Andarin: The Mountains: live ; I

She remembers two dichotomies, both alike in strength in her mind, and both beautiful: the ancient forests of a place unknown by true distress, her oak and its spreading branches untouched for a eon or ages infinite: cherry blossoms, and the endless green of her childhood, spent frolicking beneath the careful gaze of her guardian-mother and what powers yet dwelled within her (and this, before she succumbed to the duality of the earth, and its fickle wisdom and pain – how young she was! How innocent was she, before the fall, before the end and the beginning of everything; how she looked back now, scarred with what she had done, and wept!). And then, after the war that never was, but for her sacrifice (mind and body and spirit, she thinks, and it is the truth; oh Nebkheprure, whyever!), there was the desert of her maturity, and perhaps the last place of consequence she would remember: the sand that glittered in the moonlight like an ocean of minute diamonds, glinting like tears and thirsting for rain, and silent witness to her, she that danced upon it, she of that terrible innocence! And how, for she had known love and loss and love once more – that horrible love unfulfilled, burning like flames and with her shame, within her and beneath her and in the glorious green of her eyes: Pharaoh, whyever! Galahad, never to be!

They haunt her, the desert and its stallions: the King, her king, bold and bay and beautiful and terrible, bloodied against the etherality of her pale skin, and his dark champion, whom she loved as no one else, and he had loved in return – and for nothing! She bore two heirs, pure-blooded and mortal, one secreted away from her love to live in hiding and safety as they true heir to her home’s throne (Daughter, forgive me!), and the other kept for his father’s older joy, and thrust to the corruption of the dark star – all gone, all forgotten in time, cast to the stars like so much ash and dust in flurries of wind. There had been a war, she remembers, and the fall – the fall, where she had made herself vanish, thrust into the earth as a legacy, an escape.

She remembers that pain, even now, as fresh as if it were yesterday: the pain of birth, the roaring, seething, confusing hatred for Pharaoh (for how can one hate and love in synchrony, and not go mad?) in his betrayal and what his treachery had forced her to do; the bitterness of her love for Galahad, forbidden by his oath and hers, and wretched as they had looked in one another’s eyes and spoken it without regard, as her son suckled her belly and the moon rose against their gleaming backs. Enshrined, immortal, infinite – braided in the tapestry of their beloved shame!

She remembers the brimming of her powers: the Green that had fled from the forest into her veins, and suffused her with its power, as if it had collected her to outstretched arms and surrendered unto her; she had Seen, and Felt, and moved with the earth as if one with it. She remembers the holiness of that first moment, when it had opened within her and she had Known – oh, that green fire, manifest within her! She, condemned with it, as she was condemned to live the lie, the King’s Oracle Queen and prisoner of his love and love untainted! The ache of it, the raw power blinding within her, brought to bear as she has commanded: first to heal, as she had done her King, with love and hate combined; second, to restore, as they had razed and folded asunder her home in those final damning moments after the fall, as she – testament, and defiant – could not bear to see it crumble, and she had sown it anew with her purity, her love, and leant her green to the flurry of ashes left carelessly in their wake.

Finally, third, she had brought her powers to create; knelt, with her bloodied knees thrust into the shattered earth, yet to show the fruits of her labour, her blood a sacrifice to the land, and the earth, and her children and her love. With the wind strong at her back, shimmering with choked ash and the scent of death and mute entropy, she had whispered leaves into the scattered slag and dust, bespoke the green and woven into it those three gifts, binding it with a terrible flash of green light – her life’s energy, entwined and knitted like bone into the matrix of a rock, imbued with rivulets of shining green that dripped and flowed like her blood onto the sundered soil – her power, thrust into her earth, and be damned with it! Moments pass, hours or seconds or the indeterminate moments in-between, and she remembers, bleeding, and burnt by her own green fire, leaning into the dusk of her own creation and vanishing unto it, like a phoenix into the sun –

She remembers; curled on unfamiliar ground and covered with the tiny, effortlessly soft fragments of snowflakes, the corpses of raindrops frozen by the wind, blending and suffusing onto her white coat like a kiss from the cloudy skies. It is midnight, she knows, as the moon glows high above her through that thick silver veil of cloud, greyed into nothing at the edge of her vision; beneath it, in that flickering silvered light, she is beautiful, her skin a soft grey aglow, stretched leanly across a body lithe and elegant, and her eyes still a haunting burning green within the gentleness of her face, touched by love and sorrow both. She cannot feel her earth beneath her – it is similar but not the same, and unknowing, both of much of the passage of time and how she came here (and indeed, where, truly, she was: the land after, if all mercies prevailed? Or some other inbetween place, cast there to suffer more for her sins?); and silently, alone in a night frightening for its strangeness, she shivers - whyever! - in a cold deeper than any winter night in her desert, curled at the feet of earth and power and love.

“Lumina…” Lórien, the Skysong, whispers then, in her terrible solitude, in a strange forest in a strange land – and the stone lies beneath her folded forelegs, weaving its green into the scratches that adorn her knees, forgotten and glowing, as always, and forever, once again in the reaches of Lumina.