The Way That She Died by AdmirableMonster  

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The Way That She Died

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In the truths that she learned 

Or in times that he cried 

In bridges he burned 

Or the way that she died 

~ Rent, Seasons of Love

Last night, the King’s Men put to death a large group of dangerous radicals in the Artists’ Quarter of Armenelos.  Caught only a few hours before their planned assassination attempt on Tar-Míriel, they forced our heroic enforcers to battle for their very lives.  Unfortunately, the splinter group of Faithful fanatics were unwilling to surrender peacefully.  A large number of weapons, including incendiary devices, were recovered from the basement of the house in which they had been planning their cowardly and devious attack. Although all of the royal guard survived, one of their number was carried to the local hospital with severe injuries; he is expected to recover.  

Citizens are asked to report any unusual activity to the King’s Men. Now, more than ever, Númenor must stand together against those who would destroy her.

—Short Bulletin in the Armenelos Times, Year 11 of the reign of Ar-Pharazôn

Twelve hours earlier. 

“Listen, Finyo, we can find her, we can get Caraë out, just listen to me—” Finyarusco put his gun to the base of Oiacalma’s skull and pulled the trigger. No hesitation. The world shattered into before and after.  Bright blood spattered across the floor.  He went to his knees and took the body into his arms, still warm.  Don’t look, don’t look, don’t see…

He didn’t have much time.  Realistically, he didn’t have time for this at all.  He could hear the voices of the King’s Men, a murmur outside.  They must have heard the shot.  They could hardly fail to make the assumption that at least one person had survived the initial assault. (It would be morbidly hilarious if the incendiary devices they had used were ones that Finyarusco had sold them.  He wouldn’t bother feeling guilty about it, wouldn’t particularly call it well-deserved, since they’d have gotten hold of such things one way or the other, but it would be funny.)

He put the body gently onto the ground.  The face would be ruined, if he looked at it, but he tucked Oi—the corpse’s hands together over its chest.  Then he put the gun barrel, still hot, into his own mouth.  Painful, but that wasn’t relevant.  Don’t think.  He pulled the trigger.  It clicked.  The voices outside grew louder.  No no no.  There had to be another bullet in the chamber.  He pulled the trigger again.  Click. Again. Click—

The door opened.  He looked up at the blood red uniforms of the Kings’ Men.  His stomach heaved.  I never meant to be a martyr.  “Calmo,” he choked out, but there was no one left to answer him.

* * *

Twelve hours and twenty minutes earlier.

“We should leave,” Finyarusco hissed through his teeth at Caraitelen.  Oiacalma rubbed his temples.  While both his lovers usually got on fairly well and the aftermaths of their arguments were often more than worth the argument itself, the world had been trying lately, and he was very tired to be finessing them during one of Caraë’s scholarly get-togethers.

“We do not need to leave,” Caraë said, gritting her teeth right back.  “I’m not letting them know we’re scared—we haven’t done anything wrong.  We are literally discussing the finer grammatical points of root words for character names in a fifty-year-old novel.”

“Do you think they care what we’re actually doing?” Finyo responded, and Oiacalma felt a prickling unease run along the back of his spine.  Finyo was not a man to be serious about anything other than a particularly well-designed filtration system.  Besides, the rest of the book club—Mannarossë, Filitári, Nimruzimir, and Arcanamma—were clearly subdued and nervous, and as much as he wanted to support Caraë’s essential stance of not backing down in front of baseless intimidation, there was no point trying to run a friendly discussion under the circumstances.

“I need to g-go,” Nimruzimir said, before Oiacalma could interject, rising abruptly and marching out of the room.  He never stood on much ceremony before leaving, but the tension amped up another notch, especially when Finyo gestured dramatically—albeit silently—after his receding back.  Caraë sighed explosively, rising to her feet.

“Let’s all take a moment,” Oiacalma said, looking at the other three half-huddling together.  “Everyone’s a little nervous, and I think we all need a breather.”  He extended a hand to Caraë and one to Finyo.  “All right?”

They both glared at him.  Caraë folded her arms.  Finyo rolled his eyes.  Oiacalma waited.  After a moment, begrudgingly, Caraë waved a limp hand at him, and Finyo did the same.  Oiacalma brought them together, clasping them between his own as he always did—

The world exploded.

* * *

Twelve hours and forty-five minutes earlier.

“I really don’t think it means anything except that the original author wasn’t consistent,” Mannarossë shrugged.  “We already know that the first few installments were written before there was any idea of the success Menel Mentië would experience.  And it seems many of the less explicable choices stem from that era, including Nimruzimir’s name.”

“Y-Yes, I c-cannot deny the possibility,” Nimruzimir agreed, his voice, as always, a little faint.  “B-But regardless of the precise origin in the mind of the author, it still functions as a p-powerful symbol; thus, I feel that finding a satisfactory explanation which does not appeal to our external universe is a worthy cause.  N-Nimruzimir is conflicted in a way that none of the rest of the crew is, his status as a h-half-Elf to me is an interesting point when taken in conjunction with the Adunaic name—”

The door slammed open.  Everyone jumped, including, to her chagrin, Caraitelen, who had been leaning forward, intent on following the point raised by the newest member of their book club.  It was, of course, Finyarusco, who never seemed to be on time, his face set in a grim line beneath his customary slightly-overenthusiastic choice of facial hair.  “We’ve got a problem,” he said.

“Can it wait?” Caraitelen asked, warningly.  The conversation had just started to get interesting, and Nimruzimir was very easy to silence and not very easy to get speaking again.

“Can’t, actually,” said Finyo, with what was actually a startling lack of his customary tact.  His usual pleasant contralto had flattened to a sharp alto.  “The King’s Men know we’re meeting tonight.  Someone told the wrong person.”  His eyes flickered across the little group, dark and full of warning.  

That was worrisome.  Not that what they were doing was particularly seditious, but the King’s Men already did not like her, or her outspoken editorials in the local newspaper, or Calmo’s pleasant speeches about the importance of scholarship surrounding different religions or different cultures.  They had broken no laws, but Ar-Pharazôn had grown increasingly willing to silence dissidence with violence since the recent appointment of Zigûr as his chief adviser.  

On the other hand— “We’re meeting tonight to talk about names in a novel,” Caraitelen pointed out.  “I don’t think we could have chosen a milder subject if we tried.”

“I don’t think that matters.”  Finyo unearthed a cigarette from one of his cavernous pockets, lit it, and took a deep draw.  “I’ve been hearing things through the business.  Pharazôn doesn’t want power among the Faithful, including social power, and you have it, Caraë.”

“Well, forgive me if the word of a known arms dealer from his business associates isn’t something I permit to tell me how to act according to my conscience,” Caraitelen snipped.  Her chest was tight; her cheeks were warm.  She had forgotten how infuriating Finyo could be.

“Your conscience is going to get you killed,” Finyo retorted, too loud, and the rest of the circle, which had slowly been breaking up into small, desultory one-on-one conversations, came back together with a snap.

“Finyo,” hissed Caraitelen.  “Let’s speak in private.  Calmo, can you keep running the discussion?”

* * *

Twelve days, fourteen hours, and thirty-three minutes earlier.

“I’m thinking now would be an excellent time to hold another scholar’s roundtable about Menel Mentië,” Caraë said.  “Nf.”

“Now?  Right now?” Finyarusco asked as Oicalmo thrust into her again.

“I am thinking now,” growled Caraë, “that—ah—”

“Is his pace too slow for you, my dear?  I could take over.” 

Caraë rolled her eyes.  Her cock was hard, her skirts rucked up about her waist, her face flushed becomingly.  Finyarusco wanted to ride it, and that was absolutely not an impulse he would be admitting to.  He forced two fingers deeper into himself, rubbing his thumb in circles over his own mound.  Calmo turned a laugh into a cough, which then became a moan.  He was terribly attractive like this, the muscles of his back rippling all the way down to his rather impressive thighs, his face flushing beneath his neatly-trimmed beard.

“You don’t have a leg to stand on, Finyo,” Calmo managed.  “Last month, you told me to stop fucking you so that you could go write down a formula you thought would increase the yield of your latest bomb.”

“It wasn’t a bomb,” Finyarusco retorted irritably.  “It was a firework.”

“Not with a yield like that, it wasn’t,” Calmo muttered.

“You were helping with it, we were having a conversation!” Finyarusco howled.  “And I was fucking you!”

“Why did we have to bring him here?” Caraë lamented at the ceiling as Calmo slowly thrust into her.  “Oh, that’s nice, darling, keep doing it like that.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” Finyarusco pointed out, leaning back and spreading his legs wider, so the other two could get a really good view from the waist down.  Heat collected on the back of his neck and pooled in his groin.  “I was in-vi-ted.”

“And I’m regretting extending the invitation,” Caraë snapped.  “I thought it might be nice for Calmo to have both his lovers in one room—”

“Yes, we’ve certainly never occupied the same room before—”

“All right, you two, that’s enough,” Calmo said, an ocean of calm.  “Finyo, come here.”

“I’d love to, darling, but I keep getting distracted.”  He pressed a thumb into the base of his clit to demonstrate, both thighs jerking a little in response to the almost painful overstimulation.

“Please?” Calmo asked, voice deep and rough, a little wrecked.  His bright eyes were full of love and amusement as he stretched out his hand for Finyarusco.

“Well…” Ugh.  He could never say no to Calmo.  Dragging his feet a little to at least make it less obvious how easy he was to manipulate, Finyarusco got to his feet.  His cunt throbbed as he moved, and he made a breathy little noise as he approached the bed.

Balancing on one knee, letting Caraë secure herself with her legs wrapped around his waist, Calmo used both hands to clasp Finyarusco’s and Caraë’s hands together.  It was a familiar gesture in a less-familiar situation.  Finyarusco looked at Caraë, and she looked back, also wrecked, flushed and trembling.  He was forced to admit that she was a beautiful woman, skirts rucked up around her narrow thighs, the chest of the dress artfully suggesting more cleavage than she actually possessed.

“You’re right, Calmo,” Caraë said sweetly.  “We are being quite troublesome, are we not?  I propose a friendly wager.”

“Mmmm?” purred Finyarusco.

“Ride me and whoever comes first…owes the other one a favor.”

Calmo groaned.  

“Well, we’re not fighting,” Finyarusco pointed out.  A nonspecific favor from Caraë? She had ears and fingers in nearly every social circle in the city, even those that had a long history of disliking the Faithful.  He could do a lot for himself with such a favor.  “Deal.”

He was rather particular about who he let inside of him, but Caraë mostly slept with Calmo, especially since things in Armenelos had started to become—politically complex.  And there was the convenient fact that Caraë was on some primitive potion to soften her face and make her breasts bud that supposedly also rendered her infertile.  Not easy to obtain, sadly.  Though maybe with a favor…

With a sigh, Calmo helped him into position in front of him.  Finyarusco drew a hand down Caraë’s quivering cock—she hissed with pleasure and then glared at him.  “Manual stimulation was not part of the wager.”

“Yes, yes.  But I need to position you properly.”  Obviously, he’d been cheating, but it was important if you were going to do that sort of thing to be plausibly deniable about it.  He positioned his hole over her cock and sank down, his own wetness easing the way.  She did fit inside him nicely.  Then Calmo put an arm across his stomach, one long-fingered hand splaying across his upper thigh, and began to stroke his mound.

“Hey!” Finyarusco protested.

“I’m not fucking only one of you while you’re engaged in this.  I don’t need to be accused of favoritism.”

“Then stop fucking her.”

“What, stop fucking a lady halfway through?” Caraë put in.  “Does your rudeness know no bounds, Finyo?”

Rather than continue to engage in this, Finyarusco began to roll his hips.  This did function to turn any other words from Caraë’s lips into breathless cursing, but it also reminded him that he had already been getting quite close when he was stimulating himself while just watching them.  The repeated drag of Caraë’s cock on his inner walls was unfairly good, and he couldn’t reposition himself for less stimulation, because Calmo was holding him there as he grunted and fucked into Caraë.  Fuck.  He was in trouble.

Caraë must have seen it on his face, because she smirked and tilted her hips so that every one of Calmo’s thrusts drove her upwards into Finyarusco.  He bit his lip, but he couldn’t keep an incoherent moan from dropping from his lips.  And now the desperation was starting to take over, the friction that made him want nothing more than to fuck himself onto her over and over again, wager be damned.

Calmo moaned and bit down on his shoulder, stilling behind him, his fingers twitching almost painfully at Finyarusco’s cunt.  Caraë gave a soft noise and started to move her hips urgently, fucking into him until his eyes rolled back in his head and he was drowning in the waves of heat rolling up from his cunt.  

When he blinked back to himself, his hands were on Caraë’s chest, and everything was warm and sticky.  The first flush of embarrassment faded as he realized she’d emptied herself inside him.

“Don’t give me that look,” she panted.  “You came first.”

“I’m not sure the physical evidence supports that.”  He smirked, raising a leg and letting her slip out of him, her sticky seed trickling down his inner thigh.

“I am entirely certain that that was a response to your climax.”

“Well, we only have your word for it, unless Calmo has any thoughts.”

“I am not getting involved in this.”  Oicalmo stretched as he sat up, pausing to pat Finyarusco’s shoulders and Caraë’s thigh.  “You two can work it out amongst yourselves.”

* * *

After.

All about him were breathtaking spaces, filled with impenetrable penumbras.  A flame burned in their heart, small and bright, but the shadow it cast was cavernous.  It lay like a heavy weight over his chest, restricting his breathing.  Bound, he could not move to escape from the blazing shadow’s gaze—or its knife.

He was not a good man.  He had never claimed to be.  (Was this a punishment?  Surely the world was not so neat and tidy?)

The dull blunt sound of the gun, the jerk of it in his hand, the smell of the gunpowder, Oiacalma’s sprawling fall, man to meat in a moment: all this kept repeating, repeating, repeating in his mind.  They had broken his fingers and branded his skin, carried him from a high white room into this light-dark place.  They had laid him on cold stone and fastened him there, poured sickly-sweet liquid down his throat and waited, as everything grew jumbled, distant, and vast.

That bright flame was the only hint of color in all this terrible place, a spark that was igniting a terrible weapon.  He knew weapons, devices, machines.  Not until this moment had he realized that the city, too, was a machine, precise and huge, a machine which had, until recently, remained unarmed. But with the advent of the flame, that time was passed and forgotten, and now the machine rolled forward towards some inevitable end, barrel pointed at her own heart.

(Caraë was dead.  He had seen what Calmo hadn’t, or wouldn’t, or couldn’t, the broken form beneath the rubble, blank eyes staring skyward. She could do him no favors.)

“Please,” he begged, with a voice that did not sound like his, ruined and hoarse and sincere. He had begged before.  It had changed nothing. It changed nothing now.  Still he lay in a welter of pain bound upon a stone altar, listening to the sounds of shuffling, the murmur of low voices, the scrape of knife on stone.

The fire rose; with it, the followers of the flame, roaring with many voices, demanding death.  He dragged another painful breath into drowning lungs.  The knife rose—

in the blade, Calmo’s hand in Caraë’s hair

two eyes, dark and unfamiliar

—the knife fell.

It didn’t hurt; it only felt like sinking.

* * *

Between.

The canal is wreathed in heavy white fog.  Sounds are muffled—the ubiquitous sizzle of the lightning lines resembles the quiet hum of bees, while the typically sharp clip-clop of hooves becomes the soft susurration of water.  He looks around in some bewilderment.  Is he late for the ferry?

No—there’s a boat coming this way, through the canal.  He can see it moving, a slim shadow hidden in the billowing whorls of fog.  And yet—that can’t be the ferry.  It’s too small; as it draws nearer, he can see that the prow is thin, pointed, and elaborately carved.  Not the sorts of carvings he’s used to, the grubby, blackened spires of Armenelos, curling, elegant, leftover relics of a bygone era—these are intricate, sharp-toothed, interlocked clockworks, gears frozen in white wood and left unturning.

As it comes closer, he sees that there is a girl in it.  Very small, with great dark eyes, wearing one of the embroidered robes of the Drúedain.  It is stained with blood on the front, blood surrounding three vertical parallel rents in the rich fabric.  She is barefoot.

He’s never been much good with children, and this boat cannot be for him.  Yet when her eyes light on him, her round face becomes rounder with good cheer.  The boat comes straight towards him, direct as a bullet in flight.  “Are you Finyo?” she asks.  “I hope so.  You’re only my third passenger, and the other two are waiting for you.”

Oh, yes, of course: his name is Finyo.  Who wouldn’t know their own name?  Finyo hastily pastes a winning smile across his face.  “That’s me,” he agrees.  “But I don’t think I was waiting for a boat.”

The child looks apologetic as the boat grounds itself by Finyo’s feet.  “I know,” she says.  She jumps lightly out.  “It was especially unexpected for you, and it was really hard.  It took a long time to be able to reach you.  I’m sorry.”

Why is she apologizing?  He laughs.  “I don’t need an apology, kid.  I told you, I wasn’t waiting for a boat anyway.”

“Will you get in?” she asks.

He glances behind, but there’s only mist.  There’s no one else—he cannot even see the buildings of Armenelos behind him, only the great dim arch of the bridge above, a murky paint-brush-stroke overhead and back.  He’s sure he must have had something to do—wasn’t Caraë running one of her book circle things?  When was that supposed to be again?  But something about the blank waiting whiteness seems to be telling him that retreating towards the city is not an option right now, and the little girl, waiting patiently and hopefully, has the air of a child sent on her first independent task.

He’s not that heartless.

“All right,” he says awkwardly.  He sidles over, slinging a leg over the side.  He expects the boat to wobble beneath him, but the gleaming white planks are as steady as a level.  There’s a single seat in the back of the boat, and he goes to it, settling himself onto worn, comfortable cushions. 

The boat pulls away from the shore, and almost immediately, the narrow canal widens out, and the fog begins to melt away.  Rather than the high, caging, intimidating walls, all smooth high worked stone, there are only two heaps of white sand with glittering pebbles scattered across them, not even as high as the keel of the boat somehow.  Blue sky arches down to meet the blue water, and puffs of shimmering clouds race one another across.

“Where…are we?” Finyo asks.

“On a journey,” says the child.  “But we won’t go the whole way alone.  Your friends are waiting for you.  Apparently, one of them thinks she owes you a favor.”

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Chapter End Notes

All names (save Nimruzimir, which is from realelvish.net and is Adunaic for Elf-stone) from Chestnut_pod's amazing name list.

Translations as follows:

Caraitelen (Caraë): busy/active star

Oiacalma (Calmo): everlasting light

Finyarusco (Finyo): clever fox

Mannarossë: blessed rain

Filitári: little bird queen

Arcanamma: narrow claw

Nicknames derived by me mostly based on vibes from the Fëanorian nicknames in Quenya

With many thanks to kimikocha for letting me borrow their conception of Death, as seen here.