He was old. When had he grown so old? His fingers gnarled like tree-roots, like bare branches stripped of leaves and life by winter’s biting chill. They shook like branches also, trembling as he pulled the plain black wool about himself more tightly. Was the room cold? It felt cold, but perhaps it was only his bones that were cored now with ice even as his flesh burnt itself upon them.
He was a dying fire, all that had been strong and vibrant in him eaten up and away. He was growing thin, and knew it, and did not care. The nursemaids they set him gave to him dishes of thin gruels and broths, soft bread sopped in wine; meals fit only for invalids and old men. He was both, and still he would not eat them.
Long gone now were the days when he had worn armor beneath velvet, when he had woken before the rising sun and grasped a sword in practice for the battles he could not ride to any longer. The Steward’s rod had seen to that, and yet still he had kept his body honed and hard as oak-wood beneath the plush luxury of his office.
And his mind, also. Nightly he had wrestled with the darkness in the Seeing Stone, nightly he had climbed to the hidden room, along the spiraling stair which did not yet defeat the joints of his knees and hips. Nightly he had grasped the Stone between his hands and wrested back control from the one who’d watched him there, gazing not into that fell Eye but out across the lands of the free West. He’d looked at Mordor also, had seen the armies massing there.
And he’d seen Thorongil, still young and hale where he had grown old with time’s gnawing, and he had known finally who waited beneath that assumed name. Not the bastard half-brother he had suspected so very long ago, but the usurping upstart who’d thought to be King -- and now would be.
Denethor hissed and bent over himself as a wave of shuddering need swept through him. He craved the Stone, the Palantir, hungered for the visions the Stone had brought him, thirsted as one parched for the heady strength of bending the artifact to his will.
A voice spoke in the stillness and he looked up, eyes that had once been sharp as gimlets now fogged and hazed by the sickness of his memory. He saw the mantle first, blue as death and spangled with the starry sky.
A gasp left him with a sound like a punch taken, a fighter rocked back hard and breathless with it.
“—————- Finduilas?” he rasped out, the word all but silent for lack of air to give it voice. “Finduilas? Have you come to take me, then?”
With a mounting eagerness he could not disguise he raised his gaze from the tender blue of the plush garment to see at last, again, the face of his beloved – but when his eyes cleared, only a stranger waited there, pale and sallow-blonde where his Finduilas had been all rich darkness. He trembled with a sudden rage.
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