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[hobbitwrangler]

out of the water, cold and blue

Prompt: Númenor for @tolkienhorrorweek day 7

Summary: As the seas grow restless, Elendil feels a presence drawing near. He is less and less sure that it is friendly.

Character(s): Tar-Míriel & Elendil

Rating: T

Word count: 4.8k

Warning(s): body horror

Elendil could have wept for joy when he realised that he was being haunted. It had begun with small things. Hearing a voice in the whisper of the waves at dusk, a voice that his servants assured him, eyes darting meaningfully at each other, was not there. Familiar music seemed to rise with the sighing of the wind, as if just beyond the next cove the old palace minstrels of his youth played on, before ever Ar-Pharazôn first thought himself worthy of infamy and renown. The past, he thought, standing upon the balcony outside his chambers, nagging at the edges of his mind, reaching out to him through the veil. A deep, yearning ache ran through him, standing before the night and the wind, listening to those sounds calling from the darkened sea. And yet it was all easily dismissed. Men hear many things on the sea wind, both imagined and best avoided. 

Then there had been that feeling, walking along the sea shore, clambering over the rocks in search of what he did not know, that just at the edge of his vision someone was following him. Nimble feet leaping silently from barnacled rock to barnacled rock, never slipping on seaweed or slime, hands fluttering like butterflies in the cool, sharp air. He had said nothing this time, had let the phantom follow him. If it were a conjuring of his imagination it was best left alone and if it were not, maybe his silence would encourage it forth, like an animal which retreats into its den at the sound of Man’s approach but can be lured into the light if one feigns disinterest. It was so familiar, not in the way of someone that is known but something that is cherished, loved, home. He thought it was his wife, poor fool. He wondered if she hid from him because she thought he would be afraid of her, but for those few precious days of delirium, of imagining that he saw Mirima's face reflected in the rockpools as he walked, there had never been a man more happy to be haunted than Elendil. He would wonder afterwards whether there had been something sinister to it all, to the whispering voice and the music and the shadow on the edge of his mind, a malice that he had missed in his desire to hold onto someone long slipped from his grasp. Or maybe he had not missed it. Maybe he had not cared, had only reached for the feeling of home, neglecting to remember that the home in question was a dark, dead thing, fallen into the unforgiving depths and weighed down with the screaming of the doomed.

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