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What do I know? Silence. What have I known? A roar. It is all Niënor can whisper to herself, wisps of shadows sharing her mind–taking up space along the walls of her skull. Something knocks against that door. What will I know?
—
She doesn’t feel cold the night she sheds her cloth, though it is mid-winter and the frost bites at the soles of her feet. Gradually her chill grows within. It isn’t long until the moon cradles the earth and all around her she sees the reflecting eyes of wildlife, sniffing at her mystery. There is fear within her, but something innocent prods there too, and she saddles up to the dots on her horizon.
Niënor drinks from a half-frozen river, next to the red-pawed foxes and bell-throated toads. She sees a face in the ice—furrowed brows and gentle, scurried eyes, but that is all it is, a face which stares back at her with something like reverence although she cannot name it, it stares until the call of a lark sends her running.
There are soft flurries in the air, the beginnings of snow, she pays the layers that prick her bare shoulders no mind as she scampers through the dark forest. Her feet hit rock, and frozen soil, and the bones of animals forgotten, and soon they hit nothing as she plummets down the side of a hill. There is no language on her tongue, no words to fill the gaps of her fear, but she can still groan and whimper as she slides to a stop in a frozen dell.
Hands reach out blindly, and It is a naked birch which she touches, which she scrapes her palms against looking for safety and tucking herself into the too-tight hollow. She is cold, and wet, and oh so tired, and something deep within finds familiarity in this tall, looming figure of a tree. It’s blinding bark, it’s visible roots, it’s clean, seething limbs.
Niënor blanches—a sharp pain from the center of her forehead makes her gasp out, she falls to the moss and wood underfoot, and lays there until morning comes.
—
Arien is swift-footed this winter day, for Niënor wakes to the sun already overhead. She climbs from her hollow, goose-limbed and skin red from the biting cold.
There is a great urge to run, but it is not all from utter panic, no there is a greater desire there, to bound over crag and stone, sinking moss and scratchy lichen. Niënor has nothing to base this on, no words to describe this want, there are not even words to describe her, the stranger from the water, a reflection of a reflection that has no recollection in her empty memory. But the urge is simple enough that she rises from the ground, still cold, still bare a newborn babe, and bounds through the dell.
Birds scatter from bare trees, the night’s frost cracks underfoot, sending sounds like thunder in her wake. She runs, and runs, and runs, until her throat is parched and the skin of her cheeks are whipped blood-red. Then, Niënor settles against the cold stone of a rock face, eagerly sucking in air as if she could eat it.
The sky is bitterly grey, with tinges of blue and the sun’s welcome gold. There is little warmth in it, but as she presses back into the stone something warm, hot as a ready drink, breathes against her frozen calves. The skin there heats, and her whole body shivers at the sudden remembrance of warmth, Niënor succumbs to that human desire, that vicious, primal want to live. Not in bitterness but in the fires of life.
She follows the warmth.
It leads her to an opening in the stone, just large enough for her to pass through with her chest to the walls. She is careful, because pain is fresh in her mind, though she does not know where to place it. Niënor, with her frozen limbs, shuffles into the frozen stone, closer and closer to that hidden fire until the rock is all around her and the sun no longer shines atop her head.
It is a cave, though she cannot name it, and when she skirts a corner, the stone there is blindingly warm. There is the lash of something like stone against stone, a great charred tail collides with the stone just near her head and Niënor falls to her knees where the width lets her. She follows the tail until her eyes take in this behemoth of a beast—and there lays a scaled furnace.
Here, there is recognition, her heart ceases to beat for a moment and reignites with the thrum of a thousand war drums, her lungs quake, her limbs shiver and shake, a whimper flees from her mouth just as she wishes to do. Niënor lowers her gaze, focuses on the ash-like ground beneath her, this is a primal, unrecognized act, but still, she does it.
Alas, it is the warmth that soothes her shivers, and she revives a part of her soul enough to endure.
Niënor steps into the cave, and the dragon draws in a breath at the sight of the woman. A gasp, if she were to know better, but her mind is frayed, words far from her tongue, and even if they had been there, she would not say much. The dragon pauses, fear subsiding when she notes Niënor carries no weapon, no sharp dagger or arrow ready to fly. Her throat grows golden, and the flames decorate the grey stone.
With enough wits to know fear, Niënor flies into an alcove close enough to save her from the worst of the flames. The heat sears her bare skin, accompanying the cold, and slicing through winter’s freezing teeth. It is enough warmth that she does not leave.
When the flames die, she pokes her head out from behind the stone. The dragon stares into her, gaze at once cold and fiery. Niënor feels as though her memory, empty as it is, is being peered upon, her mind added to this dragon's measly hoard. The dragon, burned in its own way, carries the one key to all those locked doors, but still, barred her own entrance.
Just when Niënor thinks the breath will burn her body to dust, the dragon’s throat simmers, scales returning to their pale complexion. Its voice was soothing, rumbles of stone against stone but soft as pine in the wind-filled trees, from it Niënor could tell it was old, but an old lady at that.
“Sit, girl. Warm your blackened toes before they are lost, and stare not at my dying.”
Niënor stares into the fire, something she remembers in great, roaring waves and licking limbs, but warms herself regardless. Life returns to her slowly, and she comes to see that it had taken her the greater part of the afternoon to find the warmth. Above her is a grand opening, a battered mountain top, sheared open by fire and grandiose teeth and broken determination. Niënor peers into a starless spot of the sky.
The dragon’s words finally make sense in her senseless mind. She peers into its eyes, not golden as she would have thought—something she thinks she has seen before—but a blue hue, so dark it is like the underside of a bruise. The hottest of fires. The dragon cocks her head, sulfuric breath exhales until the fire before her roars back to life, and begs her question.
Niënor cannot give it—so she raises her hand, sends a pointed finger to the broken scales she notices.
The dragon follows her gaze, to the patch of pale skin nearest to her heart. Caked blood like molten gold is plastered to the remaining scales, cradling the arrow lodged within her. “Arrow,” she says once she realizes this woman cannot speak. “I am mortally wounded, it would seem.”
The words do not carry meaning, but sympathy clouds Niënor’s eyes and she shuffles closer to the fire, to the dragon herself.
The dragon exhales sharply again, and Niënor coughs at the fumes. “What are you called?”
Again, Niënor makes no move to answer, instead she peers into the blue-flame eyes and waits–for what, neither knows. The dragon huffs as she moves, a groan of pain that tremors through the whole of the mountain. “I am called Perilambe.”
Niënor brings her hand to the warmth, her palms glow red and in the shade of the mountain and its dragon, she looks as if she holds fire. “Per–i–lam–be,” she whispers, her tongue fractured and her throat gravely from sucking in winter’s violent air.
Perilambe, who has not heard the name spoken in such tones, smiles–if a dragon could smile. “Half-tongue,” she remarks on the name's meaning, there is a flicker of a hot-red tongue, split down its center, one side missing and the other serrated. “A epithet for us both,” Perilambe mocks.
“Per–i–lam–be,” Niënor says into the fire.
—
The worst of the winter, with its tearing teeth and drowning snow, Niënor spends within the cave. Perilambe teaches her many words, and all of which are, at first, like ice grinding against her teeth. The language that she must have known before, now is new, and learned from the mouth of a dragon, it is fire and salt and ash in the throat of Niënor. Still, she learns.
The sun rises early this day, and Niënor rises with it.
Perilambe does let her rest long by her warmth, and though she has learned to drape her bare body in the soft fabrics of the dragon’s forgotten kills, the heat of the cave is much appreciated. “Speak,” she demands.
Niënor sends her a look, vacillating between contempt and pride, and picks herself up from the ground. Standing tall she faces the dragon. “You are Perilambe. Dragon. We are in a cave.”
“Well enough,” Perilambe huffs and Niënor bats away the smoke that darts at her face.
“Nay–nay. No smoke.”
Perilambe ignores her, and for the first time in weeks, asks again: “What are you called?”
Niënor hesitates, and the stance of her great figure falters. Her mouth opens to answer, then quickly shuts again. “I know not,” she whispers after a moment. “I have never been called something.”
“But you must have–we are all called something, a name. I am Perilambe Half-Tongue, it is not a name I admire, but it is mine nonetheless.”
“I cannot–” Niënor shakes her head, pale hair cradles her shoulders. “I cannot remember.”
“Nay,” Perilambe draws her gaze to fix pointedly on Niënor’s. Within her, Niënor feels a drawing breath, matter shredded and reforged. Her mind fixed with a looking glass, but her own eyes turned blind from it. She lets out a gasp but still Perilambe does not look away. Her limbs tremor, her fingers grip the dead’s clothes, words come jarringly from her mouth in sharp spatter. “Perilambe, what is it you see?” To Niënor, it is all fractured, yestereve, tomorrow, and the present–in this cave–there is a crashing wave, a man in Elven robes, an eye so gold she flinches–
“Nay,” Perilambe repeats. “That is no longer your name, it belongs to the dark. Tiutalë, I shall call you now.
Niënor still shakes, but the assault is done with and her mind returns to the way it has been, the way she has just gotten used to–this hole, this loss she is aware of but cannot mend. “Sit,” the dragon says. Niënor stays on her feet, cold but looming. Keeping to her stance, and furrowed angry brow, she returns to the bowl Perilambe had taken her from–a measly forage of dried birch bark, cattail root, and mushrooms she required Perilambe to sniff before consuming.
A glare is sent to the smiling dragon, Niënor’s anger does not simmer. “You live on rats like a hound.” Or what she remembers is a hound…she shudders at the onslaught in her mind again, a thousand visages she cannot place. It pains her.
“I am broken, as you are. My wings do not fly, my teeth cannot tear. What else shall I eat?”
The words make her frown.
Thus, Niënor learns to hunt, which is decidedly easier than learning to speak once more. It is methodical. She finds her trigger hand, Perilambe instructs her on the making of a bow, showing the many scales they have pried from her body. She does not watch as the wood bends and creaks, and Niënor carves, and carves, and stretches, and, eventually, shoots.
She returns to the cave with squirrels, rabbits, and gobbling birds, and once a white-tailed deer that she squeezed into the cave until her shoulders shook from exertion. All the while Perilambe smiled in the odd way dragons smiled, licked her serrated tongue out, and did not thank Niënor.
It is on one of these hunts that she sees Men.
Niënor settles into a tree, and for once, the bitter familiarity in it does not wrench out pain from her temples. There is a softness to the way she barely recalls this action–back to bark, legs swinging, arrow drawn and waiting. Niënor does not think it a memory really, but something spoken of, a story, a tale. Told in a voice gentle and, for once, not weeping.
The pain returns and she focuses again on waiting for game. Below, the ground still in the throws of a deep winter, is not quite yet alive. Overhead birds twitter too fast and too near the sun for her to shoot. Niënor waits, impatiently, as she has nothing but the now to entertain her.
There is sound suddenly, not like the wildlife and not like fire, and certainly not like hers. New, as the word and its connotation has been drilled into her, is exciting but to be feared. Niënor steadies her swinging feet, keeping the arrow locked but not drawn, and soaks up the sound as it draws closer.
It is the soft crashing of dried twigs and frozen grass, and into the forest beneath her, marches a group of men–hunters, Niënor thinks, like her.
They are garbed in shades of green and blue, few of their cloth is torn, their boots shine beneath the fallen twigs and acorns, and above all their weapons sit forged in beauty. Carved bows like wrapping ivy around a yew, blades–the kinds Perilambe had told her of–sharp and shimmering with mid-day sun. Niënor leans forward, careful not to tumble from the tree but eager to absorb this newness.
There is one Niënor can’t help but eye, a man–-what she has been told is a man at least—with hair of night and a cold look to his eyes. He lingers at the back of the group, and Niënor can tell he keeps half a mind to the forest around them, for game or for something harsher on the tongue.
Familiarity, when it comes, is bitter as always. A great ache wiggles its way into her temples, radiating until she can feel every thrum of their footsteps in her skull. She doubles over, bracing her head on the rough bark but keeping her groans muffled in her fist. One eye stays on the group— the man has paused, turned an ear to where she sits hidden, but does not move his hands to the quiver at his hip. He stays there a moment, surveying and for a reason Niënor cannot place she feels the urge to run to him, to climb from the tree, stumbling in pain and indescribable want, to collapse into his arms and weep. She imagines his caress, dark but gentle, caring in a way she hasn’t the heart to try in recall at this moment. When he moves along, Niënor sighs and ceases gazing fully, instead she presses her head into the tree until its bark draws blood from her forehead and the pain throbs there instead.
When she pulls back, painless, the hunters have left her eyesight. She climbs down and follows.
Niënor is as careful as can be, even still a few times does the man pause and turn. When he does she lowers herself into the brush until his attention wavers. It gets easier the closer they get to the rush of the river, and when there they sit and savour a meal Niënor can only look at longingly–hard cheese and dried meat.
There is a great stone half-wedged into the treeline, and as the hunters settle on the riverbed, Niënor lodges herself beside it. From here, she can hear their words, no longer seldom as they had been, and sighs.
The man’s voice, when he does speak, is soft, strong, with a certain determination shaded in this deep sadness. It is one she knows well, Perilambe has called it out in her own heavy tongue–a curse of language, words that seem to carry a burden. In hers, Niënor thinks it foolish, in his, it is beautiful. A despondent solemnity fit for the dark-haired man before her.
One of the hunters throws him a sack. “Draw from it, Turambar.”
Neinor sounded the name out on her tongue, slowly, quietly from her place behind the rock. His name, too, carried a dimness, a scent of doom.
Turambar draws a piece of bone, on it Niënor can faintly make out an etching, lines upon lines. The man turns the bone in his fingers, the other man gasps. “A poor fortune!”
“Eat your cheese, Henreth, leave the man alone.” Remarks a man sticking his boot in the river’s mud.
“Truly–an ill-fate. Poor Turambar, your pale hands have grasped the rune of destruction. Where will fate lead you I wonder?” Henreth half-smiles.
Turambar smiles not. He tosses the bone over his shoulder and Henreth frowns but does follow its path. It lands somewhere down the riverbed.
Niënor watches as they continue to eat in silence, and eventually, they continue down the river. Once they are out of sight and sound, Niënor stands from behind the stone. The river is cold as it gathers like a gown around her ankles. The carved bone is now half-burried in the mud, but she pries it from the river’s hold and rubs the muck from its etching. The shape nips at the flesh of her thumb. “Destruction,” she says aloud, and slides the bone into the pocket of her cloth.
The river rushes by, louder than midnight wind. Niënor steps further in until she can feel the pull of the water–how it holds her and, if not for her determination and strength of limb, would usher her into the sea. She imagines the great water, what she pieces together from her half-remembered visions and what Perilambe has spoken of, waves lashing like a master’s whip, blue as a storm cloud.
In her dreams, Niënor stands before the welling, drawing sea, feet drenched in the salt waves. She spreads her arms and wallows in the wind and water—she feels a great burning.
With her arrow she plucks several fish from the river’s edge and returns to the cave. The carved bone is cold against her skin.
—
“You are churlish in the night hours,” Perilambe says one morning.
Niënor wipes the dust from her lap, fresh arrows notched by a remade blade sit beside her. “I sleep.”
“But your tongue does not. You say a name like it is your breath. Morwen, you say, over and over. Who does the name belong to?”
“I know not.”
“Once you did.”
“You say so, but I cannot know. My mind is labyrinthine, and I cannot find the right passage.”
Perilambe hisses, the sound bounces off the stone walls until every inch of the cave carries it. “Take heed, daughter of ill-memory. One day the sorrows of that labyrinth will lead you to your death.”
Niënor sighs. Weeks have come and gone in this way, with Perilambe poking at her mind though she has already seen into it. Niënor knows this, knows the dragon has drifted a clawed hand into her abyss and pulled and pulled until she had her severed memories all before her. And then, with nothing more than an inch to scratch, she tested Niënor, mocking her absent mind. The world lies before Niënor like a riddle, but the present is easier to stitch together, to wrap and tighten like the arrows before her. She does not know into what future she can shoot, nor what past she draws her arm back into. At times, she finds she does not mind.
“You speak in awful riddles, dragon. but I cannot fault you for it, my tongue is no better it seems.”
Perilambe is quiet, grave, and the silence of the cave eats Niënor up little by little until she thinks she will scream. “What of your past?” she dares to ask.
Smoke filters out of the dragon’s nose, night-like air swallows Neinor’s pale figure, and though she coughs she does not relent. If she too had a way to cover her glinting eyes and shame, she would. Through the haze of their selfsame burying, Niënor asks again.
She cannot see Perilambe when she answers, but her voice is clear. “I am a corruption, a corruption of a corruption, bred for fire and ash. You know nothing of it.”
“Tell me,” Niënor pleads before she can stop herself. There is something in Perilambe’s cold voice, reaching out, mourning in the way Niënor herself does. She cannot help but pity the dragon, and then pity herself for doing so.
“I am a creature, embedded with foulness in the absence of light–Perilambe, daughter of Melkor.”
Whether it is the name, or the desperate way Perilambe says it, Niënor grows cold, her spine straightens. She is surrounded by smoke, the release of Perilambe’s dark past–a small part of it at the very least–but she has been answered and the air feels lighter for it.
Perilambe does not stop. “It was ages ago, when he made me. I was fire then, ground-shaking fire. I could have burned an army of ten-thousand of your kind.”
“Ages so you say,” Niënor cuts in. “And if you did, I've not the memory to know. And if I do not remember your blights, then how can you be my enemy?”
“You are foolish. This will get you killed.” There is less stoicism in her tone, Niënor notes. And the way Perilambe hisses is near enough to a whimper that she thinks of reaching out a hand. To press her cold palm to cold scales, to feel a dragon’s heat beat in her fingertips, and comfort her.
Instead, she holds her palms closer to her own heart. To feel its own beat, cursed as it and her mind may be, she is still here. “I’ve no time to fear death.”
“No one does, but it comes regardless.”
The smoke has grown thinner, the air above pulls it up until she can see Perilambe’s eyes like a blue flame across a dark, swarming ocean.
In the dragon Niënor finds something she believes she is missing, a broken off part of a long-ago loss. There is grief in this discovery, but there is also relief. A mourning she was unaware she held is released like smoke.
—
Niënor returns to dragon-spittle and curses in a guttural tongue. A hare drapes itself over her shoulder, warm blood dripping down into her old rags. It would make a good shawl, something warm in these bitter mid-summer nights. It would make a good meal, not enough to fill the belly of a dragon but to tame its bloodlust regardless.
But she returns and at once drops the hare and rushes into the heart of the cave. Perilambe has grown pale these past few months, as the winter drifted into spring and spring tumbled into summer. Her eyes are dimmer, the glow of her scales less vibrant. In this stone, where she has barely moved since Niënor came upon her, she looks like a water-smoothed statue of a dragon once fierce.
“What has happened,” Niënor asks.
Perilambe hisses. “I am old, Tiutalë. I have shed blood and my own has been shed from me.”
Niënor shakes her head, confused.
Tenderly, Perilambe lifts her wing. The scale-less spot of before shines a little less bright and the blood has been washed away from the arrow which Niener had pulled ages ago. But, in that spot the skin is aged and pale, worn and old. A painful heart thrums beneath it, every beat falling slower and slower.
“You are dying.”
“I have been for some time.”
Niënor breathes slowly, her lungs working quietly and gently. Questions rage against her tongue, but she has no want to ask them.
Perilambe’s half tongue slices through the air, licking at pale scales and a fire-less throat. “What will become of you?” It is mocking, because she can guess and Niënor cannot.
Niënor juts her chin out. “Tell me,” she demands. “Tell me what you have seen. What you have drawn from me and refuse to relinquish. Tell me, now.”
“It is corruption. Grief and brutality.”
“Tell me!”
Perilambe growls, low in the throat and it sounds like the mountain is collapsing. Niënor shakes but does not relent. She furrows her brows, and thinks, perhaps, she too holds a dark blue flame in her gaze.
The dragon does not surrender.
There is a monster in front of her now, with teeth meant for grazing skin and pulling blood from her body like broken dams. Niënor could not have named her monster, though in her measly, dark memories she is sure the face of a dragon is the very definition. Perilambe is not that, those hazy golden eyes she sees sometimes in a wordless dream, wrenching out something she can only recall the loss of.
A tempest swathes Perilambe’s dark eyes and Niënor falters in her step, she who had in a matter of months grown tall again, warm, and strong as the wind—Niënor who had bared her teeth in the face of beast, forgotten her fears, and warmed herself in its fires—falters, stumbles, and collapses to her knees, lost to the dragon’s gaze.
“Go back, Niënor of Dor-lómin. To your blissful ignorance, to the bittersweet bleakness of the vanished memory, seek solace in that enveloping dark, where all you know is yourself. Mourning you shall be named again, one day I am sure you will remember it.”
“I do not understand.”
“You do not need to.”
Overcoming her is a feeling she should not have forgotten. That awful tearing of matter and blood, a scraping like a claw inside her mind. She loses the cold of the cave, the wood chips embedded in her palm, warm hare’s blood on her neck, the outline of her face and the color of her eyes–grave and solemn and longing in the reflection of the water–she loses the words she has fought so hard to learn, the woman in the forest, what she has made herself. And finally, she loses Perilambe.
Lost and trembling, Niënor tears her cloth and flees from the cave.
—
There was grief in her rising and grief in her landing. Grief in her birth and grief in her death also. All around her is this unrelenting sorrow, draping her mind in soot-like agony. To Perilambe, it is no wonder at her birth name–this child born into a world that dredges out no remaining joy for her bitter, and seemingly short, life. This child–for, to a dragon meant to live ages upon ages, she is but a little thing—who is both enigma and clarity, mourning and wishing all at once. A thing with a heart meant to bleed and splutter, with lungs meant to drown in still waters and breathe out one little mote of grief-stricken air. Niënor, daughter and sister and wife, and friend to the half-dead and half-living, who is herself somewhere in that purgatory, waiting though she does not know it.
Perilambe settles into her death, and though her soul is blackened by her own inner fire, her body a forge of fell creations she thinks she will never atone for–she sends out a plume to the dark, starless sky she has been under for what seems like a lifetime, something that asks someone to watch over the cursed, memoryless girl in the forest. A face among the faces, a reflection of a reflection, of a curse made by a blacker tongue than Perilambe’s.
There is, of course, no answer.
—
There is a woman in the forest. She doesn’t feel cold the night she sheds her cloth, though the rain is harsh and the chill bites at her with gnawing, pulling teeth.
There is a river before her, water babbling and drawing her in, and her body feels light in its current. She flees once more into the dark of night, and the violence of a storm. and in that breaking of sky and rumbling of the earth, she falls upon a mound of grass, softer than the stone of the cave, softer than the scales of the dragon, and though she can hold no true comparison, she smiles into the delicate grass until the moon wanes and the rain has fled.
“Lady?” a voice says behind her.
There are a thousand things she could do now, freedom rages inside her, she, who is an empty cavern and has been that way two too many times. The welling song of the river rushing out into an open sea–she who was once named for her mother’s mourning, named for another’s comfort, cradled by her doom and cast by its wretchedness into the hands of a moment’s cure.
Gentle footsteps approach, a gentler voice whispers a word again. There is something cold as bone frozen into palm, and the grass tastes like ash against her forgotten tongue. Destruction seems to whisper its depraved words from all around her.
Niënor closes her eyes and asks the dark for its name.