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Steward Denethor II of Gondor
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| a late night in the citadel |
[Jun. 22nd, 2005|10:44 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  tired | ] |
Sleep was impossible. Denethor was too limb-weary to pace back and forth in his bedroom, and his mind would not be distracted by the book he was trying to read. He tried to write letters of state, but his mind and hand would not connect, and he had only dripped ink on the top corner of the paper. He felt like a house missing one of its supporting columns that held the roof up, and wondered when he would come crashing down in on himself.
Though walking was painful, and Denethor had a raging headache, he found himself standing at the tall window at the end of the hall that looked out into the east. Over the wall the steward's house had a perfect view of the mountains over the river, windows open and heavy curtains fluttering in the bone-chilling night wind. Low. High. Low. No matter what Denethor felt in a moment, he could not escape this - he could not escape the shadow of Mordor. Neither could Gondor.
"Eru curse you!" He shouted as the wind picked up intensity, blasting what felt like pieces of ice against his cheeks. Heat grew behind his eyes and crept out in the form of tears. "Eru curse you, Valar bind you, greed destroy you, but you'll not have my country as a wasteland of graves if I must defy you alone! I will find a way, Gondor will never be yours!" The hot tears grew cold on his face and swept away from his nose, leaving a bitter trail in their wake.
He found himself shutting the window dry eyed, latching it closed and could connect the action to the one before it. Webs of the future spread out before him, like ice patterns curling upon a cold window pane, like a solitary spider weaving their thoughts together, connecting the threads... oceans of voices rolled like the tides as he closed the heavy curtains over the window, as if that would hide him from the great eye that, wreathed in flame, tried each day to overwhelm his will and divine his thoughts through the palantir.
Denethor limped his way back to his bedroom and sat down at his desk, wrapping himself in a blanket to stave off the cold, and began to address the affairs of state he had let grow lax in his tension through the day. Lest he ever feel like a glorified innkeeper with all the guests he was keeping, he reminded himself they were merely a distraction from the real work he had to do, unless he found a way to make them a means to his ends.
( The steward works. ) |
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| first post |
[Jun. 17th, 2005|09:47 pm] |
Denethor sat alone in the privacy of his personal quarters, nursing the mother of all headaches. A kind of nauseating heightened awareness followed extended use of the palantir, he felt as if a thousand eyes watched the stewardship of Gondor, and each time he closed his eyes another dizzying wave of nausea would overtake him as his mind replayed every image he saw in the palantir, combing the landscape apart for details that might have illuded him. It was never silent for Denethor, words constantly running through his mind like chanters upon street corners, words from conversations recent and long past, rolling over the back of his mind like wave crashing upon the shore, images fragmenting and blurring and always, always constantly searching...
"It must stop." He told the single candle that sputtered dimly in the cold room. He was not selfish enough to light a fire, even though old bones suffered from the cold. An injury of his adolescence - a rediculous thing, he'd fallen off a wall in the city and broken his leg - ached in the cold, steady in its throbbing like the beating of his heart. He focused on the steady thrumming in his thigh, placing his hand over the old, old wound, counted the rhythm in the rushing blood that made the muscles spasm in a pain long past. "...I must stop the evil that will come." Was Sauron watching now? Did he see the weakness of the steward of Gondor, who suffered in silence and languished in loneliness? Was one of those thousand eyes rimmed with fire?
What was the meaning of the strange men who had come to Gondor - or were coming to Gondor - who did not belong? Where was New Zealand? Denethor felt the desire to laugh, he had risked a great many things for one stranger in the tower of the white wizard, and knew before the end he would risk much more on the part of these lost strangers. He knew what it was to be lost...
Tired, he thought to himself, he was so tired, the long slow sleep of death sometimes crept around in the back of his mind, a warm suggestion, a quiet end, the Numenorean right. The suggestion of it quieted the voices in the back of his mind, always replaying, always repeating, offered him a moment of relative quiet, and the longer he thought about this death, the departure of spirit from body, the quieter it became, until there were only two voices, the sweet, summer-like calling of the long silence, and his own silent voice, the sound of his breath catching in the cold air.
Not tonight, he told the warm rest of death, and she slunk back into the darkness of the room and passed him by once more. For a moment, still, all was quiet. "...I must find a way to save Gondor." He spoke aloud, and the voices rolled back like thundering echoing off mountains, looking for the answers, somewhere in the darkness of the past ever-fleeing. For a brief moment he had forgotten his headache, but when the voices with their insistant urgency returned, one voice at first, then another, and another, hundreds of voices, words ringing around his head in an unharmonic clash and clatter of tones and meanings, settings and sayings, it returned in full force, like something launched from a trebuchet abruptly slamming behind his temples.
One voice, the host laid long to rest, caught his ear for its sweetness, and he picked his wife's voice from among the crowd, willing her words back, as the memory swelled up around the sound of her words - the firelight gleaming off dark hair, the keen eyes, the long elegant fingers twining through his own rougher ones, the warm quality of her voice, so tender, so sympathetic - a strain of worry, he could hear it now, as he could hear the crackling of the fire behind her. "Rest, Denethor, you tire yourself so much, there is still time tomorrow for what must be done." For a moment the steady pulsing in his leg faded beneath, the headache receded, and he forgot he was cold and the room was dark, as he looked into the memory-perfect vision of his wife's face. It was not the first time he noticed there were lines of care beginning to form around her eyes - but the first time he'd really noticed it, it had been far, far too late...
The candle sputtered and Denethor opened his eyes. The headache would not go away. He sighed. "It comes to this," he murmered, repeating the words of many men through many ages, "and there is nothing you can do but breathe." He leaned foreward, extinguishing the candle and sat in the cold darkness, as a swarm of voices and images overtook his mind. I will never be free of this, he knew, and despaired.
Somewhere, there was laughter, and warmth, and light, but Denethor knew only sombering cold darkness and the weight of the world. |
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