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I dream.
Oft I dream of the smell of flowers, or of roaming through the plains of Rohan, or the woods and hills of Ithilien, with those I love, the wild wild wind tossing my hair, free as a bird.
But this night I dream of darkness. I wander through the empty halls of Meduseld, my heart beating wildly. The Golden Hall is dark, and lonely as midnight. Even my breathing is loud in the silence. Before I can take another step, a cold, sweaty hand slips into my hair, twining it through his greasy fingers.
So fair… so cold… like a morning of pale spring—
I wake, trembling all over. The iciness of that hand surrounds me, and I cannot get warm. Blackness envelops the earth. Is there no light, then? Is the shadow so complete?
“Shhh, my lady, shhh.” A hand slips into my hair.
A cry escapes me, and I hit it away with all my strength.
A grunt of pain follows that, but barely a moment later, an arm around my waist pulls me closer. “It is naught but a dream, Eowyn.”
“Faramir?” I whisper, shaking.
“Aye,” my husband assures me. His warm hand flows over my back, forming slow, gentle patterns across my shoulders. How in my delirium I supposed that hand belonged to Wormtongue is a mystery. They could not be more different.
“It is… naught but a dream?” I repeat his words again, my trembling beginning to ease.
His fingers brush away the strands of hair from my face, tucking them behind my ear. “It is long past.” He does not ask of what I have dreamed. He has no need to.
“I felt it to be real again,” I bleat. Tears of fear and confusion and relief well in my eyes.
“I know,” he murmurs. “At times I wonder if all that I know now to be life and joy and love is naught but a cruel phantom’s dream. If the truth of life is not when I sleep and dream of shattered hope and fire and the everlasting ache of grief.”
“How can you be sure it is not?” I whisper brokenly, the tears drifting away down my cheeks.
In answer, he kisses me.
With a shuddery sob I press close to him.
“My Eowyn,” he whispers. "Bravest of hearts..."
And he holds me, for a long, long time. Till the shaking finally ceases and I fall back into my dreams, my tears spent and brushed away by his gentle hands, lulled to sleep once more by the soft song of our heartbeats intertwining.
And this time, the darkness does not trouble me.