Immortalitui // Faramir 🥀

Chapter Ten - Old Friends

Word Count: 2,232 words. 

Warnings: None. 

Elves lived long lives. They lived as long as they weren't killed. Illness and plague weren't something that touched them and as an elf, it was easy to live for thousands of years without seeing a single wound. Some elves have never even known what blood looks like. What colour it was or how it felt between their fingers. They didn't know that it dried almost immediately after meeting the air and they didn't know the pain that accompanied it. The small, stinging pain of a papercut or the pulsating agony of a dagger to the side.

Arathiel pitied those elves. She didn't wish to be like them or to feel like them. Many would. Many elves would only wish to have not seen death. To have not experienced loss. To have never picked up a blade, but not Arathiel. It was her pain that made her who she was. It was pain that made anyone who they were. Happiness was overrated. It was talked about as though it was the only thing that mattered, but she knew better than to wish for it because no one ever truly succeeds in finding it, no matter what they might say.

And so pain was the only thing she had. Grief. Regret. And she lived on it. Day by day, the pain would lessen. The memories would fall further away and she may smile or laugh without that familiar ache in her heart and mind.

Although she thrived on it, she also avoided it. Not feeling the pain nor experiencing the grief, but rather she avoided remembering what that pain was about. Where it had come from and who had caused it, but it had been avoided for too long. Perhaps it was Faramir's words that led her to the entrance of the Mines of Moria. Or perhaps it was Rose's. How long ago had it been since Arathiel saw her old friends? Certainly years. She had been five years at Gondor, without knowing it and so how many days had she wasted in the Libraries of Mirkwood?

That was another thing that was strange to elves. Time. It didn't flow the same as it did for others. How could it? When it seemed to moved so slowly and so quickly at the same time? One moment turned into years and years turned into one moment. Who was tell how it passed and why it did so? The only thing that Arathiel knew was that had been wasting it.

"My dear elf." His voice was always so soft. So gentle. So unlike that of Dwarven nature.

"Balin," she replied with a smile. He always made her smile.

Bending down to his level, the elf took the old Dwarf into a tight hug. "It has been too long my friend," he replied.

Returning to her full height, the elf took in the Dwarf in front of her. It truly had been entirely too long. Decades, but not yet a century. Balin had grown older, which was not something that Arathiel was sure that he could do. The man already nursed a long, grey beard on his chin and hair to match and although those two features of his hadn't changed, his face somehow had. The wrinkles that she remembered had grown larger and his skin seemed more decaying that it had been before, his eyes sunken further into his skull, but the fire was still there. It was always there.

She had known him a long time. She may not be able to tell how many years it was. If it was decades or perhaps more than a century, but she had known him since he was a boy. Balin had always been a wise dwarf, cleverer than any of the others, and she had cared for that in him. Other than her brother and perhaps Legolas, Balin was the only one who knew everything about her. Every fact that she wished he didn't as well as those that she had wished he knew. Next to elves, dwarves lived the longest, but they still died and for a moment, Arathiel feared for his death. How long did he had left   in Middle-Earth?

"Indeed my friend," Arathiel muttered as they began to walk. "I'm afraid I forget how long a day is."

"A year more like," he retaliated. "Decades it has been since we have seen each other."