Disclaimer: All credit for this goes to the Professor.

Thanks to Tehta for betaing these for me.

~

We are all made of water. It is part of us. It runs through our veins as it does through streams, smooth, graceful, gently flowing. It is what keeps us alive. Here, on the Helcaraxë, the water has frozen inside us. We who march are made of ice.

The others view the ice with hostility. They fight it; fight the urge to join it, to become the ice, here where the water is so strong. Yet the ice is not our enemy. Do you think it could not crush us if that was what it wanted? No, it allows us to pass. We are kin, the ice and we.

Can you not hear it? Can you not hear the song of the ice? It sings to me. There is no pain in the ice. There is no more cold, for it will reach out and envelop me.

They fear it, so they tried to stop me. They do not understand. Yet I stole away, when they were not watching. I curl up in the ice now, hugging my knees to my chest, like a babe inside his mother, protected, content, unburdened by the world. I can hear it as I drift off to sleep, telling me of the bliss that will come. I drift away from pain as I listen, losing myself in the song of the ice.