Xanderian lay on the soft grass, an evening's breeze making it's rambling way along the swiftly flowing brook beside her, sweet and heavy with the scent of lilac's in bloom. The moon had just risen, full and luminous, giving everything a silvery edge as it bathed the scene in soft, pure light as if it were Telparion itself.
The huntress tensed, and looked around slowly without rising. She remembered this scene and her blood froze. However the breeze smelled of different shores and open water, the pale moonlight was softer and colder, a lingering undertone of expectation colored all. This was a different dream altogether.
She looked up at the distant stars, reaching out into the space between…and in a flash she finally understood it all. Suddenly it all made sense and she was filled with both a sense of relief, and a slow, vicious rage.
She rose carefully and sighed, turning to face the solitary figure that appeared suddenly beside her, dressed in strangely baroque armor that seemed carved of stone and starlight. The man's features were sharp and fine, their jawline proud and regal, their bearing imperially slim and arrogant, a true child of ancient Numenor.
He smiled at Xanderian lovingly, his thin, feminine lips pale pink in the silvery night, eyes alight with mischief and malice and mansions no one would ever see again.
When the figure spoke, the words were unbearably smooth and intoned by a multitude of voices like many threads forming a single gossamer strand, so beautiful yet so very terrible, invoking dread and breathless awe. “My sweetest servant, at last you sleep. She is here. She awaits you, provoked by your petulance and your power. She has been summoned by your sincerity.”
Xanderian nodded softly. “I know my Lady Dancer, dear Heartbreaker. I felt her as I woke and whats more, I knew the truth.”
The figure tilted their head, long white hair flowing down to the ground, mimicking the elleth’s own gestures like a waxwork figure, the voices teasing and taunting as if speaking to a beloved but obstinate child. “And did the truth know you? Did it seduce you from your reckless resolution?”
The elleth simply shook her head and raised her pale face to the figure, her eyes closed. The man made a soft, cooing noise as if hovering over a bassinet and leaned down, kissing Xanderian slowly, teasingly, then stepped back into the shadows, words flowing like a multi-hued tide. “Then go and face your maker…and know that whatever you choose, you will always be ours, and we will always go with you. Always.”
Slowly Xanderian turned, to find that the sleepy little brook had become the coastline of an endless sea. Moored on the white sand was a graceful boat of swan like design, festooned with glowing lanterns and draped in shimmering, silver light. In the prow stood a raven-haired elleth, dressed in flowing lavender robes and facing the distant black horizon. The ship and the shore and the woman were exactly as they had been when Xanderian had seen them as a child, and ever after in dreams.
Xanderian approached with careful steps, strangely reluctant to get too close to the glowing vessel. At last she stood beside it in silence, waiting. After many long moments, the older elleth appeared to finally notice her, half turning to face her. The lantern light traced ribbons across her perfect features, then she looked back out to sea as she spoke. “Dear Lethril, at last you come, you come at last. I have called and called, sending you guidance and urgings, yet finally I must come unto you like this for the waters have grown strange between us. Come away now, take my hand and lay your burdens down. There is nothing more you can do here, there was little enough to be done on the day of your birth and there is less now. Come away.”
Slowly, gracefully, the elleth stretched her hand out to her daughter, beckoning her towards the boat.
Xanderian watched the outstretched hand as moments turned to years, as if assembling her words, then finally turned her gaze to her mother’s shadowed eyes. “No.”
The older woman raised both eyebrows, as if she had not understood the dialect. “No? What do you mean, no?”
The huntress smiled coldly, her rage building. “No…I mean I shall not come, Emig. I remain here. You said you sent me guidance? My dark dreams, my feelings of impending doom and despair? I assumed they were from some shadowy enemy or dark foe…but they were from you all along. I see that now. You sent me nightmares and fell visions, not a mother’s gently teaching. You sent me horrific shades to stoke my fears, not loving whispers to sooth my dread. Why, Emig? Tell me WHY?”
The woman seemed confused…then perturbed. “My second born, my eavesdropper, my strange, bitter child. I knew that you are more adept at facing darkness than chasing light, so I sent you what you needed to know, as you needed to know it. However the form is of no matter before the meaning. The time has been drawing nearer and the time is now here. Your time here is over. Come away now.”
Xanderian didn’t move, speaking from the shore in quiet, carefully chosen words. “For many years I wondered what I had done. What I had done to cause you to abandon me. First I blamed myself..and then I blamed you. After that I blamed the Banshee for many years. Surely your raging, difficult first born must have driven you away. However recently I have seen the truth.”
The huntress stepped forward, hands gripping the slim figurehead of the ship, letting its ethereal silver glow surround her as she spoke. “The truth is that you left us for love. Your love for Adar, Anerial the Kinslayer of Thangulhad, which took you to the West, gripping his hand and bearing the shame he could not feel, could not bear for himself in his madness. I do not blame you anymore, I understand you…for I have chosen much that same path.”
The older elleth stared, her perfect composure cracking like crystal. She looked as if she would have struck her daughter if she could have. “You…you know NOTHING…what path is this you speak of? Remaining here? You spiteful child, that is not a path that is a madness. You have no idea what you are speaking of, no idea of the cost…”
“EMIG!” Xanderian’s voice cut through her mother’s words like a blade, her face raised to the stars in passion. “I know EXACTLY what I speak of, I have calculated the cost down to the last degree and I am eager to pay it. I have read the ancient tomes, I have walked the roads of the memory of our people, I have clutched in my own two hands the secrets no one wished to tell me. I know what will become of me…I will remain in these lands as the power of the rings departs once and for all, first becoming mortal, then becoming less than mortal, fading slowly but inexorably. Undying but no longer truly alive, I will become a shade, haunting and watching from the shadows.”
She met her mother’s eyes again, their gaze locked in the embrace they had never shared and never would. “If this is the terrible cup you hold before me with your trembling hands, Emig, I drain it happily…for I will fade as those I love age, I will pass into shadow as they depart from this world, and my shade will tend their graves and watch over their descendants until the end of all ages. Doom? I welcome this doom for I will no longer remain as others pass away. Now, at last, I can join them in my fashion.”
Still gripping the prow of the ship, Xanderian slowly began forcing it down off the sand and into the flowing tide. “You departed before your time, leaving your children behind you, for love. For a love greater than that you held for us, for me. I understand that now, I even respect it. I too live for love and love alone. I would die for love and for love alone…and I remain in this dying, changing, burning world for love, love alone and nothing else. For my Cyndwin, for Fillegedhiel, for Arahen and Gretel and Hawke and Audea and Amrun, for Xandilif and Xanir whatever fate they choose, for those who live and those who rest…for every soul that reaches out and strains to grip hope, to embrace life, to transcend despair. I stay for those, for all of those and when my time is done, and I will mark my days well spent and my life well lived.”
With a final mighty push the huntress sent the ship away from the shore, wading into the cold water as the dream began to fray and snap, the silvery glow flaring around her like spectral fire.
“Good bye Emig…farewell my mother. I think we shall never speak again. Think not unkindly of me as you live out eternity for I have done as I must do, as you did.” Slowly, Xanderian turned from the shore and walked towards the treeline, breathing in the smoke of hickory wood fires, the dread that had been eating at the corners of her mind already growing silent as the world dissolved.
When she woke, she burrowed deeper into Cyndwin’s embrace by the campfire and was relieved she slumbered so deeply like a true daughter of the Mark, and would not ask her Rian why she wept in the night.
