Immortalitui // Faramir 🥀

Chapter Fifteen - Darkness

Word Count: 2,072 words. 

Warnings: None. 

The darkness that invaded the forgotten tower was something that Arathiel had never expected. She knew that it had been destroyed by the Witch King of Angmar, she had been there as it fell, crumbled to pieces and faded from memory, but she never questioned how hard it would truly be. Ignoring the whispers that came from the walls. From the ground below her and the air that encircled the tower. She sat at the edge of the tower, facing outwards, in the hopes that the lack of sight she gave the confining walls, the less darkness that would follow.

The light had turned to night and now Arathiel could hear the crickets chirping in the grass around her and she could just about see the fireflies that circled the trees. She could feel them, the Ringwraiths, the Old King's of Man, whatever they wished to be called. She only knew them as death.

The elf's hand instinctively went to the healing wound at her side. Only, it wasn't healing. It was doing anything but that. Darkness had touched her again when the Nazgul's blade pierced her in Gondor. It should have healed by now but there was nothing normal about the wound. He had found his way back into her mind and her body. She only had to resist it now.

Aragorn placed his hand on her shoulder and she jolted, hand reaching for her blade as she turned her head. Arathiel sighed in relief upon noticing that it was only Frodo.

"Sorry," he apologised nervously. "I didn't mean to startle you."

The she-elf sighed, hand retreating from her waist. "I apologise for almost pulling my weapon on you."

He smiled. "It was my fault."

"It was nothing of the sort Mr. Baggins. Would you like to join me? I was just watching the stars," she offered.

The young Hobbit nodded, taking a seat beside the elf hesitantly. "It's quiet."

Arathiel turned to look at him. "Do you not like the quiet Frodo?"

"Not a lot happens in Hobbiton, especially in Bag End. I am used to the quiet," he explained.

"Bilbo loved the quiet," she began, earning his attention. "He told me that once. When the world around us was consumed by dragon fire, he told me that he wished only for quiet. For the peace of his small Hobbit Hole."

"My uncle doesn't speak much of his adventures. Claims that they are memories for the past."

"They pain him," she tried to explain to the small man. "I have been alive long enough to know all kinds of pain and what happened on that Lonely Mountain, was beyond even that. I do not blame him for wanting to forget, only envy Bilbo Baggins for being able to at all."

"I've heard the stories, peaked a look at his maps and journals. How there was a king under the mountain for only a day."

Shaking her head, the elf took a deep breath. "It was a little more than a day, but we did lose him. Thorin Oakenshield. It was not only him that was taken, but his nephews. The last lines of Durin."

The guilt ate its way back inside her as she thought of the pair of brothers. Kili and Fili. So similar and yet so entirely different. Their loss was one that Arathiel believed she could have prevented. Two young men that she could have saved if she hadn't been so...

"There was a sickness in that mountain," she continued. "One that took Thorin's mind. It almost caused a complete slaughter, but we got him back, Rose got him back, and they killed the Pale Orc."