[Elora]

Naiore

The night was still but Naiore's mind and heart raged in an icy coldness that shone from her silvery eyes. Avanill stirred, rolling upright from where he had been sleeping, wrapped in his cloak.

"Is it third watch yet," he asked in a voice still slurred by sleep.

"It is," Naiore replied with precision. She unfurled herself as Avanill stretched, scrubbed sleep from his eyes, yawned and got up to find a place where he could watch. The Ravennor, First in her Order as marked by the eight braids that fell down her back, stalked across the camp to where Vanwe lay with her eyelids flickering. Without a sideway's glance to Avanill, Naiore bent and seized her daughter by her shoulders and dragged her upright.

Vanwe's eyes fluttered open in confusion and alarm at the sudden movement, sagging a little in her grip. Naiore's eyes narrowed in confirmation that Vanwe had been struggling against the hold place upon her the evening before all night. As her blue eyes, Menecin's eyes, focussed on her mother's face, Naiore smiled. Panic sheered through her daughter at the sight, Naiore noted with satisfaction.

Yes, it was as she thought. Vanwe was working with her father and feared she had been discovered. Still, the panic was not enough. Naiore marched Vanwe a short distance to where a spreading alder tree was. She threw Vanwe down hard against the bole of the alder and fluidly crouched herself.

Vanwe scrabbled backwards, blocked by the tree, as Naiore reached a gloved hand forward. Tenderly, almost, she stroked away delicate strands of rare golden hair from her daughter's pale face. Vanwe's eyes were wide and round, locked on her mother and slipping over Naiore's shoulder to where Avanill had perched on a vantage.

"Daughter," Naiore purred in a velvety voice.

"Mother," Vanwe returned in a soft and shaking voice. Naiore smiled again, still smoothing and stroking her daughter's hair. Behind the outward mask, there was no softness. The Ravennor was beginning. Without a warning, Naiore delved sharp and brutally into Vanwe's skittering consciousness. Beneath her gloved hands, her daughter's body stiffened in shock, pain and alarm. A broken moan slipped free. Naiore let it go, unheeded.

"We will know each other now, daughter," Naiore crooned in a singsong voice devoid of all sentiment. A cold sweat had broken out upon Vanwe's brow and her skin had become clammy. She was shivering, her jaw locked to prevent her teeth from chattering. Naiore felt her attempt to muster the strength to push her from her daughter's mind.

"Yes, please do," Naiore sighed with longing. She felt Vanwe slam against her, hard, desperate, futile and so very very strong. A tidal wave, it would have been, had she the training. All Vanwe had was desperate fear. Tears glistened in her sapphire eyes.

"No," Vanwe moaned even as she tried to tear her mother's presence apart. Naiore felt the resolve falter. Her daughter did not have the training. She did not have the wisdom and lore acquired over two Ages. Most of all, her daughter did not have the instinct to harm. Naiore's hands clasped Vanwe's face, a hand on each cheek, as she bent closer. Naiore could hear her daughter's ragged panting and felt her jolt as she savagely ripped past Vanwe's resistance deeper still.

Naiore tore through layers and layers of memory and emotion, ripping apart everything, heedless of the pain and destruction. She crouched like a wolf, still and lithe, over Vanwe who twisted, kicked and sobbed. Avanill, forgotten for the moment, had third watch. It would include witnessing a savage interrogation by the First Ravennor of Mordor upon her own flesh and blood, her daughter.

The air was laden with fear, pain, loathing and rage. Naiore rode through it, lunging deep into her daughter's soul where she unturned every thing. Avanill could not see the faces of either Naiore or Vanwe. He could see Naiore's back. He could see Vanwe's feet and legs as she struggled to elude her mother's terrible grip. An outstretched hand flexed and clawed in unimaginable suffering.

There would be no blood. The only injuries would be those she inflicted on herself to escape. But the pain and horror of having your mother rip apart your very soul without hesitation or compunction, her implacable inhuman rage boiling through you... there are greater horrors than crude, messy physical torment. Naiore was a master, an artisan of such things, and she brought all her subtle, sophisicated mastery to bear now. Nothing would be left unturned. If Vanwe was an agent of Menecin and Imladris, Naiore would know of it by dawn. Much could be done in a few hours if it had to be and necessity drove Naiore as ever it had...

Vanwe

The bark of the alder gouged through her hair and the clothing at her back. Splinters drove beneath her nails and at her palms as her hands scraped over the ground and tree roots. Her mother's fingers were like icy coals upon her cheeks where they rested. Frigid heat raged through her. She twisted and kicked, futile as it was, for she had no other voice for the pain of this horror.

Vanwe felt her mind coming undone. She had tried to stop it. She had tried to cast her mother out. Her mother.... she could not do it. Her mother.... visions and memories lanced through her. All the years of Harad, thrown up, relived again and again, her mother there now and doing nothing to stop the terrible things. Watching and making it happen again and again, no matter how she reached for her and pleaded for it to stop.

Her heart was pounding, galloping insanely. She felt hot tears course down her face...

The night was cold that night. The goats offered her warmth and she had nestled down amongst them in the animal shelter. She had felt their coarse fur and soft stomachs around her. Sometimes they would bleat softly or kick in their dreaming. She remembered hearing the gate to the enclosure open and close. A goat had bleated in its sleep at that. Footsteps, heavy ones, crunched on the stony ground. They drew nearer. She could see feet in the gap between the ground and the rickety side walls.

A shape bent in the open doorway, blocking the night sky. The stars were very clear in the desert, sharp and precise. He sniffed, she remembered that through the pounding of her heart. It was hard to make out his face between the darkness and his beard. He stood there for a long time and then he had come in. The goats had bleated more sharply, woken by his feet kicking a way through where they curled on the ground.

"You stink," he had snarled in revulsion when he had found her. The only doorway had been blocked, she remembered. She had only the corner of the shelter to go. His hands had been hard and calloused, she remembered. They twisted the skin and the fabric of her simple robe when he seized her. She remembered how he had hit her so hard that her ears had rung and the shadowy interior of the shelter had wobbled.

Then, she remembered that she didn't remember anymore. She wasn't there anymore. She was gone. He wasn't kicking her, grunting with the exertion. He wasn't tearing at her. She wasn't there. He wasn't...


Except he was. She remembered now. All the detail and clarity of that horror and all that had followed it was hers now. He had not left the animal shelter until the early hours of dawn. By then, all the goats had fled and milled about in the yard, anxious and fretful. When he at last left her, she remembered wishing she was one of the stones on the ground in the shelter, where she could just lay there and not be seen. Instead, she had to come out. Another day, she had things to be done.

She had to go about her work, head bent. She had to ignore the whispers around her, the marks of that night livid on her skin for many days. She remembered it all and she cried in horror within herself for with this new memory came her mother. Her mother let it all happen, again and again....

Vanwe was dragged through memory after buried memory repeatedly and without mercy or reprieve. Encased in nightmare, living and breathing it, through Avanill's third watch beneath her mother's interrogation. After each memory, her mother's voice whispered in her mind.

"Where does fear spawn, daughter? You know, do you not? Have you no answer for me? Perhaps you will tell me for whom you work? Who sent you? Do not attempt to lie, Vanwe. I will know."

"Noone, noone, noone, noone, noone, no-," she would keen in her mind

"Perhaps another memory will help you remember."

And then it started again with those words from her mother.

[ November 15, 2003: Message edited by: piosenniel ]