Do Moths Pity Candles? by Melesta  

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Do Moths Pity Candles?

“Adaneth, I tell thee, Aikanár the Sharp-flame loved thee. For thy sake now he will never take the hand of any bride of his own kindred, but live alone to the end, remembering the morning in the hills of Dorthonion. But too soon in the North wind his flame will go out! Foresight is given to the Eldar in many things not far off, though seldom of joy, and I say to thee thou shalt live long in the order of your kind, and he will go forth before thee and he will not wish to return.”

From “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth,” Morgoth's Ring.

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The night births a new dawn in the sky above Dorthonion. 

Its dark sapphire begins trembling and the spaces of its hesitation are slowly overcome by hues of plum and salmon, growing brighter and brighter, illuminating the old pine tree that rises as a dancer with her arms outstretched. And when the streaks of gold at last subdue the remaining dark, so do they fracture Aegnor’s heart. He watches helplessly, torn between the beauty of Arda’s spectacle and the inexorable grief of the parting it announces.

Andreth stirs between his arms. “Has morning come?”

“Not fully yet. Rest, my beloved swallow.” Aegnor turns his face to place a kiss upon her forehead, tightening his hold about her, possessively, already yearning.

“The harvests begin today, I cannot linger,” she grumbles softly beneath his chin. 

“Give me but a few moments more.”

Another kiss, a plea. He wins a small victory – she nestles closer.

“Alright, but when the bells of Ladros ring out, you will have to let me go.”

The light of dawn is stubborn, summoning with it the rapid heat of mid-summer. Beads of sweat well upon Andreth’s forehead, she exhales in displeasure, and the birdsong upon the trees is one of distress.

In the corner of Aegnor’s eye, the short grasses are kindled as it happens at times in the months of drought. He rises quickly, pulling Andreth with him, but never releasing her hand. Before his feet manage to take a single step, the flames erupt, leaping from grass to bush to the low branches of the dancer-pine and then the neighbouring tree and another and another until the grove is enveloped whole.

“We must ride to Tarn Aeluin at once,” Aegnor growls through the chokehold of alarm and whistles for his horse.

“I told you, you will have to let me go.” Andreth’s face is dreadfully serene. 

She refuses to move even as the fire reaches the edges of her skirts and licks upwards her legs and belly. 

Aegnor does not unloosen his grip, holding tight through the heat that sears his skin. “We must run!”

“It is but a memory. Let me go, Aikanár.”

The moment Andreth’s lips come shut, they are devoured by flame. Her fair face melts as if it were a candle spent. Only the charred bones of her hand remain in his grip. He clutches them as the inferno claims him too.

*

When next he opens his eyes and looks down to his hands, there are no charred bones, no sign of Andreth, no scars of burning. There is nothing upon his skin that would testify to suffering at all. His body seems all too pristine, a statue freshly polished and waxed.

The honey-scented air of Lórien’s gardens fills his lungs. Aegnor chokes on wrath.

“No! I do not wish to return!” He screams until his throat is scraped raw. “Let me remain among the dead!”

None might help him. The pulse of life keeps on thumping mightily in his veins.

Aegnor runs, undeterred by the pain that rages through his unused body, until he comes at last to the westernmost shore and leaps off the high cliffs that oversee the Outer Sea.

As a crystal glass dropped onto a marble floor, his body shatters upon the surface of the water.

*

The next time, he swallows enough of fumellar, Irmo’s flowers of sleep, until they petrify his beating heart.

The time after that, he fashions a spear from Yavanna’s trees and runs it through his liver. 

And then again.

And again.

*

There is no winning against the laws of Mandos. The more Aegnor fights, the swifter is his will taken from him. Death, that gift of Ilúvatar, which even the Valar envy, is not a boon to be granted to the Eldar for as long as Arda endures.

His hands remember shipcrafting, the skill he once mastered in Alqualondë, so Aegnor builds himself a ship and sets out to cross the Sundering Sea, once again. If he must live, he will do so where death still reigns. Seldom any cross his path, for Beleriand has been long forsaken.

“What pieces remain of those lands are cursed, lord.” So tell him the few sailors he meets, some far away descendants of the Peredhil houses. “That place you seek is now known as Tol Fuin, the Dark Isle, or so we believe.”

Aegnor sails on stubbornly and finds her, at last. Scorched and ruined, he recognizes Dorthonion all the same. He knows the empty crater where Aeluin’s waters once trembled, and in the hills above, the ancient pine with its branches outstretched as a dancer – now blackened and barren — standing still. The landscape is neither living nor dead, and in this, Aegnor finds an answer. He shall become as the land.

He snaps a branch of pine and sings a Song of Fire. It takes little to summon destruction upon what has already been killed.

“Take me now, as you once did,” he prays to the flames and drives the burning edge into his ear and then the other. He would rather not witness the sound of his own agony. The pain flares, almost impossible to bear, but Aegnor drives the weapon against the enemy that is his own living body. Flame ingests the flesh of his mouth and nose, his fingertips, and the last, the tender pulp of his silver eyes. 

Unseeing, unhearing, stripped of the ability to touch and taste and smell, Aegnor divorces himself from the world. A man not dead, yet unliving. In the absence of the All, memory overtakes him.

Andreth’s face mirrored in the waters of Aeliun, and the star caught like a jewel in her hair. 

Andreth’s hand upon the nape of his neck.

Andreth’s wrist beneath his lips.

Come to me, beloved.

Aegor surrenders between the protruding roots of the dancing pine, another charred body in what was once Dorthonion.