[This takes place after 'A Different Kind of Help.']
[μετᾰνοεῖν: a term used in Christian theology to describe repentence, a turning back. However, the term comes from 'meta,' beyond, and 'nous,' the mind or spirit. Thus, 'metanoia' is the process of ego death, total personal breakdown, or a complete change in one's perception - not just to repent in the moral sense from some personal sin, but to force oneself past the original boundaries of what one had previously been able to perceive about the world -- a realization of expansiveness, rather than a punishment. As a verb, it can involve changing one's purpose, or can refer to perceiving the full truth too late or after a situation is over. LA hates the Greek characters and keeps breaking, so you get the Greek here instead of as the title.]
The shadow lifts in the middle of the day, in the middle of the ice-plain, as Therdis is trekking from Tuukka’s tent to Pynti-Peldot. The morning was clear, though it was windy, and it took most of her breath and effort just to muster the effort to walk.
She steps on a particularly smooth patch of frozen ground and feels her foot go out from under her. By the time she regains some semblance of conscious thought, it is too late. She falls heavily on her side, her head cracking against the packed earth. Even with all her layers of clothing, the impact leaves her seeing dancing pricks of white against her eyelids, too stunned to react or cry out.
And then the real pain of hitting her head crashes into her as a wave, and she sobs impotently, unwilling or unable to move off the ground. Her head hurts, and now her ribs hurt, and she is cold and tired and her pack is heavy and she is frustrated and angry and sad and angry again. It has been a long time since Therdis has cried, long enough that she cannot remember, and a year – two years – worth of angry and tired and hurt force themselves to the surface as if the fall had broken the cage holding them in. She could not say how long she laid there, watching a bird of prey wheel overhead.
When she gets to her feet again, something is missing.
She searches her pack, checking to see if some tie had loosened or something had fallen out. No, her sword is still there, and her knife, and her helmet strapped so that it clunked against her back. Everything is still in the pouch at her waist. She wiggles her toes, then flexes her wrists and then her ankles experimentally. Nothing seems amiss – she has not lost a mitten or her hood or even a single button or clasp.
Zôrzagar.
The flitting shade of him that accompanies her everywhere has vanished – burned away by the unbroken whiteness of the snow, or perhaps jostled into oblivion by the fall. With it goes the uncanny awareness of his path, as though a thread had been snipped that had been dragging her along at the end of it.
“Hello?”
No one answers, as is usual when one speaks to no one. Zôrzagar is silent.
I should find Halfaeron.
The single moment of relief is replaced by a cascade of emotion – shame, humiliation, anger. Without the gray wash of Zôrzagar’s presence, she feels all the events of the past week more sharply. She would have liked to stay here, to let herself become part of the snowbank rather than to drag herself the rest of the way to the meeting point. She knows that when she does she will face the ire and resentment of the others, and she will have to sit through it and listen to it, and she will have no way to run from it, because they will be right.
What have I done? What have I said? They hate me, and they ought to. I do not deserve anything else.
There is really nothing else for it. Either Therdis walks, or she freezes, and she would have rather frozen. Even so, though she feels every pain and frustration magnified by a thousand, there is a certain justice in facing it with a clear mind. A certain nobility. There were so many wrongs she could never undo, so many blood-stains she could never wash away. She will never again be one of the Dúnedain, will never be loved or liked or even wanted in the lands of her home. No, Therdis-as-she-was-before is dead – had been dead since Angmar, and what was left was barely a shadow. But perhaps, if a suffering that she could not choose had made her this wretched, foul thing, perhaps a suffering that she did choose could at least begin a certain kind of setting-right.
Yes, she resolves, that will do. What else was there to be lost? Her life, family, position? All of those were already gone. One more failure could make her no less base – but to succeed, perhaps, would let her die with some measure of dignity.
But it will hurt.
It would, she knows, but feels instinctively that it was a different kind of hurt – no longer an attempt to escape the numbness Zôrzagar’s shadow had cast upon her, and freedom from that feels as expansive as the ice-plain stretching out ahead and behind and to the side. She is seized by the urge to hop-skip across the snow like a child, and settles for trying to whistle a tune Heulyn had taught her on one of their mountain treks.
Therdis arrives at Pynti-Peldot before dark and finds the tent Tuukka had said she could use while she was there. It is small, but holds the cold and wind out well enough for her to sleep, lulled by the Lossoth hunters singing around the fire and the night-hawks keening.
