Immortalitui // Faramir 🥀

Chapter Forty-Two - Sméagol

Word Count: 2,228 words. 

Warnings: None. 

Númenor... centuries before it's fall...

"It is quite spectacular," Arathiel commented, approaching her brother's side. They spoke in Quenya.

Hands behind his back, an older Elros looked at the statues. The workers were putting the final touches on their detailed faces.

"It is my life's work," he explained, wrapping an arm around his sister.

"Your life is far from done, Elros."

The man looked down at her, eyes glazed and skin wrinkled. He no longer resembled the youthful, reckless older brother that Arathiel had known all her life, but nothing could hinder his tone; his warm and gentle tone with a spark of childish nonsense when he jested.

"I am nearing the end, and it is exhilarating," he explained.

She feared the day she would see him for the last time. "Exhilarating is not the word that I would use to describe death."

Elros smiled. "It is not death. It is a surrendering to life, to living one day at a time, to knowing how many hours have passed between conversations and how many years between the start and the end."

Arathiel scoffed. "I do forget how philosophical you are, dear brother."

"You will forgive me someday."

"There is nothing to forgive."

"I have placed you between Elrond and I," he explained. "In limbo between brothers, without the knowledge to make a choice."

"I know how to choose."

Elros looked at her again. "You do not, and that is by no fault of yours."

"I chose to stay with you, in Númenor. Was that not my own?"

The man smiled. "That you chose to stay with the brother that would age compared to the brother you know will never change? Yes, Arathiel, that was a fine choice."

She took in the bustling streets of the city, a city that she knew would not last forever, but a people that would never change. Should Númenor fall, another Kingdom will rise, another heir with the eyes of Elros, and the values of peace.

"These people," Arathiel began. "I swear to protect these people."

"Do not say such things out of duty for me."

She smiled as she watched her brother. "I do not. I never felt at home in Valinor, nor anywhere that we settled in Middle Earth, but here, with these people, with humanity, I feel a purpose."

"Mark my words, dear sister," Elros muttered. "Protecting an entire lineage, and living by them, is not a vow that I will ever force you to make."

"Well, then it is my first choice of many, is it not?"

Elros had surrendered to life the following day. He had gone to rest that night, and not awoken the following morning. It had been their final conversation, and she had not told him that she loved him. She loved him as a human and an elf.  That vow she had made, her first choice became muddled as the years progressed until the memory of it vanished. How right Elros had been...

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On the outskirts of Gondor... the eve of the final battle with darkness...