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The night in Aman flowed slowly, like thick honey. Silence. Only the nocturnal cries of birds of prey. And the rustle of leaves beyond the windows. A careless drizzle fell, barely perceptible, and the occasional drop struck the windowsill with a ringing sound.
Only in one set of guest chambers was there no peace.
Silence, the damp coolness of the bed. Labored, ragged breathing.
Finrod lay on the spacious bed, his eyelids heavy, and beneath them his pupils darted from dreams worse than any waking hour. The stars beyond the window gazed through a thin veil of frivolous clouds, but he saw neither clouds, nor stars, nor Moon. He saw something else.
The strike of a drop upon a damp floor, steeped in the smell of iron and decay. Iron? That scent, it seemed, was already on his tongue. The clean, fresh bedding turned to cold stone. Alien breath right upon his shoulder. A sticky whisper that made everything inside him coil into a sickening knot of bile. A warm, sticky whisper on his shoulder that made him want to flay the very skin from his body.
A sharp inhale. His eyes fly open. He is suffocating, gulping air with a gaping mouth, and the darkness of the room around him tightens like a noose.
His heart hammers somewhere in his throat with a fiery pulse.
Finrod ran a hand over himself, searching for something, perhaps. His palm found only the fabric of his shirt, soaked with icy sweat, clinging to his chest, his stomach.
The skin beneath the fabric felt as if it burned. Though no one had touched it for millennia.
His vision was adjusting to the darkness. But his breathing would not be calmed — with animal horror, he stared at the shadows of the curtains, barely swaying in the faint wind, and saw something other.
He knew, he knew somewhere deep inside, that it was a shadow. But he knew too that it would never leave his mind.
His hand clamped over his own mouth, so as not to betray himself — though there was no one in the room. A habit. One that will not die even with the body.
And so he spent the remainder of the night: knees drawn up to his chest, palm pressed over his mouth. He stared at the wall, he stared at the stars beyond the window. He listened as the barely perceptible rustle of the light drizzle drowned out the roaring in his ears.
Only toward morning, when the dark sky was licked for the first time by the ghostly rays of the Sun, when the little birds began to praise the birth of a new day, did Finrod exhale and close his eyes. Slowly, cautiously, as though every movement caused him pain, he drew the blanket up to his chin.
Inhale. Ex-ha-a-ale.
Silence.
Aman, Blessed Aman.
The fabric smelled of freshness, of faint, subtle herbs. It did not smell of iron. Warmth, which now he could gather and hold in his palm.
But skin still remembered.