Queen of Winter

Winter is coming, I can hear the gentle murmur of your skirts in the rustling of the leaves. Here we are again, together, you and I. Queen of Winter, how I long to gaze into your glacier blue eyes. How I long to touch your raven hair. How I long to stand close to your breast, your frigid breath against my face. And yes, Dear, how I long to kiss your black lips, and die. Queen of winter. I long for you.

A Goblin's History

A Goblin’s History of Angmar
First of all, you can call the place whatever you want. Outsiders always called the place Angmar, and it stuck. We always called it home, the word being Grokka in swamp goblin, but what kind of a place name is that? Everyone calls their own place home. Angmar is really two places, the Snowy Isle, always the province of Elves and Men, and Melumore, the big island, home to abominations. We goblins is abominations, I suppose, though I never felt like one myself. I just likes to eat rats and make traps to catch the humans, but enough about me.
They say this island was once shrouded in darkness, like the rest of the world, all of it shrouded in darkness. Back then there was no elves or dwarves or men or even orcs nor goblins. Back then there was things like spiders and grey jellies, krells and shadow men, and I suppose, they got along just fine without light. When the gods of Arda built two great lights to bring day to the world, the whole place lit up like a chandelier. All the sudden, in Middle Earth up north, green trees started growing, and the troglodyte folk moved underground or just plain died. Even with these lights though, most of Angmor was in shadow. Those lights were pretty far away, and between the Green Mountains and the Red, and the Black, not much of any light crept over those peaks. Angmor is the one place in this universe some of the original, black forests, still stand, their branches tangled with black vines, whispering ugly truths to the passerby. It is still pretty dark down there, in the South, and these forests still stand, but I ain’t never been. You smarties out there might be thinkin’ trees can’t grow in the dark, and I suppose that is true for the fancy green stuff that grows in the North of Angmar, but in the South, we still got the old kind. Black as soot, leaves and branches, they get their power from the Earth itself. I hear them type of trees grows deep under the ground too, where the real power of Angmar lies.
Anyway, Morgoth destroyed them lights. He hated them. He takes all the credit for that, but I hear it was mind flayers that put him up to it, or Krakkens, or the Aboleths. For a while, it was dark damned near everywhere. This is about when goblins and orcs came here, by sea, in great ships. Angmar was so dark a goblin cold walk ten days and not have to cover his eyes. It was paradise. The darkness did not last long because the gods of Arda like their light, and so great trees grew far in the West. For thousands of years, the light of the world came from two mystery trees the elves grew. I ain’t never seen it. Nobody here, not even them folks that is thousands of years old, ever seen them trees. They was so far away and just for elves. Those Elven trees never did last too long. Morgoth came down here and fell in love. Ungloiant, our spider queen, was as lovely as a streak of black storm clouds. They say she had the face of a maiden, and features that captured the best elements of menfolk, goblins, and orcs. She had eight legs too, and could spin webs of darkness so thick ain’t nothing could see through them. The rest is Elven history, but our Ungloiant killed that tree, and ate them gems, the Silmarils, except one. She ate Morgoth out of house and home too, then cut loose, spreading her seed far and wide. Finally she returned home, and spawned three daughters. Then she died. Spiderfolk do that sometimes. The elvenfolk here are the dark kind, and they worship one or the other of them three. They are Ungolia, Lolthina, and Sargon. Them elves arrived about the same time as the orcs, I think, by ship or from tunnels so deep under the ground that they pass beneath the sea.
Dark Elves? The elvies say this. In the beginning, when the great lights were constructed, there was a call by the gods of Arda to migrate, West across the continent of Middle Earth. Most took heed, though some got lost along the way. The lost ones they call the green elves. The ones that made it all the way are the fair elves, and the ones that made it, but with trouble, they call them the grey elves. There were ones that made to the coast and never went across the ocean, and them is the high elves. Two kinds stayed. One was the dark elves. They ignored the call on purpose, and when sunlight finally reached the North of Angmar, they moved underground. The other kind is the Orcs, who never were elves, but close enough. Orcs and elves are kissing cousins, though neither likes to say it. Orcs live underground because they always has, and in places on the surface where they can make a living hunting animals or terrorizing the weak. Then, of course, there are goblins, bugbears, ogres, hobgoblins, dark faeires, gnolls, flinds, lizardfolk, and the underground races like dark creepers, mind flayers, and grimlocks. Angmar has always been home to monster folk. Some say that when, after the mystery trees were killed for good, and the sun was created to light the sky, monster folk of every creed, color, and design came down here and hid in the mountains and the dark woods. Dragons too, and their half-man consorts, came South in those days. That was the time when the great monster cities were built.
Hellgar, city of black minotaur folk, was built at the base of the Mountain of Fire. Here, the minotaur men forged great machines and weapons, and built libraries and roads underground. Their big and stupid cousins, the Red Minotaurs, guard this place with axes made of steel and bone, or so I hears.
Deeper down still is the land of the dark elvenfolk. They have a couple cities down there, not as big, but by some recollections, prettier. Black tile streets and slaves to do all the lifting, the Drow, as they are called, farm beasts for food and work strange feats of magic. Below them is the city of the mind flayers, but the less said about them, the better.
There is a goblin city down there too. Moglog, ruled by a goblin king twenty feet tall, who can read and write, and breathe fire. Goblin smiths down there build the best weapons of the land, and make nine out of ten horseshoes and carriage wheels. Only problem is all the blood goblins. Another story there.
Then you gots all the evil gnomes that came overseas recently, with all the troubles up north. Gnome folk and dwarf folk get along ok, I guess, but there is bad dwarves and there is very bad dwarves and neither fits in. Most of em drink too much and fall off a ship, from the north, drunk, down in Angmar, sooner or later.
They say that nowadays, the sea people, the Numenoreans, are building a world empire, and carting all the gold and silver to their island, far out in the ocean. Wherever they go, they bring war, and trouble for beasts and evil men.
Now, our land has been through an age like that. Five centuries ago, Elves and Men and Dwarves from oversea came to our dark island seeking treasure. They found it, in the hands of dragons and giants, mokroths and beholders. These men were tough, and dwarves and elves too, and they built three kingdoms. The kingdom of the men, by the sea, grew town by town along the coast, fishing village connected to seaport connected to farm town by ships and boats and canoes. Alongside them were the sea elves. Inland were fair elves and grey elves, building stone towns along the rivers and connecting them with mighty roads. Trees were cut by the men, but the elves mostly worked around them. They planted gardens and brought fair deer, bunny rabbits, badgers, and the kind of birds that don’t lay eggs under your skin when you are not lookin’. By turns, the place was tamed, and there was no place a su monster could find a decent meal without ending up at the end of a sword, so the monsters fled South, and East, and underground. In the mountains was the dwarves, and they built underground cities of their own. Their mightiest was a six foot tall dwarf named Kargoth Kollossus, King Under the Mountain, and after him followed three great ones. Gimolf, Gloin, Borgstor, and Nilbor. They reaped great treasure and mined gems.
In the kingoms of men and sea elves there was mighty kings as well. Zardozar, the mighty wizard, built an upside down tower into the ground and filled it with wonders. He ruled with a wand, and some say he had a beard ten foot long by the time he died, centuries after he was born. Finally, the grey elves had their own kings and queens. Luthinia, the mightiest of them all, ruled from a castle deep in the forest. Swamps were cleared, black trees were cut and replaced by the green kind, displacer beasts and devil dogs were slain and replaced by white deer and wild horses. Ravens replaced blood birds, bats moved into caves, and for a while things looked bleak. Finally, up North, there were troubles for the elven folk and the men. An Orkish army was fighting the elves again, this time with the help of dragons, and fighters from this land left to lend a hand. This was our moment. A mighty alliance was formed between the dark elves and the mind flayers, the lizardfolk and orcs and goblins, and even the dragons were in on it. This was about the time of Rhohan and Zelgar, who tried to hold us back, just fifty years ago, but it feels like much more.
Overwhelmed, the forces of good were eaten or destroyed. Only a few fled tell the tale. The old cities still stand-some goblin and ogre towns, some inhabited by men and all sort of monster folk, and many more still abandoned, home to vampires and unmentionable horrors.
Now, this world of ours has places for everyone. The big cities haves a thieves guild and houses and smiths and even places where a goblin can get a knife sharpened. We have taverns for menfolk, and many more for monsterfolk, places weirder still that takes magic words to get into. Underground, we have tunnels connecting the dark cities, and people in the know can usually find the ways they connect to the sewers of the surface towns. We have our wizards and our priests, and we have slaves to do all the work. In the South, we got dark forests full of things I can’t even find names for, and in our seas, we got krakkens, and sea monsters, and cities out in the deep too.
Now, the sea people don’t see our ways as the right ones at all. In the North, their galleys have come and reclaimed the old towns. Some say Snowy Isle never really fell, and there they got great castles and princes, gold and ballgowns. Down here we have rat meat and cockfighting. We got tribes of orcs in the hills, and gnolls, and lizardmen in the swamps, but we got orcs workin the streets sellin’, though what kind of sausages I don’t ever ask. Our ways aren’t their ways. I think you can see the problem.

an unvisited geological epoch

if i were made of plywood, i would be full of hot coals. if i were glass, tuning forks. strike that-i would be half full of warm deoxygenated saltwater, with a single eusthenopteron gulping at the surface, prowling about for its next meal, not realizing that the trilobites are long extinct, and if anyone feeds it at all, it will have to settle for flakes. an ammonite cannot escape the coils it has set, over the years, because its internal organs are locked solidly to its mantle cavity. i am a vase full of seed fern fronds, a lappet moth nestled against a bright green motel room door, unable to work its natural colors into the pattern. all my archival footage, my collection of yellowed paperback novels, my victorian monographs, creaking under two centuries of distinctive museum dust, are like discarded tapes in a paper shopping bag. I am wide awake and this is now and something truly remarkable keeps happening and happening. past history means something, because in a previous geological epoch, i might have longed for something i could not have, but that was the Triassic and things are different now. i was not expecting rainforests again, and reefs, and an adaptive radiation of new forms. this is all so unexpected. whatever happens, the face of this strange planetoid is producing butterflies, again, and in forms more diverse than before. i can only marvel at it.

an open window

i feel it too much to ask what brought this here, how long it will last, and what will become of it. i am merely happy for it at the moment. this is what i tell myself, but i ask all those guilty questions, particularly the last of the three. the Cretaceous was a very long geological period, and it had the most interesting dinosaurs. it is a similar situation with galactic evolution. hydrogen burning stars of the right size can only exist at certain times in the grand scheme of things, and long after they are all burned out, and for all those billions of years we had to wait for them, space was lifeless. how long? what will become if it?