Melian’s brow wrinkled as she looked at the final page.  “Frodo wrote this,” she noted softly.

            A brief notation indicated, This was found in that kist given to Frodo’s use that Gimli brought home to the Shire.  It does not appear that Frodo ever went through the kist once it arrived in in Bag End.  Again, it feels that this ought to be right for the final entry.

Z

Ah, Zimraphel, how I wonder about you!  Always I heard the story told that your cousin Calion forced you to marry him, and that in so doing he usurped the throne that ought to have been yours as Tar-Míriel, fourth Ruling Queen of Númenor.  Now in an obscure codex I learn that—perhaps—you had become enamored of your cousin long ere your father died, and planned together that after his death the two of you would ally yourselves and seek to see the visions of those who rebelled against the mortality chosen for them by Elros Tar-Minyatur fulfilled.

Which is true, Zimraphel?  Were you married by force, or by mutual consent?  Did Calion take the Kingship with your body, or did you grant it to him along with yourself, and was it you who chose for him the name of Pharazôn, or Glorious?

Either way, Zimraphel, I find myself pitying you.  To fear death as at least he did is such a folly, as my late companion Boromir was wont to put it.  How often I found myself wishing death would free me of my own burden.  After what the Ring has taught me I do not doubt the report that many of the Eldar grow to see their immortality as a burden, particularly as they see so many and so much they have loved succumb to time and destroyers and fall to ash and dust.  I wonder if that is why the Ring Itself allowed Gollum to take It that one last time, perhaps foreseeing in a darkened corner of Its awareness that only he could take It to Its dissolution.  How often I find myself wishing that he had taken me as well as the Ring with him!  Can even the Powers themselves know such spiritual exhaustion as I have known, as the despairing from amongst the Elves have known?

To fear death, Zimraphel, is itself a delusion.  We do not know—not for certain—what awaits us after we quit the body; but it has to be better than to be so crippled in body or spirit that one cannot find or hope to possess joy and satisfaction any longer within this life!  How I miss the joy I knew when I was younger, when my body was supple and I knew that the ache at the end of the day would dissipate within a reasonable time, and that I would wish and be able to dance again on the morrow.  But Sauron, or Zigûr, as you knew him, robbed both of us of that chance for normal joy.

Finally, Zimraphel, why did you climb Meneltarma at the end?  Was it to flee the already present flooding?   To find a place high enough to perhaps see what became of your husband and his cursed fleet?  To stand in the sacred High Place again as the rightful ruler of Númenor, to cast off the fanciful name your husband had granted you as you were subjugated to his vanity and his domination and to offer intercession for your land and people as you knew was of old expected of the rightful monarch?   Did you expect for the Creator to hear your prayer and set aside His wrath at your people and their choices and allow Númenor and its inhabitants to survive? 

Were you fleeing death, or perhaps were you seeking it?  Did you hope your own death in the sacred precincts would propitiate the Powers and allow forgiveness for the building of that ziggarut of a temple constructed by Zigûr?  Or did you simply wish to stand above all others, hopeful that your own death would somehow mean more than those of the rest—the sailors and woodwrights and shepherds and seamstresses and those who tended the gardens and the city of the Dead?  Did you hope that either Aulë or Ulmo would accept your own death and body as a sacrifice whose meaning you imagined in your heart?

How I wish I understood, truly understood, your heart and mind as you fled, Zimraphel.  You dwelt close to Zigûr within your husband’s court.  Did he offer to violate you as his Ring has done to me?  But at least all of my life I have known that Sauron is a liar by nature, that he holds only sufficient truth to him to make his lies more believable to his victims.  Certainly I have learned that the “truth” offered me by his Ring was always twisted, always showing meaning far from what was true, as was the “truth” he allowed the Seeing Stones to show to Saruman and to Denethor.  Did you realize this?  Did you realize that the worship of that temple he built was empty, and could not bring Melkor back into this world, no matter how many were burnt to that avowed purpose?  Did you even think to protest your husband’s granting of permission for the twisted creature to even build such a place, much less to offer such a distortion of worship?

Well, I bid you farewell, Zimraphel, or Míriel, whichever you preferred at the last.  I must find it within me to appreciate that my own offer of sacrifice was not accepted, and to find ways to live in spite of the emptiness that too often I find within me as I anticipate returning home.

That is, if there remains a home for such as I am now….