Month: July 2017

misbehavingmaiar:

(( you know I can’t resist the umlaut eyelashes! ))

This is dedicated to all the perpetually under-slept nurses I know.

____

The old icons had her raising a shield aloft over the wounded, but she hadn’t worn a shield in many ages. “That work I leave to my sisters;” she would say, a stream of smoke blown through a weary smile, “there is too much to be done here.” These days Estë wore gloves of dun leather and a tight fitted mantel that buttoned from under her chin and fell like a dawn-grey column to the floor. Her red hair she kept bound in a practical coif; her wings neatly folded and out of the way at her back (they were crimson, blue and gold.) Sometimes she smoked a long pipe. She had many mortal affectations— they helped her cope, she said. 

“Why do they never think.” Estë’s hands flew over a soldier in the marshlands, as quick with thread as Vairë, her needle pulling together ruined flesh and bone. “Why are they so willing to spring forward and charge to a noble death when so many of them simply end up with me, needing their guts untangled and their ribs mended? I’m sorry—” She added quickly, “I need’t tell you, do I?” 

Nienna shook her dark head. “Your lament is mine, sister. Please, continue. Give air to your grief.” 

Estë snorted, blowing a white plume from her elegant nose. “Grief is a strong word for it. Frustration, more like. Frustration and anger and… and…” Her gloves raised in the air, helpless. “I just wish the living had more will to stay alive. And to stay whole. That’s all. There are too many bolts in the sky, too many swords, too much hunger, too much need, too many great causes that must be fought for until victory or Mandos comes…” Her fingers closed the eyes of a farmer in the hill country, unflinching at the barbed arrow through his temple.  

“I could speak with it. It listens, sometimes, to me.” Nienna said. 

“Thank you, sister. No.” Stitching in the taut skin of a Teler’s shoulder pulled tight, its thread cut deftly. Blood flowed along its natural tributaries again. Skin grew over hurts and buried them. “It is not Námo’s job to keep a body and its soul together." 

"You work very hard, sister. Harder than any of us.” The sisters knit their hands together, pale and strong. “You and your spouse." 

That made Estë laugh in fondness and set down her pipe next to a basket of apples , abandoned by a girl who was doubled over her troubled belly.

 ”My spouse is at play every moment of their work! Irmo lives and breathes dreams— they’re not exactly like Aulë at his forge… Still, if it weren’t for them I’d have run myself into the ground a year after the Firstborn opened their eyes. You know how I am— once I start, it just goes on and on, there’s no end! Always someone falling from a horse or eating poisonous berries or taking an axe to the knee…”  

Nienna smiled too— a rare sight, and brief. “Irmo is lucky to have you. It is well they  bring you comfort, and bliss. I confess…” the lady of sorrows turned her face away, “I never understood what brought you two together.” 

"I do not understand how a dull little peahen attracts the peacock,” Estë clucked, “but their kind continues all the same. —Easy now. There you go.” A woman roared through clenched teeth as a stubborn child was brought, bloody and vigorous, into the world. “…Irmo and I share an understanding that can only be achieved in dreams. We both work at night; then during the day, we are free to—" 

The healer yawned, flexing her colorful wings and stretching. “Oh… no. You see? I have a whole camp of scalded Firstborn to visit yet! Just one more and I’ll rest. Just one more—”  Her delicate square jaw cracked in another yawn, more insistent than the first.  “Oh alright, love! Fine, I’ll lie down! Just for a moment, do you hear? I’m very busy.” 

Nienna watched as her sister lay down in a bed of folded reeds, and the whispering grey-green willows of Lorien shivered and sang in a canopy overhead. 

A shimmer like oil on water followed her movements, dusting her with motes of glittering dust, soft as moth wings. Slim, bone-white fingers undid Estë’s coif as her head leaned into the comforting grass, hair like a river of copper spilling its banks.  

"Lord Irmo.” Nienna nodded in greeting. The prismatic air shimmered in return. “Please. Give her the love, the rest, the cheer she deserves." 

Irmo wrapped their ivory arms around their spouse and nodded, bright eyes gleaming with the lunatic mischief of birds. 

 ”Sleep sound, dear sister.” She sighed and slipped away to her bleached cliffs to watch the earth that so needed mending. 

– an old drabble about how Sleep is a nurse’s best friend.