vardasvapors:

@anghraine replied to your post: prompts etc    
       
               

 
my favourite: ‘a fading people, a springless autumn’       

It was cold, for it was always cold now, but the woods were dark and deep, full and thick, with dream and with memory. The woods were silent, for the whispers were gone, as if the trees were all sleeping. They were sleeping, as they had in the beginning. Once again the deep sleep, but not the same sleep. The air of stirring was not that of fading, though both were cold as it was now.

He was-

(in Tauremornalómë)

among the wood, and the dark earth, and the green growing scarce in the cold, but no other voices to remind him-

(My voice went up and sang in the sky)

There were echoes of songs, of things that had once been known, that still he remembered, if he would wake long enough to breathe and dwell on them. To breathe deep, breathe in the air of the places he had walked, in the far youth of all things. But now there was sleep, as sleep there had once been before, soft in beds of the earth now cold, where the trees’ roots grew long.

(And the years lie thicker than the leaves)

It was too cold now for the leaved trees. They were dry-silent and their roots turned to soil. Only the needled ones still dreamed around him. For many, many turns of the seasons, now.

It was cold, and he thought, he could move towards the south like the other creatures had done after the ringing of dwarf-hammers under the mountain had fallen silent. The sun would grow golden-shining-warm again, if he made haste to follow the retreating green, where trees might yet be awake for a while. There the stirring might come, and the cold would sink back like-

(Ah! the sight and the smell of the Spring in Nan-tasarion!

And I said that was good.)

He had not felt a true spring for many years now.

There was a white wall of ice in the north. It rose high above all else and wide as the horizon. It came, as the cold came, closer and always closer. It shimmered like the snowfalls on mountains had, before it had rolled over them inch by inch, scraping and crushing them, slowly, slowly. Slowly even for him, if he did not sleep and wander in timeless dreams so much now-

In time, it swallowed all it touched. And the heartwood-freeze of winds came whirling down before it, with wolflike howls to herald it, as it crept forward, year by year.

Perhaps, someone would wake him and then he would leave. He would step out of the earth, would shake off the high drifted snow and ice, as he had many times. Wash it all away, as he had once, when he brought the floods. Then the journey, and new warm lands where he would meet

well

he would meet

He remembered now, there were no others left to meet.

Land and wood there would be, but it was not where his roots and memories lay, nor those of the others he knew. The trees slept now all around and did not wake. He had not wandered in the lands beyond the reach of the ice in all the time since he woke under stars to the singing of curious hasty folk, and none sang songs to wake him afresh now.

Long, long ago, the last, the very last, of the singers he had known in the dark hush of awakening, had passed him on the paths to the west. The elf had stopped and sung for the trees a longing lullaby, of golden leaves and golden hair.

(It was more than my desire)

So it was for him too, perhaps. Autumn now and winter, as the spring had once been, and winter unchanging now, as the first spring under stars had been unchanging.

All was fading, had long been fading, but he had not wanted to hasten it, for he loved–

(Ah! the depths of the snow and earth over Tauremornalómë

And I dreamed that was good)

With a groaning, cracking, creaking of limbs, he broke the soil all about him for the first time in an age. Then slowly he moved to turn his face south, so that he did not have to see the encroaching ice, or feel the biting winds leaping down its edge, and settled down to sleep for the last time.