Of recent I had cause to amend with a friend of old, and through the rigour of our reunion - tempers and joys which flared and cooled by the hour - we calmed one night in the course of our sojourn by deep-night candlelight, and shared tales - as we may here, now.
Since I have told my tale this Winter to another: I shall, instead, tell you his.
You may find it out of season; the dread of it. But some tradition holds among some part of Men, where tales which chill are given in exchange in these white-blearing nights of cold, as if the shivering fear conjured to the listener serves instead to warm against the real and bitter weather. Or perhaps it is that such stories are held fonder and safer in their telling and hearing here, now: for the warmth of company is high-strong in these mean months by need.
Listen you, now, and decide which of these seems most right, for yourself.
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This story begins in a tower of old, as many stories do and as many which pass through them. Auspicious at first this tower seemed, when first scouted by two wayrangers of the Elves cutting in of old Beleriand - guarding against reproach to the Falas after those shores’ time besieged, and their eking improvement thereafter.
Methenselion and Rostandir of Nargothrond, these scouts, and their new-found tower; old, seemed yet older or somemeans newer than they might have had means to know. For on the maps and within the sketches of their company this tower did not appear. And Methenselion, he was within Cirdan’s confidence, for his husband was cousin to the then Lord of the Falas. High-sure was he, then, and with right cause, on matter of the architecture and paths of Brithombar and Eglarest both! And, so he thought, their satellites as well.
The tower stood as a surprise, as indelibly it stood.
Mysterious, then, and unaccounted-for, yet well-hospitable. Aye, worn and crack’d, but the roof cried for neither daub nor thatch, and the chimneys breathed clear of moss or matt of roots or nest, leaving the fireplaces stood dry - though disused. A chest they found, dense with a press of unspoiled dark furs; and a short cask of wine was soon discovered as well: received by two joyous grins - and their discipline which, so-assailed, waned.
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The comrades took to this tower with all the warmth it seemed to bear them in turn. A home-feeling set about them as they discussed its generosity of merits over late cups. Its sightlines seemed to stretch for miles beyond the right of its stature; yet they deemed their fire hid by angular cliff-shadow, and their smoke by velvet-weight sea fog. From here could the Falas entire be seen and yet without being itself over-looked. In days doomed to come, the tower promised to be spear, and shield, and friend. What a seat! What a boon!
‘Yet,’ remarked Methenselion, ‘for all here that makes camp a revel, the statuary I mark strange. Much calls me to ease here, but to be sat at ease beneath their dour frowns’.
Rostandir tittered, as if Methenselion had joked - but right was his friend in this. Two figures knapped of emerald-glass vulcanism were they, of image alike and unalike our own, they say, as the tower too was in its style. A tall and tense posture each, a bristle-backed looming-over of that glad round of respite: the stone flag floor below them, and those at rest upon it.
For all the warmth the curved hall offered, there was none given to the faces given them by their unknown maker. They stood, visible from the Southern approach, on an upper open ring of the tower, looking in, and down.
Came the peak of the night, Rostandir protested of those figures’ eyes boring into his braid-framed nape, and retired - quite out of sight - with Methenselion following alike, soon after.
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Disgust. Consternation. Acrid thought and feeling lay with them that night as sleep but scant graced their brows, and dream fought for its place behind their eyes. Settle they did in time, and great rest they had come the morning light - but after such ugly start. But with that start: forgot.
So it was a many of the nights they spent there, as they strode the lands nearby and plotted routes of support for the convalescing twin havens. The movement of man and material busied their best-lit thoughts and most energetic feats, and at night they would take up with their emeraline hosts. In their days no person did they pass or let pass-by who was not known to them, or who knew what they did not, or that had heard of any tower alike, unalike, those our own at any length South from Eglarest and, of course, had never seen such from Eglarest itself.
To the minds of Methenselion and Rostandir; doing secret and subtle work before the great many would march their found paths: this acclaimed the tower all the better.
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As the young Moon neared its full eve by eve, the pair would share company bathed in mixed lights. Ruddy, brassy, the seasoned fireplace they held at low-crackle; a buttercup-smear of candles winked, placed as they were in nook and upon beam and in bare brick-hole; and as well there was a smile of silver - the unadulterated Moon on a high wall, poised to look out, and away. And moonlight again, in strength: for the most of it did filter green through those forms above, and cast deep ocean-shadows to play in the darks that held.
The day of the night of the Moon’s fulfilment, the friends fought. Methenselion tells me, pained as pain, that he wonders even now what for, what over, what of? He has never remembered. He has recalled the beginning of some dream not-his-own. Disgust. Consternation. Yet it passes, and so not-dwelling: he dwells not on it. If he did so on that day, that night, I know not either. But to hear him tell this tale, especially coming now the rest, one wonders what one can hold in heart or mind; of what one sees, and wishes to see not.
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They had beaten a thorny path that morning with many barbs exchanged between them, but at Noon, at some fork in some young road, they parted. The heat of their split opinions, or was it ill humours, a poor breakfast, a mistaken remark, that had been upon them the last hours weighed upon one the same as it weighted on the other; and so both did greet the fork as a needful reprieve, and so each with a smile. In faith, Methenselion took the left path and Rostandir set to the right, and they resolved to find each other in their grown-homely ring of stone, in better humour, come sunset.
The fork did its work.
Removed by bare miles and few hours, Methenselion’s thoughts turned to his friend, and so did his affections return soon after. It seemed to him that each feather-mute wick of his striding impelled to mind some merit of dear Rostandir; or so of his blessings; or else some of all they together shared, and so the prize of their reunion-to-be grew in him: by then all-too-happily calling himself ‘fool!’ for his bitterness and brashness - and laughing to think of Rostandir doing same, as surely he was!
Come the reconjoining of their paths, Methenselion could see that his compatriot was well ahead by the signs they would leave for one another: deftly knotted grass stems at ankle-height, which he smiled to see, for here, they had already begun speaking!
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But a little further on, and the Sun was blaring its last over suddenly, suddenly swamp-still seas, shrinking, sullen, from the cusp of the tower’s haught-ringed dais.
In its leaving it un-lit for Methenselion a stage set for dread, and empty of its actors.
The statues were not to be seen.
There opened in Methenselion’s gut a pit: plumbing, dreadful and deep. Versus that depth fled the strength of his arms, and the sprint of his legs; down sank his clear thought, and floundered beside those limbs benumbed; and allwhile it felt that the world were sinking alike hisself and not; in ways at-once horizon-wide and single-speck’d: whirling, miring, and blinding. The path to the foot of the tower’s stair seemed to snake anew and cruelly: stretching beneath his ailed and beating steps, and making that once-gentle approach an utter torture - despite the fleetness of panic which propelled him.
The skies darkened as the Sun rolled to roil beneath the Western seas, and that darkness grew dense with the anguished Elf’s every fought-for forward-step. Reaching the stair, he marked a track of three scrambling footprints - two left feet, one right, Elf-like - slinking seawards with nil grace. This puzzle gave him pause, but his dread compelled him onward to the door-arch, and the leering fear beyond it.
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Methenselion entered the tower.
There was no fire lit, and so no light of orange nor yellow nor red there graced any surface nor part of air, and neither was there a glint of green.
Instead, there, framed white in impossible dark by a shaft of moonlight as straight as a tear-streak: lay poor Rostandir, fled of form, and mournful to behold.
How Methenselion bent in grief.
He felt that he should have folded to nothing, or else rounded over again to see his own shoulders heaving in sobs, where he could have put down a hand in comfort. Oh, for a hand on his shoulder, then. Who would not have proffered it? But alone was he, and as wretched as any alone in the wilderness - esteemed scout or no - Methenselion wept himself to exhaustion, to oblivion, and awoke the next day to find the scene cruelly unchanged.
Yet in the light of that fresh-crying day: one glint of green did come revealed.
Clasped desperately, nigh spine-deep, to the dead Elf’s chest, and clamped there by his own fright-viced blade: an emerald of rare style.
The size, and form, of a foot.
-
Some have said that the tower and its wardens must have been the work of the Hated Foe, or some high servant thereof of old.
Others accuse a Dark Elf, some sorcerer with no ear or space-in-heart for their people.
Or that it were a Numenorian endeavour: a fell and prideful experiment that pierced through the rounds and whorls of Arda like a dropped needle and found itself, like those friends, out of place.
But there are those who yet say that those statues were simply alike, unalike, ourselves: that but few were left and resolved to remain,
until the last of that hall’s hospitality was spent,
and its last guests, judged.
((Adapted from Edith Nesbit’s ‘Man-Size in Marble))
