#the other one is ghosterin a for aaaaaaaaaaaa

[aurore-parle-de-ses-idees]

oc-tober 2021, day 25: spirit with @oc-growth-and-development

ghosterín :D (based heavily on assorted aus sarc has come up with)

[death (being about a ghost), and some horror/gore in thuringwath. not gone over in detail, but definitely there]

===

You should have known better, making promises you can’t keep, but standing knee-deep in the flooded Ring you did not care. I will not leave any of them behind, not again.

You do anyway, in some sense, but not in captivity, not in the way you meant it when you thought you had just watched Lothrandir die. Before the Black Gate you fall (But those are not the wounds that kill you. Not that it matters much, the technicalities)

---

“You can delay no longer. Choose, and go forward.”

I promised… You choose.

---

You wake in a field full of flowers, in victory. You go looking for your friends, and for a time you do not realize why no one else tries to speak to you. It is only when someone else walks through you that you realize. I will watch over them like this, then, you think. It will have to be enough.

You find them all, alive but hurting, and you hover over the injured, itching to reach out and make use of your runes. Your bag still hangs at your waist, spectral as the rest of you, and as useless.

Corunir sees you, as you linger over Golodir’s shoulder, and he pales. He doesn’t look like he can afford it. He grips Golodir’s arm and doesn’t move his gaze from you.

Golodir tells you off later, shakily. The sight of you convinced Corunir he was dying- and nearly convinced Golodir too, until he saw you himself and you rushed out an explanation. You don’t know if it eased anything, but Corunir is sleeping now with Golodir watching over him, and you make slow rounds of the field trying to figure out how you will explain yourself to dozens of worried friends. No, I did not refuse the Summons, you insist to those who know to ask. I am here as many other shades of Men we have met. But not quite. Many of those had been Oathbreakers. You are here not for breaking faith but to keep it.

Into Mordor you follow they who you have sworn to defend. It is easier to battle the fell-spirits here, both the bound and the wandering, but they can hurt you too, like this, and in ways they never could before your death.

Deep in the Morgul Vale you find a hidden valley where death lies heavily over a bone-white forest. You back away, and insist none of them enter. This is no place for the Living. It is hardly one for the Dead.

The city, though less terrible to look upon, is no less dangerous, and there are many among those dearest to you whom Gothmog would dearly love as his playthings. Though much else in the city has fallen into disuse, the dungeons have not.

I will not leave them here! None of them!

But he grows weary of your interference and furious that he cannot stop you, not permanently, and so he sets a snare and traps you in a stone like the hearts of the watchstones and brings you back to the terrible forest, where even the trees have become vessels for fell-spirits.

“Hail, Mistress of Lamentation,” Gothmog intones before the great doors.

“Hail, hand of the Witch-king. Have you come again for the Rite of Returning?”

“Nay, Mistress. The spirit I have. It is the body I lack.”

“The Rite of Remaking then. The sacrifices have already arrived; enter. I trust you remember the way.”

And so you are brought into Bâr Nírnaeth, the Houses of Lamentation, where even Gothmog shows deference. The halls are lined with glass and crystal vessels filled with blood and walked by flayed, skinless things with a cold hunger in their eyes. Beyond, through the inner doors, white roots strangle black rocks beneath a starless sky.

“Hail, Morloth.” There is a strange softness to it, Gothmog laying a hand against the trunk of the pale and twisted tree. It lasts only a moment before he sets the stone heart in which you rest in a crook among the roots of the tree and steps back, watching a large, dangling fruit. The Mistress of Lamentation chants somewhere below, and you are drawn inexorably into the limbs of Morloth the Black, where lost spirits are remade.

---

You wake in a cell. Your friends are near, calling for you, and you are alive.

Well. Nothing has changed, though everything has. You will escape together or not at all.