#he never does a selfless deed while on earth

[ryukisgod]

[gravityslingshot]

Morning mist clung like gauze to the earth, softening ridges and gullies into ghostly suggestion. Beneath the high pale boughs of birch, two mounted figures emerged.

Faramir laughed. It was not the dry, political chuckle of council chambers, nor the brittle mirth worn at feasts where old wounds throbbed beneath linen – this was boyhood laughter, loosed from the lungs without permission, rich and startled by its own sincerity. He had not ridden thus, bare-backed and wild, since before the White Tower had stolen the shape of his soul. Wind tousled his hair, and the coarse braid of Éowyn’s own golden mane danced ahead of him.

“Wait!” Faramir called, though not with authority, nor with any real desire that she slow. His chestnut mare took the cue, hooves flying as though she could not bear to be left behind.

The White Lady of Rohan was fearless. She rode like wildfire with the wind behind it, and left him in awe.

Trees gave way to meadow, and there the light caught her fully. He saw her in fragments – the turn of her neck as she looked behind her, the press of her knees into her horse’s velvet flanks, the white of her knuckles as she leaned into the gallop. The air itself seemed quickened with her passage, and Faramir rode not after her, but within the wake of her becoming.

When at last Éowyn drew rein upon a low rise, she turned her face to him, and it was as though the sun had found its purpose in the roses of her cheeks.

“I do not know,” he murmured, breathless, as he drew his horse beside her. “If I follow you into joy or into ruin.”

For she was not gentle, not tame, not crafted to fit within the walls of any man’s keeping. She was wind and blade and pale defiance. Yet, here she rode beside him, not as one subdued, but as one who had chosen – for this hour, for this breath – to keep his company.

For that, Faramir was grateful beyond measure.

He stays in her slipstream, the trick of an experienced rider. It is not the breed from the Lords of the Westfold that throws her ahead, whose neighs were the sound of the powerful Gléomer and strength from the Baldor, but the terrain she chooses. The hooves of her steed find solid home in the tougher ground they meddle with, no stranger to galloping days.

The sky rips into view. Éowyn smells not of the White flowers of the city, but rough kerseymere woven from the poorer Riddermark homes, while her eyes shone age from the warm hearths and scarce food from a dying Rohan, and now the easing grief of losing her uncle, clouded like an amorphous beast by too many years to forget and experience to season and sour what should have been youthful innocence. A raging storm cloud, overtaking the sun. Divining pieces of the puzzle to put back together since the days her heart rode her out from her want to die. The chipping pieces sneak free and tumble to her dreams in the riderless horses of her father, mother, cousin, her uncle, racing like the wind in the field, behind the hills into Shadow.  

Alone has she grown. Haunted does she look when the road is still dark and no one is watching.

Yet in the reducing path of fate and the strangulation of dread, such is often the course of deeds that mark the ground of the world.

She is full of fear that has festered slowly like poison in her heart, from all hope taken from her as each of all she has ever loved tore away.

But Faramir has led her away from the dark nightmares of Rohirric fields, to the peace that lay around them in his own selfless warmth.  

It’s a chore to contemplate what they looked like aside from a blur of laughter, of tumbling over green hills in the brightening day, the veins of her arm still deepened into black. The glare paints sharpness into her cheeks. Her smiling again, even if he doesn’t know it, is one King Théoden had never seen before. Her voice is melodic, a comforting glow as would it embrace those grieving at a burial, the fearful before battle, and now, one she may not see again.

‘   But you will not stay with me long, my lord! What does your heart say? Your duties remain in the citadel. A man of Gondor must stay his purpose.   ‘

@saltuary