( – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)
The year 1998 was the year of eternal autumn for me. Now, it feels like those days are here again.
It’s raining here. Water world, Caladan … Global warming run amuck. Is here the last bastion of humanfolk? The last bastion of the free people of middle earth?
Our climate is changing. I have lived here all my life, and I can feel it. As the economy dredges, one hundred years to a halt, here, the Rocky Mountain High, is becoming a temperate rain forest.
And I think .. Rivendell. The autumn leaves swirl. From my childhood, I can smell the smoke of burning leaves. Burning pine needles as our forests turn brown with the ravages of the pine beetle. Burning leaves. It’s a smell from my youth, from innocuous and unknowing people and causes, plying the results of their uncaring into the atmosphere. But I remember it fondly, alongside the acrid diesel of the airport. The end of days, the burning leaves, the hubris of human technological triumph. Twinned in complex carbon compounds.
Last refuge in the dying light. Perhaps. Perhaps elsewhere.
Seven billion people. And callousness. The earth has 7 times 70 billion ants .. but they work together, in colonies, and the bones of their evaporation feeds the earth.
Rain fall. Light grows dim. The comfortable grab the remaining tidbits in the dregs of the hot afternoon, while clouds build and those inclined yell at them.
How will we survive the dying of the light? Will we make greenhouses, to feed the last few? Will we establish a bastion against the darkness? Will we stand?
At once, Covenant slumped back into his familiar emptiness. His eyes were void. For no reason, he said, “Don’t touch me.”
Before Linden could reach out to him in yearning or rage, try to keep her promises, the floor near Vain’s feet began to swirl and melt. With surprising celerity, Findail flowed out of the granite into human form.
Immediately, he confronted Linden. “Are you a fool?” The habitual misery of his features shouted at her. “This is ruin!” She had never heard such anguish from any Elohim. “Do you not comprehend that the Earth is at peril? Therefore did I urge you to your ship while the way was open, that these straits might be evaded. Sun-Sage, hear me!” When she did not respond, his apprehension mounted. “I am the Appointed. The doom of the Earth is upon my head. I beg of you-do not do this thing!”
But she was not listening to him. Kasreyn stood grinning behind Covenant as if he knew he had nothing to fear from Findail. His hands held the golden band, the threat which had compelled her. Yet she ignored the Kemper also. She paid no heed to the consternation of her companions. She had been preparing herself for this since the moment when the First had said, Why do we yet live! She had striven for it with every fiber of her will, fought for this chance to create her own answer. The removal of that neck-band. The opportunity to make good on at least one promise.
This is ruin. It is the Sunbane, but it smells of autumn, autumn leaves, to swirl about, in the last dying refuge, of Imladris.
3 comments
Author
It is a potent smell, the smell of power.
Gaia and humankind contend.
Hurrying forward again, Sam tripped, catching his foot in some old root or tussock. He fell and came heavily on his hands, which sank deep into sticky ooze, so that his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mere. There was a faint hiss, a noisome smell went up, the lights flickered and danced and swirled. For a moment the water below him looked like some window, glazed with grimy glass, through which he was peering. Wrenching his hands out of the bog, he sprang back with a cry. ‘There are dead things, dead faces in the water,’ he said with horror. ‘Dead faces!’
Gollum laughed. ‘The Dead Marshes, yes, yes: that is their name,’ he cackled. ‘You should not look in when the candles are lit.’ –TTT, “The Passage of the Marshes”
frightening to me is that so many of us can see/feel/smell what is coming.
we do not thrash around and declare the end of the world; we say it in quiet ways, in side conversations.
that makes it more real than if the teevee announced it.