20. Palantír: What is love?

The thought of love… Aragorn thought that will be the last blow to Sauron, but it seemed the contrary – Sauron gathered his strength again! Another vision filled the palantír:

A beautiful woman dancing at the fire, graceful and slender like a deer. Seducing lips, hair like ripe corn flowing freely down her shoulders in the rhythm of the dance. Something free, something wild is in her eyes. Valacar watches, mesmerized by the dance.

"That's my daughter," Vindugavia says. "Her name is Vidumavi…"

Osgiliath burns. The kin-strife damages Gondor like a hurricane. Barley rots in the fields for men fight over the right of succesy. Castamir the Usurper thinks his blood is purer than the future king's. All of that, because a king fell in love with a woman of the Northmen, not of Númenorean blood. But all blood is the same, all blood is red, and it smells the same, flows the same from the wounds…

You see, Sauron points to him, you didn't need me to fight among yourselves. Love was at the beginning of the kin-strife… It was a kin-slaying, just like in Alqualondë: do not take excuses in the mortality of Men, that unlike Elves, they would die anyways. Your history is stained with blood just like the hands of the Noldor Exiles, settling in Nevrast. All that for love…. And what is love?

Another image came to him, a ship sailing in the unknown waters. Upon the prow stands a woman, clad in black, holding a white cat in her arms. Nine black cats are on the deck of the ship and climbing the sails. Queen Berúthiel, set upon the wide Sea by her husband. A swift uplifting rush of wind drove the ship farther from the shore. Did you know that if you die in a lock room with a cat, it will eat your carcass, Sauron remarked dispassionately. A dog wouldn't. I always liked dogs more. And werewolves.

Aragorn shivered, and Sauron continued: The line of the Ship-kings ended with the first of them, and continued with his nephew, for Tarannon had no heir. That is love: a fleeting, unreliable thing that gets cold with years…

Aragorn tried to protest. No, love is not that! Love is…