#losgar

Mae: I think we're what people call a "ship".

Fingon: *deranged laughter*

-

Celegorm: Dunno what I'll do next, but I'll burn that ship when I get to it.

Fingon, sweating: Can you *not* ?

-

Maglor: Wanna watch Titanic with us ? It's about time you get over your fear of ships.

*two hours later*

Fëanor: We’re kind of missing something...

Curufin, looking at Maedhros: Teamwork? Cohesion?

Maglor: A general sense of what we’re doing?

T | 1,011 words | First Age

A king is not a man. A king is the connective fascia between crown and sword.

“You would sacrifice your own son?” 

Silence, accusatory; gloom, no stench of beeswax or tallow, a cold light; terror, polluting the air like smoke (or perhaps the smoke itself permeates the waxed canvas and silk tapestries, always insidious in its invasiveness), and the faint sound of weeping.

Nelyafinwë, scorn-faced; Kanafinwë, mourning-white. Heaving under the weight of breath, trembling against the edge of light.

“You would not wait one more hour?”

Morifinwë, soot-handed. Restless on solid ground, straining against distance and closeness both.

“You did not know he fled?” 

Turcafinwë, steel-gleaming; Curufinwë, lance-stiff. Washing no complicit hands, casting shadows without end.

“You would murder him? Your own blood and flesh, by your own hand?”

Pityafinwë, reeking of fire. Alone.

Silence, cleaving. 

“And if I did?” 

I am not weeping. I am still. I turn on my heel. I begin to walk. I let the tarp drop closed. I blink away ashes; I pass my sons’ knights voiceless; I move out of reach of grasping hands. I gave the order. I have nothing to talk about.

The rocks grind softly beneath my feet, singing white quartz, striated gneiss, dappled gabbro and inclusions of silicate scale soot-stained -- darkness reaches even this far, it has followed us, it has preceded us, the night has hands like a cataclysm and they pollute whatever they touch -- black, it's all black, not madder and indigo reflecting starlight in the paraphernalia of royalty but the black of annihilation where nothing survives. 

The only fire they have ever known has all but gone out. 

It is done, sealed as unassailable; the great carrion of my choice is lain beside me bones-barred in all its thrashing atavism, silverwood crumbling to ash like the funerary rustle of my crowning wreath. Every coronation is sealed in blood. The skeletal shadows of ships are beginning to collapse into the bowels of the earth, white flames dead, eaten by the cold sea. A wind is picking up. The pyre is at its end. The west is out of sight. 

During the burning of the ships

Then Maedhros alone stood aside (2024)

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