out of the air as she sprang. He held her down, his entire frame trembling with the effort it took not to succumb to the compulsion to attack, to rend, to feast upon the thing they had just run to ground. He restrained her while she fought him mindlessly, writhing in the grip of a hunger pang, as their quarry fled into the night, yowling in terror. Only when their prey was well and truly gone did Legolas release her. He sank to his knees, burying his face in his hands.

She knelt beside him, trying to speak with effort. In the last two days, there were times when words and language deserted them both. She put her arms around him as she shook with silent sobs.

"What?" She managed to ask. "What---bad?"

"It was a Man, meleth-nin," he whispered. "It was a Man we nearly killed and devoured!"’

They made their way back to the cottage in stunned silence. They lay down at daybreak, famished, and woke again at dusk doubling over with the hunger. They found a little herd of small, light-footed red elks and tore them down, drinking up the red fountain of their life’s blood, disregarding the drained meat when they were finished. They were too long at this feast, and there was almost no time for a last cleansing swim in the creek before the approaching Sun began to weigh down upon them. They lay before the fire, stoking its flames high against the oppressive chill that always crept into their limbs as dawn drew nigh. They coupled fiercely in a burning haze of insatiable need. It was as though their ever-growing, all-encompassing hunger had spilled over into every aspect of their beings, so that no appetite of the body could be sated fully.

At dawn, they fell into slumber in the midst of the act of love, sinking downward into insensibility with a gasping sigh of pleasure. With the last of his strength, he breathed one of the only phrases she could still make sense of. "I love you…." He collapsed upon her, wrapped in her arms and legs and the great woolen blanket tangled around them. She smiled in wordless, thoughtless joy, and slept.

A tinkling clatter, like breaking glass, penetrated the deep vale of her slumber. A brilliant flare of light, like a torch lit on the darkest of moonless nights, jarred her to a pain-filled groggy semblance of waking. She whimpered in wordless distress and buried her face beneath the woolen cover until the blinding, burning light faded. She pried her eyes open, disengaging herself from her lover enough to seek out the source of the light. Ten feet from where they lay before the still warm coals in the hearth, lay a tiny sliver of crystalline glass, still glowing like one of the dying embers in the fireplace. She watched it, squinting against the faint light it emanated. After a moment or two, it died away, leaving them once more in cool, soothing darkness, lit only by the glow of the coals in the hearth. She began to drift back into the dreamless realm of sleep.

A shuffle of movement, very close by, and the sudden flicker of another light, brought her back to consciousness with an irritable little snarl. She sought beyond the confines of the hearth room with her hunting sense. And smiled slowly, even in the half-stupor of daylight. The game animals were large and they were many and they were very close. Hunger roared to life inside her as she caught the scent of their sweat, a distant aroma of blood. Some foolish gaggle of herd beasts creeping close to their cottage in search of food while the mistress and master slept. She listened, her stomach rumbling with anticipation, as something fumbled with the latch to the hearth room’s outer door. There were dozens upon dozens encircling the cottage, but four or five were gathered just outside the door in the welcoming room. The herd creatures seemed agitated, as though they were arguing over the wisdom of entering her den.

Wise beasts, she thought.

She listened harder, focusing the full force of her mind upon what was going on in the next room. And slowly, their speech began to make sense to her.

"---then there is no reason to delay!" A young male voice said fiercely. "You said if the Shard we tossed inside did not set them afire, then they are not past saving!"

"My friend," a second Man’s voice, an older baritone mix of gravel and velvet, spoke gently but firmly. "I said they are not lost to hope. But that does not mean they are as they were. You have seen Legolas in battle and you know better that I how very deadly and skilled your sister is in the arts of war. They still live, and so, may be healed of this stain upon their bodies and souls. But they are two of the most dangerous people I have ever known, and at this moment, they are like wild things. If you go tearing in there without care, they will kill you very quickly!"

A heavy sigh, and a little silence followed.

"You saw the state I was in when your Riders found me in the Dustlands, young Horsemaster," another man, a deep, rich voice like warm Sabadi whiskey. "Aragorn brought me back to myself. He knows what must be done and you must trust him in this."

"Yes," said the young Man with quiet anguish. "You were in a terrible state, Master Dwarf. He healed you." He seemed to gather hope from that thought. "He will heal her."

"Mistress!" The velvety voiced Aragorn was calling to someone with a kind air of quiet command. "Do you have the boiling water ready?"

"I have it here, O King," said a young woman’s voice. "And we crush the leave upon it so?"

"Well done, Mistress Fallah," Aragorn murmured. "Stay close, if you will. I will push open the door. Fallah and I will carry the four bowls into the room and set them in a circle around our friends. Eomer, Gimli---" A grim pause, "---use the torches to fend them off if they attack. And Eomer! I will warn you again to keep your wits about you when you see her. Your sister will not hesitate to kill you if you let down your guard."

"I understand, my Lord," was the soft, torn reply.

The door to the welcoming room burst open. Eowyn lay still as a snake in tall grass, waiting patiently as the room blazed with searing torchlight, and worse, the filtered light of the Sun from beyond. The intruders had left her front door standing wide open, she thought angrily. The sound of booted heels entering the hearth room. She lay still as death.

"Oh, Merciful Lady!" Eomer gasped in a rough, bitten-back sob. "They are----this is nothing like Gimli! They are white as bleached bone!"

"Eomer!" Aragorn said sharply. "Do not lower your torch!"

Footsteps all around her. The room was filling with the scent of brewing herbs, of flowers and something that seemed a distillation of nature and every green, growing thing. It smelled like life renewed, like strength and health after a long painful illness. She knew the scent. She had breathed it in once before as she stood upon the threshold of death’s doorway.

"Sister!" Said the one called Eomer gently. "Eowyn, awake!"

He was close, she knew. Almost, but not quite close enough. She raised her head slowly, as though with great effort, though in truth, the herbal brew had warmed her blood and unfrozen her limbs to full wakefulness. But it would not do for them to know that. Not yet. And certainly not until her lover awoke to share in this great bounty of game.

She opened her golden eyes, blinking in the glare of the torch he held. She only needed to draw him a little closer. She met the eyes of the young thing that knelt less than ten feet away from where she and her lover lay. He was fair and ruddy, like a great tawny-haired young lion, and she suddenly felt a chill of distant recognition. All the while, her head was filling with the sweet, wholesome breath of Aragorn’s steaming physic. Her mind felt clear as a bell. Her body felt strong and well. All the better. She would be able to strike quickly.

"She is awake already!" Eomer said joyfully. "Eowyn! Do you not know me?"

She frowned, feeling suddenly confused. She propped up on her elbows, watching as he edged closer, hunger warring with uncertainty. His eyes grew wide as she rose slowly to all fours, the blanket sliding off her moon-pale naked skin. He made to reach out to her, his handsome face anguished, his torch lowered and half-forgotten.

A wave of tearing hunger lanced through her and she growled low in her throat, like a mountain cat warning its young away from danger. She could leap at him so easily. He was so close she could taste him! But---but---she knew that face, those blue eyes! She knew him! She uttered another snarl agonized confusion and wrenching need to sate the hunger.

A flash of movement caught her eye. A small, barrel-chested creature darted forward and pushed the yellow-haired young man back with an angry oath. And behind him, someone threw wide the door, letting in a bright shaft of morning sunlight. Eowyn screamed as the rays touched her bare skin, and Eomer cried out with her.

"She knew me, you fool!" He cried. "Let me go! Let me---!"

"Another inch and she would have torn out your throat!" Gimli said harshly.

Eowyn curled up facedown on the matted floor, moaning with pain, her hands over her head to shield herself from the blazing pain of the Sun. And then, her lover rose, roused finally by the sound of her cries. He tossed a part of the blanket over her to shield her from the Sun and snarled viciously at the intruders, baring his sharp teeth.

"Legolas---!" Gimli said in soft horror.

Legolas crouched over her protectively, growling like a cornered wolf, poised to spring if they ventured any closer.

"Edge back," Aragorn said carefully. "All of you. Keep the torches before you. We have the four pots of aethelas set about their bed. It will do its work. Now we shut the door and wait."

Legolas seemed to sense that the threat was over for the moment, but did not relax his guard until the four interlopers closed the sliding hearth room doors against the hateful daylight and edged back to the far corner of the room to begin their vigil. Only then did Legolas peel back the blanket and turn her gently on her back to face him.

"Shh," he told her gently. "Safe. Safe now, meleth-nin." He leaned down and kissed her, deep and sweet. She sighed and drew him down into her arms, wrapping herself around him.

Distantly, she heard the sound of a little scuffle. "No! No!" Eomer was saying angrily. "He is my friend, and I understand that he is blameless in this matter. I know that. But do not expect me to sit idly by in the same room while the Elf tups my sister!"

"They are not tupping, my Lord," said the woman Fallah in a cool matter-of-fact voice, "They are falling asleep again."

Legolas curled beside her again, wrapped in her arms, and they slept again for a time.

She came back to awareness as she was being lifted and wrapped in a soft woolen cloak.

"In the interest of common decency," Aragorn was saying, "Eomer and Mistress Fallah will tend Eowyn. You and I will see to Legolas."

"Aye, lad," was the gruff reply.

Someone was raising her arms over her head. A soft cotton garment was pulled down over her head while gentle hands worked her hands through the sleeves of a light summer dress.

Dress?

She had not worn a dress in four years. She only owned one and it was grown terribly threadbare. It would be nice to own a pretty gown again, but there was really no time for such things of late, she thought hazily.

"Sister?" Eomer’s voice implored gently. "Eowyn, open your eyes."

Had she been ill, she wondered? Eomer never woke her so kindly for anything. As a rule, she was simply happy that he had outgrown the boyhood habit of bouncing on her bed while screaming, "Wakey! Wakey!"

She opened her eyes to see her brother’s tear-streaked face. He was holding in his arms, rocking her like a child.

"Eomer?" She said hoarsely.

He began to laugh and weep at the same time, crushing her against his chest so tightly she could not breathe.

"My Lord," said a woman’s wry happy voice. "You are squeezing the air out of her."

The vise around her ribs disappeared immediately, and she found herself eye to eye with a ghost. "Fallah," Eowyn whispered. "You---" She frowned, struggling to remember. "You were hurt."

Fallah touched a bandage dressing that covered her head from the hairline upwards. "That concussion should have killed me. Elessar is a skilled healer."

"Leave him be, Gimli," Aragorn said firmly. "It is better to wake them one at a time."

"Gimli," she said softly. The Dwarf’s face came into view and she smiled weakly. She wished she had the strength to hug him. "You are alive...happy….."

Gimli took her hand in his and kissed it. "And I am as happy to see you alive and breathing, lass."

The King of the West knelt before her and took her other hand in his callused fingers. He lay his palm against her forehead. "Your body temperature is back normal. My Lady," he asked then, with infinite gentleness, "What do you remember?"

"I---" She stared back at him in sudden cold horror. "We were taken---they---they---"

It all came crashing back down on her in the space between one heartbeat and the next. She began shaking, her eyes filling with too many tears over too many horrors and pains to number. She began to sob, low, wracking and hoarse. She turned her head away, burying it in her brother’s broad chest. She wanted to hide from the memory and horror of what they had seen and suffered. Most of all, she wanted to purge the memory of that poor man who had wailed like a small child as they chased him, their voices echoing through the mist-shrouded rice fields with bright, cruel laughter. Aragorn turned her back to face him, not allowing her to hide from her shame.

"We---there was a Man," she confessed in agony. "We---we tried to---" She broke off, sobbing brokenly, trying to untangle her garbled memories of the last three or four days. "Did---did we---?"

"You did not kill him," Aragorn told her gravely. "You stopped yourselves at the last moment, he told us." Her cupped her chin in his big hand and raised her head when she would have curled into herself in a knot of misery and self-loathing. "You and Legolas are not responsible for anything you have done, my Lady. You escaped from that den of monsters, and if I am not much mistaken, set it to burn before you left. Blessed Lady, Eowyn! The two of you pulled the whole mountain down upon them! If one of the lesser beasts managed to survive I would be very surprised. You have much to be proud of!"

"The queen lives," Eowyn said. Her voice sounded so raw and weak. "I have heard her mocking us in my mind. It is you she wanted. She took us---lured Legolas and Gimli here through Haradoun---to bait you into coming here. Her children are scattered from here to Emyn Muil, but now she has called them home. Aragorn! They are coming for you! Simiasha---we burned her horribly, but she was once one of the Ainur, she told us. She wants you!"

Aragorn’s face was set in a hard, angry line. "I do not kill easily," he told her calmly.

"She does not want to kill you," Eowyn said. "She wants to change you. She wants you to be her Captain as she covers all of Middle Earth with her kind. She---she---" It was too much effort to speak further. Eowyn collapsed back into Eomer’s arms, wheezing with exhaustion. But Aragorn’s face had a peculiar look to it, one that she suddenly recognized as fear in a man unaccustomed to the feeling. Like Legolas and herself, he did not fear death, but the threat of being dragged screaming into this darkness froze his blood. And it was not a possible danger he had even considered when he set out to rescue his friends.

"Can you heal us?" She asked in a quavering voice, hating how weak she sounded, how ill and frightened. "She told us there was no hope while she lived. They---they forced us to drink! They---they---" She broke down again, feeling a fool in some detached back corner of her mind, but completely unable to stay the tears. It was as though now that she had regained the ability to shed tears, she no longer had any means of controlling impulse of weep. Eomer kissed her forehead and Gimli squeezed her other hand gently.

"I cannot cure you while she lives," Aragorn told her softly. "Not completely. But I can reverse the change to a point and stop its progression in its tracks indefinitely. The cure of painful."

"I do not fear pain," she said quietly.

"So you told me long ago," the King said with a faint smile. "And you have shown courage since that say to shame the bravest heroes of history." He set a clay cup before her and poured it full of the aethelas brew. He held the cup to her hands and she took it in an unsteady grip. He met her eyes and she nodded. "Drink, Eowyn. Drink and walk in the Sun again."

Holding his iron gray eyes as though they were her only lifeline to salvation, she set the cup to her lips and downed it in three huge gulps. He quickly poured it full again. She drank as swiftly as she could, having some terrible inkling of what was to come.

It was like nothing she could have foreseen or imagined. The pain struck suddenly. It shot through her every nerve ending, robbing her of breath for a few seconds. Then she screamed. She wailed in agony, writhing in a torment that went on and on. She felt as though she were at the base of the Crags, burning alive again. Only this time, the fire was deep inside her as well. It was so far beyond being seared by the Sun after their escape from the Nest the former seemed almost pleasant be comparison. She rode it out, shrieking until she thought she would go mad, praying for unconsciousness, praying for anything that would give her relief.

Little by little, it eased up enough so that she could think again and take note of her surroundings. There was a struggle going on nearby. She heard Legolas’ voice raised in anger and the strained breath of Aragorn and Gimli as they tried to restrain him.

"You will not hurt her!" Legolas cried. "You will not hurt her again!"

She wanted to go to him, to hold him, but the razored claws of the pain tore into her again, as another wave, as terrible as the first, struck her and left her wailing in agony. But still, somehow, she managed to thrust one hand out toward him, though she was unsure now as to whether she sought comfort or offered it. Eomer took the hand and clasped it in his own, as though forbidding her to intrude upon the tussle that was going on a few feet away.

"Do not touch her!" Legolas screamed. "Do not---!" The sound of a blow, short and sharp, and Legolas’ breath sighed out of his chest. Through the bleary haze of pain that had began to dim once again, Eowyn saw that he had fallen back into Gimli’s arms. The Dwarf’s face crumbled with sorrow for his friend’s torment. Legolas was still conscious, breathing shallowly. His eyes were dim with confusion and fear, as though he wandered though a nightmare vale of delirium.

"Oh, my friend," Gimli said, his deep voice laden with the unsteady rumble of banked tears. He swept Legolas’ tangled golden hair back from his face, his own visage as grim and loving as a father grieving over a dying child. "That they have done this to you, of all people! You who loved light and the sight of the Sun on the green leaves of your forests!"

"Gimli?" Legolas touched the Dwarf’s face with confounded wonder. "Gimli, how is it that your spirit has come to Mandos?"

"We are not in Mandos, you fool Elf!" Gimli said with a short bark of laughter. "I am alive and so are you. I leapt off the mountainside thinking I would shortly be feasting in the Halls of Aule and bragging to my fathers of my exploits." He snorted. "No such glorious ending for me, I fear. I struck the ground headfirst and woke a day later, half-delirious with the god of all headaches. I wandered the Dustlands for several days before Aragorn’s scouts found me half dead of thirst." His voice darkened. "Though by that time, water was no longer what I craved to slake my thirst."

"Mellon-nin," Legolas said hoarsely. "I am glad to see you again!"

And the Dwarf growled in feigned outrage as his friend embraced him weakly, mumbling ‘Foolish Elf’ under his breath as he patted his friend’s back with awkward affection.

"Aragorn?" Legolas said, his eyes focusing upon his other friend with effort. "How---" He broke off with a gasp of fear. "Eowyn! Where is she? Where---?"

"She is right here, my friend," Aragorn said gently.

"Eowyn?" Legolas said softly.

She sought to clear her blurred sight and her spinning head as his face peered down at her. He touched her cheek uncertainly, and as always, at the simple touch of his hand, the crippling pain eased again to something almost bearable. He was dead pale, his luminous beauty dulled, his eyes hollow and dim. But her heart contracted at the fear, the sorrow, and worst of all, the terrible apprehension that poured off of him in waves. He seemed to be searching his fragmented memories of the last two weeks, trying to piece together a cohesive narrative. She watched his face silently, her heart shriveling to a cold stone of fear in her breast. She saw his face change as he found the bulk of his recollection. He swallowed slowly and his presence radiated a sense of twisting shame and sorrow that made her want to sob with despair. He was watching her face as intently, as though he was trying to read her thoughts.

He had remembered everything, she thought numbly. He had recalled all that had passed between them with horrible clarity and it filled him with shame and regret. With horror at the way they had rutted like animals in heat. She had---she had taken from him his perfect purity, the innocence and the first act of love that he should have laid at the feet of some beautiful Elvish bride like the priceless treasure that it was. And now, when he looked upon her he would never never never feel anything but grinding remorse for all that they had sullied in each other as they sank into darkness.

She choked, as grief more raw and terrible than she had ever know, tore at her insides. And at the same instant, another wave of agony, the pain of the aethelas tea purging her blood of Simiasha’s poison, ripping though her body again, robbing her of speech. She turned her face into her brother’s broad chest with a broken wail of loss and agony.

"Eowyn!" Legolas’ voice, like sorrow incarnate.

"Do not touch her!" Her brother said harshly. "You have done quite enough of that already!"

Legolas made a soft noise, a sharp little exhalation of breath, as though her brother had just shoved a dagger into his heart.

Eowyn sobbed in weak, cracked little hiccups, blessing her receding consciousness as a brief respite to sorrow. Her last waking thought was that she wished she could die.

 *****************************************

She wandered at times in a haze of semi-conscious agony, never waking fully, unable to speak or form a coherent thought. She knew her brother was near and that she was dreadfully ill. Fallah was often at her bedside, though sometimes her face bled into a memory of Eowyn’s mother. The pain rolled in and out like a sea tide. Sometimes it was only a low burn of agony, the next hour she would hear herself shrieking and begging Eru aloud to let her die, to make it stop.

Aragorn came and left many times. His presence was like a bonfire beside the smaller glowing candles of Eomer and Fallah’s spirits. Only when he spoke to her could she make sense of anything beyond her immediate torment.

"It is too soon to rouse her," she heard the King telling someone in a quiet, tense voice, as he lay one hand on her sweat-soaked brow. "She will wake soon, perhaps tonight. But I cannot risk her life as well by waking her completely until her fever breaks. As terribly as she is suffering, it would be tenfold were she wide awake to bear the full brunt of this malady. The pain alone could stop her heart or burst the channels of blood in her brain."

"Aye," Gimli said with a shudder in his voice. "I remember. Even now, I try to remember how bad it was when you purged my blood in this fashion and my mind shrinks back from the memory. And I was not so far gone as they are. But Aragorn! He is barely breathing! He will not live through the night unless she comes to him."

A little silence.

"The change was warping him against the bent of his very nature, my friend," Aragorn said quietly. "We cannot be certain his belief is entirely unfounded."

"I can!" Gimli said with harsh finality. "If he were drowned in a well of darkness ten thousand years he could not have hurt her so!" The Dwarf paused a moment before continuing. "And besides---what passed between them did not see its beginning in the Nest. It was brewing since they first clapped eyes on each other, I think. When we came to Rhunballa, I could see what was happening even if they themselves were blind to it. I only hope this nightmare does not poison all that might have been good between them."

She drifted away upon an ocean of pain and heard no more.

 *********************************************

Eowyn opened her eyes to yellow sunlight streaming through the open window of her own guest bedchamber in the Royal Villa of Rhunballa. She felt lighter than air, euphoric to be blessedly, peacefully free of pain. Her entire body felt as though it were one great bruise, but these aches were nothing compared to what she had known. Henceforth, for all that remained of her life, she would redefine the word pain and every hurt or illness would fall short of this new definition.

Aragorn was sitting beside her, one warm rough hand clasping hers.

"Can you hear me, my Lady?" He asked quietly. "Do you know who I am?"

"Aragorn," she said. Her voice sounded as though she had swallowed a mouthful of gravel.

"Eowyn," the King said without any preamble, "I must ask you some intrusive and intimate questions and I ask you forgiveness, but time is our enemy in this. Legolas is dying."

Her breath caught in her throat. It seemed her heart had seized up in her chest. "No," she rasped. "Is he---still changing? Is---is he---?"

"Eowyn," Aragorn asked gently. "Did you and he become lovers before the worst of the change began to effect your minds? Or was it a mindless bestial thing born of the poison in your veins? Please, you must answer me quickly and with complete honesty!"

"I---" Her chest caught in a little sob. "I was in my right mind those first few nights. I---I thought he was as well." She breathed in deeply, trying to steady her voice. "The first night after we escaped---we were embracing, and then we were kissing, and then we---we---" She began to cry in earnest now. "He told me he loved me again and again. I thought it was real."

"You were not unwilling?" Aragorn asked intently.

"Is that why he is dying now?" She asked hopelessly. All her tears had dried up. Some things were too terrible, so far beyond the simple expiation of weeping that tears would not suffice. "When you woke us I felt his---his horror and grief over what we had done. It he dying because he has remembered himself and it is as though I used him as Simiasha wished to?"

"No!" He put one arm behind her back and raised her limp body off the bed. "After you lost consciousness, he went mad. He fought us when we tried to give him the aethelas tea. We had to restrain him and pour it down his throat. He wailed nonsense after that and woke from the fever a day ago. He began to fade almost instantly. He says after you were together, he remembers that you began to wail as though your heart were torn from you breast. When we woke the pair of you, he could think of nothing but that. And when you turned from him with such a cry of anguish, it seemed to confirm what he feared. He thinks he ravished you."

"No!" She leapt from the bed and her legs buckled. Aragorn caught her lightly, hefting her up in both arms. "Take me to him!" She said.

Aragorn was already moving. He carried her out of the guest chamber and the white walls of the Villa blurred by as his long legs bore her to their destination. He kicked open the door to another bedchamber and strode across the room, setting her upon the bed.

Legolas was lying in old King Udam’s great bed, his eyes open and fixed upon nothing. His skin was pale as death, dull of its natural radiance. He barely seemed to be breathing. Aragorn set a light kiss upon her brow and gave her hand a quick, hard squeeze. "Do not let him depart, my Lady! Bring him back to us."

She leaned forward, stretching out beside his still body. He did not stir or seem to notice her presence. She put her arms around him and kissed his lips lightly. Her eyes filled with tears as he blinked and sobbed softly. His eyes, hopeless and welling with boundless sorrow, met hers.

"I am sorry," he said in a soft, dry rattle of a whisper. "Forgive---"

"Legolas," she said gently. She kissed him again, long and deep and full of every loving word she had not had the courage to utter, even in the forgetful thrall of the change. It was her fault that he had misconstrued her reaction on waking. She had never said the words. Not once. And he had repeated them a thousand times in less than a fortnight.

"I love you," she said softly. "You took nothing that was not freely give with all my heart."

He regarded her with weak wonder, with hope unlooked for gathering in his eyes. He breathed in and out, a long deep breath, like a man withdrawing from the edge of a precipice from which he had nearly jumped. He inhaled again, stronger this time, still almost too weak to speak.

"I wept after we loved that first time because I was healed," she murmured, stroking his face. His cold skin had warmed noticeably under her touch. "And once I began to weep I could not stop. I felt your shame and regret when Aragorn woke us, and I thought all that we had shared must have been only the change acting upon you. I though I had hurt you and---"

He moved so quickly she squealed with surprise. He covered her mouth with his and wrapped her in his arms, squeezing the air from her lungs. Dimly, she heard quiet footsteps and the clink of a door latch, the sound of Aragorn leaving the room.

She relaxed against him, withdrawing from their kiss to look down at him. She gazed into the azure depths of his eyes, watching with wonder as the color and light and life seemed to flow back into his face. The wound to his spirit that had severed him from his innate vitality was healing itself as she looked on. He still seemed terribly weak, but that had more to do with the physical ordeal of Aragorn’s cure.

"You love me," he mused, his voice barely above a breath. He shifted onto his side, pulling her with him. "You love me," he sighed again. He smiled like warm summer sunshine on her face, and her stomach flip-flopped as though she was a little maid with a first crush. She lay gazing in wonder into his face, amazed she had never once taken in the perfect beauty of him with a woman’s appreciation. But then, she had been dead to all such yearnings until Morsul’s blood had reawakened desire in her body. She wondered if the erstwhile Knight of Doriath had found his way at last to Mandos. Somehow, inexplicably, she was sure that he had.

They rested together in easy content silence, basking in the absence of pain, each lost in the warm glow of the other’s presence. Neither felt compelled to examine or weigh the consequences of this new wonderful bond of feeling.

Eowyn was the first to break the spell. "What will happen now?" She wondered aloud, her brow creasing with worry.

"The Huntress lives still," he murmured gravely. "I do not need to tell you that."

"We were very naïve to think we had slain her so easily," Eowyn said. "We will not need to seek her out. She has called her children home from far afield. She will find us soon enough."

"When she does, we must destroy her."

"Well," she said dryly. "That sounds easy enough."

He laughed weakly. "Aye. I was aware of Aragorn and Gimli’s speech while we were ill. He has halted the change in our bodies, but---" He paused, as though considering whether to say more. "Lord Elrond’s texts on the subject are sketchy. But Aragorn fears that, even if Simiasha is slain, we may always be----altered to an extent. We must prepare ourselves for that possibility."

She was silent, trying to take that in. She drew in a long slow breath. "I do not wish to live ‘altered,’" she said with soft finality.

He went motionless beside her as though all the renewed life had suddenly sagged out of him. "Nor would I if the changes were terrible. But, Eowyn---"

She stared into the wrenching worry in his face and felt a twist of guilt. She kissed him lightly. "I must stop threatening to end my life," she said. "If I do it once more, I will furrow worry lines in your brow. I am sorry. I meant to say that I would not except that there is no cure to be found anywhere in this world." She watched as the taught strain eased from his body, as his features relaxed slowly.

"When we are free of this darkness," he told her softly. "I will ask you to avow out union."

"Our---" She broke of as she slowly realized what he meant. Her cheeks began to blush a rosy red. But on the heels of that sweet unadulterated joy, a tightness rose in her chest, that claustrophobic, pressurized feeling of overload, of too much to quickly. He watched her face and seemed to read this as though she had spoken her feelings aloud. "Our union?" She asked in a small voice.

"Among my people," he said slowly, carefully, "the act of love is the sacrament. My folk would consider us wed already. But that is not your way. When we are free of this plague upon our bodies and souls, I will ask you to exchange public vows with me so that the customs of your kin may be satisfied. Do not give me an answer yet. In truth, I would wish to give you a season to consider. There is much involved in spanning the chasm that separates our two kindreds, and more obstacles than you have yet imagined."

"Such as the fact that I will die and leave you to grieve for all of time," she said quietly. Was love enough, weighed against the specter of the sorrow he would carry for all eternity?

"Do not let that sway your decision," he told her firmly. "I will tell you what Arwen told Aragorn when he raised the same objection to their union. The deed is done. I will love you until the stars fade and the physical plain of Arda is swept up in the tides of Eternity. I will grieve when you die, though it is by no means assured I will outlive you. I have ever been the sort to seek out danger. I draw trouble to my doorstep like a loadstone. But whether you consent to share your life with me or not, I will still love you, and grieve when we are finally parted."

"I am sorry," she said, feeling her heart convulse in her chest with conflicting joy and sorrow. "It seems I am always causing you pain in one fashion or another. If I could live forever for you I would."

"And it I could forsake forever for you, I would joyfully renounce it," he said, sad and wistful. "Let us leave the matter there until out futures are assured."

"Yes," she agreed.

She held him a little closer, thinking she preferred the comparative similarity in his frame and her own. Her father, Theoden, Theodred and Eomer---the only other men she had ever embraced---had been large, broad-chested men. Hugging them had been like being embraced by a friendly bear. Legolas was reed slim compare to them, though she knew he housed enormous strength in his lean-muscled form. She rather liked that. They were much the same size, despite his greater height. It was better to feel as though they held each other, rather than being swallowed in his embrace. She ran one hand down his chest, trailing down to his stomach, feeling the taught planes of his body quiver in response to her touch.

"Aragorn will be back in shortly to make sure all is well with me," he murmured thoughtfully. His voice had dropped to a low husk with quiet, intense desire flickering in the depths of his gray eyes.

"He might be damaged irreparably if he came in upon us in the midst of love-making," she murmured. Oh but she wanted him, like a dying man in the desert wanted water. She wanted to wrap herself around his beauty and love him until they were both too spent to move.

"He is made of sturdier stuff than that," Legolas laughed softly. He touched his lips to hers. "You set my head whirling like Dwarvish whiskey. You set my blood to boiling. This desire of the body is like a sweet wine I never imagined or craved. But having tasted it once, I am become a drunkard. And here am I, almost too weak still to bury myself in your sweetness and please you until you cry out with joy."

"Almost?" She asked breathlessly.

"Almost too weak," he replied softly. "But not quite."

In an hour, they would rise and brave the consequences of besieging Hunters, of Simiasha’s looming vengeance, and very probably outraged elder brothers. Eomer, she knew, would still see her as his wayward ward---his to defend, his to command. His to demand satisfaction or a hastily wedded resolution for her honor besmirched, whatever the circumstances. They would learn who, if anyone, now ruled Rhunballa. The would deliver the worst news possible to the city’s people; the news that their nemesis was not slain and was, even now, gathering her forces for an assault.

In an hour, they would face all these tasks and battles. But for one moment, perhaps their last moment of peace before the coming storm fell upon them, they would pretend they were still wandering in the forgetful bliss of those first few nights in the bamboo cottage. They would pretend they were the only two people in the world and their love had no consequences, no barriers, and the inexorable ticking of the finite clock of her life was only so much noise.

 (COMING SOON: The grand finale! No chapter name for it yet, but the first draft is nearly half done!)