Inedibles by Dawn Felagund  

Moonfall

Tilion has a lot of time to think now that steering the Moon has become a routine job free of dragons and dark lords. He knows his place in the prophesy and that he will die violently, and he wonders if he can aspire to the dignity he has observed of the mortals in Middle-earth. A ficlet with dark themes related to death and references to blood and violence.

Prompt: mooncake

This ficlet responds to the quote, "not until the Sun passes and the Moon falls, shall it be known of what substance [the Silmarils] were made," with another nod to the "buns" prompt.

Tilion's job had become dull. Now that the assaults of Melkor and the threat of Ancalagon and, yes, the lusts for Arien were dissipated, he took his seat, long since molded to his posterior, and draped the reins across the well-worn crease of his hand and fell into muscle memory, twitching his wrists this way and that, uttering "git!" and "whooooa" without bothering to hear his own voice. He knew where eddies of wind would threaten the chariot and compensated flawlessly, so that an astronomer in his stone tower by the sea might set his telescope to the Moon's arc and always find Tilion's heavy-lidded face filling his viewfinder.

Steering the Moon gave a man a lot of time to think. And watch. He watched what transpired in Middle-earth. He saw many people die: heroes with swords that Tilion's arms-gone-frail probably could not lift, who spilled blood without a whisper of regret; he watched them beg for their lives at the points of swords or on the verges of cliffs. The tears of heroes contained the same salt as those of babes new-born.

He watched rich men who left their people to waste to dust by starvation's slow hand blubber when the relative mercy of a pitchfork pressed their own throats—their dying cries the same pitch as the orphans they'd made.

Tilion thought about this. He knew the prophecy. He would crash to the earth and die at the world's end. From his seat steering the Moon, he'd seen crashes of all sorts, in the progression of transit technology, and he knew the ugliness of limbs and heads and guts entangled with conveyance. Cantilevers and pistons and gears crushed flesh no matter what powered them, horse or steam or magic. He sometimes pondered his slender arms with his veins the color of the full-moon night and wondered what they would spill, when mangled, and how it would feel. How much would it hurt? He wondered if he'd scream and sob and beg like the people he watched from the seat of the Moon.

He reminded himself that people died quietly all the time, in dignity if not silence: the mothers blood-soaked in childbed, the grandfathers whose hourglass drained dry, the little children who caught disease like a cat catching butterflies. The butterflies, for that matter.

Tilion made up his mind that he would die like that, when the prophecy came to pass. He'd had millennia, after all, to live and steer the Moon that marked people's lives and watch what transpired. Under his light, loves were kindled. Peace forged, stronger than steel. Stories told that gave another gasp at life to the mothers and the grandfathers and the little children and the butterflies—and yes, the heroes and the rich men too. They were given dignity in the stories by those who remembered and loved them, despite their flaws. Tilion contemplated the bones of his hands, the blue-tinged nails that he clipped the night before he made new, palms damp with dew. He didn't want any of these small, precious things to fall to ruin, but no one did, he supposed, and yet all did. He would not be alone in going, when his time came.

The wind eddied and his wrists twitched and an astronomer showed her daughter the changeless face of the moon as he sank behind the mountains: another day closer to moonfall, but he'd be ready when the time came. Steering the Moon gave a man a lot of time to think.