How many times, gwador, did we prevail and leave the honored dead behind us? How many times did we go on while mourners remained to do their weeping and hold their quaint, savage rites? Little did I think on them for my eyes looked ever forward to follow you. I never knew it would be thus.
You and I, we smiled and clasped hands and uttered bold words today, empty words.
I cannot remember them now.
The world seemed to go still when the bells began their somber tolling. From that cold stone hall your beloved emerged, as beautiful as ever, as graceful, and yet utterly empty. Then did it come to me, the bitter finality of this thing we had refused to acknowledge for the sake of a warrior’s brave face.
You have gone beyond my reach and will never return.
You have departed and I know not where, and now my courage fails and a great, sickening apprehension falls upon me. It plucks and snatches at my spirit with sharp, cold fingers. It is a dreadful mystery, this mortality. What has become of you, Aragorn? How fare you now? Is there a blessed realm for you beyond the circles of this world? I am only an elf. I know naught but that you are gone.
You are gone.
Now where once my heart beat there is only a hard, hollow ache. It is like the deep bite of a blade, like falling without end, like a black shadow welling up within me to drown out all light. There is a suffocating silence in my soul.
A mocking voice of madness bids me follow you now, as if I could.
Instead I walk and I answer and return embraces that I cannot feel. Others weep, yet I do not. Others sing. At last I can bear the empty noise no longer and I flee the throng to wander alone in this city of stones and men.
Night has fallen. The sky is flat and black and the stars are naught but cold, glittering shards scattered upon it. They do not speak to me. The garden where I stand is silent; only distantly do I feel the soil and the grass under my feet. I put out my hand to leaf and blossom, I touch them, but it is as in a dream. I look out across the dark land to fair Ithilien, that work of love. I look to the north, to my home of old under the green wood where memories lie as thick as the leaves of many seasons. How is it that they no longer seem to be mine? The world has no more substance now than strokes of a brush on paper.
Yet there, a streak of dull silver on the shadowed plain is Anduin. Oh, it, of all things, is no dead image before my eyes. As keenly as ever do I feel its relentless current slipping away, slipping away…to the sea.
At last I find my voice, and it is as the sound of rending.
It would seem that I still follow you after all, gwador, if only to leave this shore for another.
For now I will sail.
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A/N: The term gwador is elvish and refers to a brother in the spiritual rather than physical sense.
This dittie seems thin to me, but no matter how I tried I couldn’t flesh it out without diluting the emotion. Criticism is welcome.