She was shivering.
She didn’t know if she had ever stopped to shiver, not on the inside, not where they couldn’t see it; she didn’t know if she still knew how warmth felt, and she wondered if her skin had ever not burned with the icy winds that went through her clothes and her skin, making her bones vibrate.
But now she was shivering visibly, and the cold, the ice was not the main reason for it, for once. Elenwë had slipped, Elenwë… The ice had broken beneath her feet, and she had slipped, and she had fallen, and then they had heard a scream and a splash and…
She was shivering.
In her last dream, it had been her who had lost her footing, who had fallen into the unforgiving depths of the icy water, so cold that it burned flesh from bones, filling her lungs until her screams were water, until her eyes and lips and tongue and heart were frozen…
Itarildë’s sobs penetrated through the ice storm. Amarië’s face hurt worse than it did usually, and tears had frozen solid in the corners of her eyes. How long had they been going? Ñolofinwë kept telling them that they would arrive soon, soon, soon, every moment they would see Middle Earth in the distance… But time had lost every meaning on the eternal ice, and thus ‘soon’ had too.
Her legs were tired. Her feet felt as if her toes would fall off any moment. Sometimes they came across banks of snow, soft looking, inviting her to sit down, to lie down, to wait until the snow came and covered her body completely… Even a blanket of snow sounded warm in comparison to the cutting, searing pieces of ice that scraped against her cheeks with every new gust of wind.
She couldn’t keep her vision from going blank again and again during their journey. Sometimes everything grew white, sometimes black, and she never knew if it was her surrounding or her own senses betraying her. She would have been able to ignore it, to just keep grinding her teeth and walking onward, if the blankness had stayed blank, though. But there were faces in the white and in the black, faces of her family, of the cold eyes of her mother and the warm smile of her father, of her sister with flowers in her hair, her eldest brother sitting among his children and his bees, her second-eldest brother smiling at her after showing off how far he could throw his spear… Whenever she saw them, her knees grew weak, and she walked slower, and she felt close to weeping, but she didn’t - she knew that the tears would freeze on her cheeks, that no one around her did not suffer like she did, that crying would be selfish… That they would wonder again why she had come with them if she needed to draw attention to her in such a pathetic way, that they would think that she was not one of them, that she didn’t march for the same reason they did, that she didn’t have the same goal as they had…
And it was true, for she had no goal. She was walking through the ice desert, and she was dreaming about the soft, warm embrace of snow, but she had no goal. And sometimes, when the white storms were too thick to even see those who walked beside her, she even forgot her own name - and the name of the person she had followed into the ice, and these moments filled her with ice cold panic that made her feel as if she was suffocating.
And now, Elenwë had fallen. The only person that could have understood her - the only person whom she had been able to talk with about the roads of Valimar, who had known the children’s tales that the Noldor didn’t tell their children, who had sung her daughter the same tunes as her grandmothers had for her… And with every sob of Itarildë, the water closed in more around Amarië.
He didn’t know what to do.
It was a feeling he was unused to, one he had never before felt to such an extent. And yet, from the moment his uncle had held him bound by his stare and forced him to swear–
Swear, Findárato, in place of your craven father. Swear, or would you prefer I consider your sister the traitor she is? It would be beneficial for us all, you see, you must understand–
And whilst no sword had been drawn inside that tent, Findárato had felt cold steel at his throat nonetheless and knew that Fëanáro was not asking for his fealty. He was demanding it.
So he had left his uncle’s presence no, not half uncle, you cannot afford to think like that now, Finda with clenched fists and ice in his heart. Determined to refuse, to be associated with the murderers of his uncles, cousins, family.
And yet.
The promise of lands far away and places not yet touched by the feet of the Firstborn lured him like a fish to bait. He had looked at his brothers, his baby sister - not a baby anymore - his cousins determined to reach new lands, and his beloved who had left the safety of her people to join him in this crusade, and decided. We will follow.
So they’d found themselves here, with hands and feet barely feeling and food supplies running low. Turgon just sat there, unmoving. He did not speak, just stared, and there was nothing Findárato could do. The feeling pressed down on his mind and only made him feel colder, and all he wanted to do was sit down beside his friend and join him in his grief.
But he couldn’t. His people, people he had forced onto this ice with a cold word how flippantly they had used the word cold, then, though they had never known true cold until this land of ice and death and downcast eyes relied on him to stay alive, to lead them through the dark. He decided to go and find Amarië, for he had not seen her yet this day and was beginning to long for her embrace.
When he reached her, though, she looked as broken as he felt, and the way she shivered made tears prick his eyes. He quickly removed his cloak and put it over her shoulders, though she still shivered almost uncontrollably.
“Amarië?” he sat down heavily beside her and took her hand cold, she was too cold, frown creasing his brow, “My love? What is the matter?"