Lord of the Rings Felis

**Bingo #s: O67, O68**

**Prompts: footsteps and whispers; first line of Junger's The Perfect Storm; skeletons in the closet; "We won't go until we get some."**

One midwinter day off the coast of Umbar, the crew spotted a bottle with a note in it. Against the captain's better judgment, the first (or was it second?) mate promptly ordered the fishermen's nets lowered to scoop up the almost-too-picturesque oddment. No fish were anywhere near the bottle's locale, and the net was hauled swiftly back onto the skiff's deck with the mysterious object as its only burden.

"I wouldn't touch it, if I was you!" warned an elderly sailor, a queer glint in his eyes. But the younger men, being, of course, younger men, paid him no attention and untangled the bottle from the empty net's twisted ropes. The first mate nominated himself to read its contents and, removing the cork, pulled forth a crinkled sheet of paper that, when unrolled, was found to be written over in a fair hand using the _tengwar _in Gondorian mode.

"Who here can read the elf-script?" asked the first mate, waving the note about for the rest of the crew to see the gibberish.

"I can," sighed the captain, who could claim (slight) relation to the western kings. Reluctantly he took the sheet of paper from the hand of his first mate and began haltingly to read aloud. "'Berúthiel, exiled queen of Gondor, to whomever the ill-fated reader may be. 848 T.A.-'"

"Berúthiel!" exclaimed the crew, interrupting in their wonder, and one voice added, "But that was over a century ago!"

"Sturdy bottle," quipped the skiff's navigator, a somewhat wiry man without the beard typical of his people.

Clearing his throat to command the crew's attention once more, the captain cried, "If you don't plan to pay attention, I certainly will not waste time reading to you." The sailors quieted down somewhat quickly upon hearing this, and the captain continued, "' I expect that no one in all this cruel world shall ever read the words written herein, but if by some strange doom this note is found, know that I want nothing and seek no aid. My only request of the reader is this: that he hear fully my tale so that the truth may be known."

~OoO~

I scooped up the white one and he mewed softly in my ear. I cradled that bundle of thick, beautiful fur to my chest with his front paws on my shoulder and his head beside my own. Sitting upright on my bed, an oversized structure with an immense black canopy, I buried my face in that downy fur and wept.

I hated- and still do- that horrible man and his horrible ocean. How dare he order me to join him at Ethir Anduin- at a moment's notice like this! And he had prohibited me from bringing the cats. It was not as though I wanted to take them with me nigh- nay, in the midst of- the menacing sea; they despised it more than I did. However, it was not as though Tarannon ignored their existence outside that one stipulation.

He had known I would deny him his request and had written that he had messages delivered to his captains here in Osgiliath, as well as myself. They were under instructions to kill all ten cats with the sword if I refused to make the journey. I knew they would gladly do so; they passionately detested both my babes and me. Ever since Lossë had reported to me the affair of my husband's chief guard many years ago, I had fallen out of whatever favour, however small, I once had among Tarannon's servants.

And now, for the first time, I deemed that their love would be of use to me, for the king had set for me a clever snare. I was trapped between two bitter options: my fear or the cats' deaths.

Tarannon never understood that my disdain for the sea sprung not from irritation or disgust, not from the petty annoyances that he expected would lead to my hatred of that untrustworthy monster. He does not realize that I fear it. It terrifies me, that massive and volatile creature; one moment it is peaceful and utterly still, a flat plain marching on for eternity, but the next it roils and writes in tireless peaks and troughs like a mountain range discontented by its location and on the move for one better. The sea is too large, too infinite, too deep, too dark, to be so restless; to be near it is to risk its entrapping one.

But Tarannon loves it, more than he ever loved me, I know, and for sheer posterity he then demanded that the queen join her king at the mansion in the middle of it. _And_, I thought, stroking Lossë's fur in melancholy contemplation_, he knows I will do anything to save my cats_. Lossë's rough tongue now cleaned my face of tears, and I laughed in spite of myself. I gently placed him on the bedspread and rose to my feet. To my chagrin, it was time to let Tarannon know he had won.

~OoO~

The captain paused. The sun was at last beginning to further wester, dipping nearer and nearer the distant horizon across leagues and leagues of the ocean's currently serene surface. A chill wind ruffled the fishermen's dark hair and pushed the skiff's comparatively small sail totally flat. The crew glanced back and forth at one another, unsure of how to respond. "Is that all, sir?" asked the navigator.

"No," answered the captain thoughtfully, "she's far from done yet."

~OoO~

I had never liked that child. The only daughter of my husband's favourite counselor was a thoroughly obnoxious little brat who found it amusing to barge into my chambers and mercilessly harass the cats. She yanked on their tails, she pulled out their whiskers, she made the loudest noises she possibly could just to frighten them; so they told me. I would have begun locking the door- a simple solution to a terrible problem- whenever Aerion and his family chose to grace the palace with their charming presence, but Tarannon had taken from me the key to my own quarters, "to keep you accountable, my dear," he had said with a sickly smile.

Those circumstances left my poor babes completely vulnerable when I was out of the room, which was unfortunately quite often with both Tarannon and his friends were in my house. It was only natural, then, that after the forbearing tolerance of the cats for three occurrences in a row of this treatment, they should at last fight back. I was not at all ashamed of the ferocity with which they did so.

When I entered the chamber after dinner with the court- for even when Tarannon was actually in Osgiliath, he slept in a bedroom of his own- and found the body, I panicked. In place of eyes, the girl now only possessed two bloody sockets; her skin was simply coated- in the places it was not missing entirely- with heinous lacerations; much of her facial skin was left in jagged avulsions.

The cats were lined up on the bed, placidly bathing themselves. Only Lossë showed evidence of the fight; some of that snow-white fur was stained crimson. My first thought was for my babes: If Tarannon learned of this, I knew beyond a doubt's shadow that he would find it the excuse he had sought for years to slaughter my beautiful pets.

So I lifted the corpse and did the first thing I could think of: shoved it (temporarily, of course) into the somewhat-capacious wardrobe wherein were bestowed my silver and black garments. I thanked Eru for the black rugs covering the floor; once the blood dried, it would be invisible against their hue.

The cats and I were strolling in our bleak little garden, observing our decorative gargoyles and trying to think of a fool-proof means of smuggling the body out of the palace to be disposed of in the River, when the soldiers came. Their countenances were grim and harsh as the leader of the company (an unfamiliar young man) spoke the words, "Queen Berúthiel, the king wishes you to do some explaining," and ordered his men to seize my arms.

As I was escorted to the throne room thus courteously, I directed the cats to return immediately to our chambers. They scampered swiftly back into the palace, swarming about the feet of myself and the guards, whom they tripped in their velocity.

Upon throne room arrival, the king's face was in the likeness of that icy mask that anger wears when it is too profound for mere outbursts of fury. No excuse I made, no torment I told him of, changed that emotion, until the very end of my defensive oration, when I expressed the cats' words to me, and he began to look at me as though I were mad- though he was hardly alone in the action: A few of the counselors lining the room's sides even laughed aloud.

Tarannon sighed deeply, then severely proclaimed the fate of the cats and me, "Because you are my wife- however lamentably- I possess the decency not to execute you- conventionally. You and your feline demons will be placed upon a shift and set adrift in Belegaer until death finds you."

"To starve, my lord?" I queried, frenzy building within me. "You would not be that cruel!"

"I would," answered Tarannon coldly.

"Please, my lord, send us at least with a bit of sustenance. A keg of water? Some fish? I will not obey without this last gesture of kindness from you," I responded, for some reason both frantic and uncharacteristically bold before the king's throne.

"Only because it would do nothing save prolong your misery, I will grant your request. Act not, though, as if to stay or go were your own to choose. You will remember hereafter, Berúthiel, that I rule you," he replied.

~OoO~

It was almost full dark now, or swiftly growing that way in the shadows of twilight. The wind had slackened somewhat, and the sea was still as flat as the hills of Calenardhon. The crew was silent. The first mate lit a lamp and made his way to the captain's side to illuminate the battered sheet of paper. "Keep going," he said, and the captain continued.

~OoO~

There were some of the king's men on the ship to guide it down Anduin, and in those days I and the cats were most like prisoners. The soldiers were supposed to stay on board for a while longer, to row us out to sea then disembark, but a strong east wind, they decided would do the job for them; when they abandoned ship at Ethir Anduin, it was difficult to say which party was more relieved: we aboard or the fleeing troops.

Verily, the wind pushed us out to the midst of the ocean; by the time I recovered from the terror that gripped me, the supplies were gone, and our doom was nigh. That was when I began to hear the footsteps.

Outside my chamber door, above me, behind me are they, the gentle creaking of the ship's boards and planks, the steady _thump _of a heavy tread. To turn around, to step out of the little room, reveals nothing of the apparent stowaway. I have asked the cats, to whose silent feet the sound does not belong, and they do not appear to know anything whatsoever. Even now I hear them, though, making their unhindered, ceaseless way up and down the vessel's diminutive hold.

I might have been able to live with this, dismissing it as nothing but the groaning of the ship's timbers, if not for the voices. Ever quiet they are, mere whispers in the ship's darkness; sometimes clear enough to understand, other little more than a ceaseless hissing. They speak of me, the banished queen with the nefarious cats, the murderers. The scandal has passed far and wind, and even from the distant sea I can hear the rumours. It was a plot between the cats and me, to slay the child out of spite in my barrenness. We were nothing but pure evil from the start; I deceived the poor king in a quest for power. They say that Tarannon was next on the cats' target list.

But they are only voices, and cannot hurt me now, eternally sundered as I am from the dry land whence they originate. They have now, though, begun to speak of a new thing, my latest despicable act; indeed the footsteps can be heard now running across the hold to spread the news: Today I killed the cats.

I hate myself with a loathing of flame for this deed, though I know in my heart it was mercy and love that gave me reason to do so. After I finish writing this account, I shall cast it onto the face of the forbidding deep, and then take my knife, still stained with the blood of my beautiful darlings, and plunge it through my chest, letting my body be claimed by the ocean.

It would not have been fair to leave them to starve alone, when I had escaped that agonizing fate, and it would have been nothing but misery for all of us to starve together. To watch them die quickly is one thing, but slowly is another entirely.

So I killed them, with each slice of this knife a part of me dying as the radiant light of each creature was forever extinguished. I called them each to me, one by one. I beckoned them onto my lap, and the way that every single cat rubbed his soft face against mine to wipe away my tears made the difficult only greater. I did it, though, ten times in a swift maneuver, then tossed the corpse out of the porthole and into the sea before the enormity of my sin could fully register with me.

By the time I reached Fuinë, the fifth, my hands were wholly crimson, covered in the warm stickiness of the cats' blood. I steeled myself to continue, while the tears simply kept flowing, until the time came for Lossë.

He wandered in of his own accord, speaking no word but fully aware of what was happening. Now sobbing hysterically, I sat back down in the stiff mahogany chair, the only furniture in the tiny cabin; the knife was still in my hand, a steady drip of blood flowing off of it onto the floor's planks. There was no way to hide my crime.

Lossë's amber eyes followed the crimson drops. "I am so sorry," I sobbed- and then he leaped into my lap, rubbing his head against mine just as the other cats had. After a few seconds, however, he stopped, he moved his head, and he looked me in the eyes. He knew.

But he still stretched out his neck; I slit his throat. His blood poured out, staining both his white fur and my silver gown. I screamed as I took his still-warm corpse to the porthole. The footsteps followed me; the whispers grew more frenzied; I whirled about, but no one was there. I let Lossë go, consumed by the sea, which is now tossing and roiling in a ferocious squall.

I wrote this account, the knife is still in my hand, and I go now to my death. Farewell, O unlikely reader, and may your doom be other than mine.

~OoO~

A storm was now brewing off the coast of Umbar. The wind had grown fierce, and the sea churned beneath the fishing-skiff. The lantern in the first mate's hand shook and was blown down by the increasing gale, shattering and going out as it hit the deck's surface. Lightning split the sky, illuminating the grim faces of the crew. It began to rain, sending harsh torrents of water down from the disgruntled clouds.

Suddenly, the wind tore the note from the captain's hand; it flew from the ship, stolen by the belligerent tempest.

"Back to work," said the captain.

~OoO~

**A/N: I have no idea what to say about this; the prompts simply fell together for it back in March, and I've always been fascinated by the story of Berúthiel. I really do love cats! Drop in a review, if anyone wasn't too traumatized to read to the end of this madness. ;)**


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Lord of the Rings, Angst, Horror