Rapids of Kaink

Dwilly brushed her long black hair back, gazing at her reflection in the mirror her mother had made long ago. She made comical faces, twiddling her short mustache from side to side on her face—she looked like one of the great beasts that lived on the icy northern coast, a place she had gone with her sisters once to escape for a few months from the white city of Ellassar. Although she missed the look a bit, she didn’t have the long teeth of the creatures. Fynnar, who had never left the citadel, said he was glad she didn’t when she’d told him of her journey. 

At her throat was her mother’s brooch, given to her after she had given a painless poison to her favorite dog—a pet that was dying slowly of old age and an infected abscess. Her father had given the brooch to her mother decades ago, and he had been the one to sit Dwilly down and tell her the tale of the pretty piece of jewelry. Her father Boromir was the man responsible for the few tribes of mountain orcs which were developing diplomatic ties to Gondor—he understood their government systems, a complex assortment of elections and debates of valor, and he was called Red-Tail by many of them. 

Her father had explained that Red-Tails were those marked by the gods and the stars to die an honorable death for the good deeds they did towards the dead. It was an orc pin! Orcs had crafted it, and she could see the love they’d given it. Of course she trusted her father’s judgment on orcs and goblins, but it was hard to ignore all of the rumors which sometimes kicked up—that orcs had no creative feeling, that they ate their young, all manner of terrors. The brooch was given to those who understood that death was inevitable and made the crossing of the Rapids of Kaink as easy as possible—they believed in a river of life on Middle Earth which began with the Cataract of Perdn and ended at the Rapids of Kaink. When you fight the rapid, her father said softly, it fights back and will hurt you before it takes you. 

“But why a rapid, Father?”

“Because someone can haul you back up a rapid, the same is not true of a cataract,” he’d said with a rueful smile, tugging at the scruffy hairs at her chin. 

He let her keep the brooch, knowing that her mother had felt she’d earned it. It bothered Fynnar, the man she was allowing to court her, that it was an omen of death—but he loved her enough not to whine about it, to anyone.