Durin’s Daughter, Down Below by Magda Knight

                         Sarah Altendorf CC



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Durin’s Daughter, Down Below

Down, down, down, down. 

To Moria. 

To Khazad-dûm.

The weight of them. Words like a bronze gong struck with bone. Not a disc of softened skin, dried and stretched, painted and adorned and danced over with the pitter-patter known only to those who have lifted their face to the sky and felt the rain. 

Some words can hang around a neck like stones.
Once, I tried to outstare the sun. Chastened, flarestruck, blinded with newfound humility. A wilful spirit tempered, its rawness burnt out. I dropped my eyes to my feet. I searched beneath my skin, inside my skull.

The Mariana trench. Gorges and canyons behind the eyes. The meatpulse of the red within, held together with intangibles.

​Despair cries deep and its horrors are manifold and yet, by the light of day - its mysteries stripped away by the sun that can outstare anything - a ghost train ride might look so very drab, tired paint, hollow promises of a thousand screams if you’ll only dig deep into your pockets and buy a ticket and enter; mildewed reality drummed up by posters and hawkers and expectation. 

The Pit of Despair. How deep, exactly? How clinging? Are there steps? How far down do they go? And what happens when the steps run out?

Does the Pit of Despair have a bottom? Does it? And if it does, what lives there? Is it Despair, though? Is it? It claims to live there. Perhaps it is an intruder nestled deep in a pit that belongs to another.

And how does Despair feed, all alone in the dark? With only myself and a centipede or two for company?

Is it must be weak? Faint with thirsts unslaked?

Hungry, when you and I and the others are not around?

Time runs slow, down in the Pit. Minutes become years. Despair – weak, not even half the size it yearns to be – prays we’ll stick around a little longer. Feed it tears from an invisible pipette. Shelter it from its deepest fears. Cosset it with numb, numb hearts.

I keep coming back to the details; the ones that can make or break a trial. If Despair is the size it claims to be, vast, unyielding, smothering, how can it live so very deep in the bedrock where food is as rare as kindness and smaller than the glint in a lover's eye?

​Something about this place is a lie.

Something about it is a fairground ride.

Down. Further down.

Despair, buried alive - is it the pit itself? It feels that way, when one goes down the steps.

Despair feels heavy in the lungs, breathed in. Sucked into the essence of one’s own space. To sink into its mass feels as inevitable as a wrong step. A struggle, and down. Not waving, an arm reaching up to the memory of the sun. Sucked down slow and deep and forever into the past, present and prehistory. Down into the tar.

Despair was never the Pit. It was never the whole of the depths. It was just a meniscus. The skin on old milk.

A heartbeat. 

Down, down, down.

A rumbling somewhere deep in the quantum wastes within the bone's marrow, so resolutely deep inside that the solid bedrock becomes vast empty space.

In. 

Further. Always.

Not Despair, but the presence of something. Life in the depths. To seek it is to hope that it will flick its whip and pull you past the limit of that final step; drag you all the way down low beneath the pit's brittletoothed floor, crusted with the crumbling bones of the slain. Count yourself among their number, moisten your cracked lips with water in a toast to what you once were, and further –

Down, beyond fear and hope and age and memory into depths that scorn the metre and the yard, tumbling and squeezing past Despair's nest of refuge where it squats and curls into itself, thumb-sucking and foetal. It is too heavy, Despair. Too heavy for its own good. Trapped. It cannot get out. And it dare not descend.

There, in the place where Despair weeps with fear to go, is something base. Baser than carbon. But life, it is. And Despair can never hope to know its neighbour, for it dare not leave its nest.

Poor Despair.

Down.

I whisper wordless marching songs to myself and think of dwarves trooping ever nearer to the centre of things on steps of their own carving in their thousands, helmets wrought of metals not yet mined by sun-warmed flutterers who live above the thin green line of grass; dwarves with a thousand words for seams and no word for blue.
Endurance. Readiness. Not up, not just yet, but down. A glint of something in a torch's flame, never a flash of radiance.

Following the weight of the sounds. Clutching at your heart.

To Moria.

Heavy. Bold. Brief. The sound of it. The finest, heaviest sounds ever written on something as light as paper... it is a wonder the paper that first bore the weight of Moria’s name did not crumble into dust. Khazad-dûm’s rhythms reverberating in the pit of your belly, not the narrow flute of your throat. Sounds expelling from the body like a punch in the gut.

​Despair’s a newborn. Mewling. Skin like milk, wanting but not knowing what it wants.

There's something deeper in the pit.

I think there may be more than one way back up to the sunlight, the world of kind and warm. There’s more than one route back to the shelter of the sun if perchance you tried to outstare it and learned of folly the hard way.

There’s another way out of the pit if you have a helmet, torch, boots, trust in senses other than sight, a head for the depths. If, when the going gets tough, you’re open to making amends, eating a centipede or two. 

Down.



SONG OF DURIN, FROM THE LORD OF THE RINGS BY J.R.R. TOLKIEN

The world is grey, the mountains old,
The forge's fire is ashen-cold;
No harp is wrung, no hammer falls:
The darkness dwells in Durin's halls;
The shadow lies upon his tomb
In Moria, in Khazad-dûm.
But still the sunken stars appear
In dark and windless Mirrormere;
There lies his crown in water deep,
Till Durin wakes again from sleep.
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[EXCERPT]

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Magda Knight is the co-founding Editor-in-Chief of Mookychick.co.uk. Her work has appeared in various venues including the British comic 2000AD,  Derby Shorts (For Books’ Sake), Into The Woods (Hic Dragones) and The End Was Not the End (Seventh Star Press). Her unpublished medieval sci-fi YA novel, Star Burn, was shortlisted for the Commonword Diversity Writing for Children Prize in 2016 and an excerpt was published in their anthology of YA writers to watch out for. Two of her unpublished YA novels were longlisted for the Mslexia Children's Book Awards in 2012. Her YA speculative fiction short stories been published in Timeless (Pugalicious Press), and Mythology High (Buzz Books). Her heart belongs to attics and noon shadows.

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