time and tide
It was a still, near windless day. Only the faintest of breezes disturbed him where he sat on the shore, staring out across an ocean that was clear and flat as sheet glass for as far as even his keen eyes could see. No sign now of the howling storm that tossed his boat shoreward, nor those heavy mists which had hung veil-like around the small vessel until it ran aground, mired in unfamiliar sands. The tiny breakers that left seafoam trails along the tideline were only a memory of the towering waves that had brought him here.
Wherever here might reveal itself to be. Even the great wildernesses and wastelands beyond Rhovanion had not provoked so curious a feeling within him as had this one, unknown shore.
It was a matter of memory, and time. Though the silt beneath his feet was hewn from ancient rock and washed in from far flung places, its history was unfamiliar. This earth carried with it the memory of heavy ice and dry desert, limestone and quartzes from a hundred different lands, yet nothing within it's crystalline depths whispered of sunken Numenor, or the broken mountains of Beleriand. A hundred million creatures had lain down and lent the minerals of their bodies to it's constituent mix, and still it did not know him. The land did not, had never known elves.
The world was broken and remade somehow, in his absence. Now he was forgotten, or had never existed, and those things that were familiar to him were at least distant and unreachable, if they still survived at all. The upturned hull of the ship upon which he sat was the only tangible thing now, solid and real to him when it felt like he had woken into a dream. Soon enough he would have to leave it, and explore.
Wherever here might reveal itself to be. Even the great wildernesses and wastelands beyond Rhovanion had not provoked so curious a feeling within him as had this one, unknown shore.
It was a matter of memory, and time. Though the silt beneath his feet was hewn from ancient rock and washed in from far flung places, its history was unfamiliar. This earth carried with it the memory of heavy ice and dry desert, limestone and quartzes from a hundred different lands, yet nothing within it's crystalline depths whispered of sunken Numenor, or the broken mountains of Beleriand. A hundred million creatures had lain down and lent the minerals of their bodies to it's constituent mix, and still it did not know him. The land did not, had never known elves.
The world was broken and remade somehow, in his absence. Now he was forgotten, or had never existed, and those things that were familiar to him were at least distant and unreachable, if they still survived at all. The upturned hull of the ship upon which he sat was the only tangible thing now, solid and real to him when it felt like he had woken into a dream. Soon enough he would have to leave it, and explore.