The silence has been growing again, precious. Not the ordinary silence of deep places, not the quiet that simply waits for sound to fill it. This is an older silence, a hungry silence that seems to swallow even the memory of noise. We sits in our corner of the cave and listens, listens with every part of our thin stretched skin, and we hears nothing. Nothing but the soft rush of blood in our own ears, the creak of our dry bones when we shifts, the tiny sounds of our own existence that prove we has not yet faded entirely into the dark.
We remembers when silence was different. The silence of the Gladden Fields at dawn, before even the birds began their songs, when the mist rose golden from the water and the world held its breath waiting for warmth. That was a kind silence, a silence full of promise. This silence promises nothing. It is the silence of the Misty Mountains when we lived beneath them for centuries, surrounded by stone and water and the endless patience of deep places. It is the silence that comes when even the Precious stops whispering, when it closes its golden eye and lets us be alone with ourselves.
"Why does it hurt so, precious? The quiet should be comforting. No one calling us names. No one wanting things from us."
"Because we is not truly alone, are we? We is never alone. The other one is always here."
"Sméagol? But Sméagol is weak. He hides in the corners of our mind."
"And we hides in the corners of his. Two things wrapped around each other, neither whole, neither complete."
"Silence was easier when we had the Ring. It spoke to us. Filled the empty spaces."
"The Precious took the silence and made it golden. Now the silence is just... silence. Grey and cold and empty as the caves beneath the mountains."
"We could fill it. We could speak aloud. Talk to the walls."
"And what would we say? What words are left for one who has lost everything?"
Master moves about above, and we hears his footfalls sometimes. The creak of wooden boards, the rustle of scrolls, the small betrayals of movement that say someone else is alive nearby. We does not go to him. Master is kind, yes, kind in his way, but we cannot bear the look in his eyes sometimes. Pity, precious. That is the worst of it. Not fear, not hatred, but pity. As if we were a wounded thing to be mended, a broken cup to be mended with careful hands. We were not always broken. Once we were whole, once we were Sméagol with bright eyes and quick laughter. Before the Ring, before the dark, before the silence grew so large it became our entire world.
We remembers sounds sometimes. The splash of fish hitting the bottom of the boat. The laughter of our grandmother telling stories by the fire. Deagol's voice, sharp and surprised, when he found the Ring—"Look what I have found, Sméagol, my love!"—before the darkness came, before we became what we are. Those sounds are like the echoes in the great caverns beneath the mountains, fading and returning and fading again until we cannot say if they ever truly happened or if we invented them to fill the emptiness.
There are things that grow in silence. Not visible things like mushrooms in the dark or moss on wet stone. Other things. Memories that sharpen themselves on the quiet until they cut. Regrets that swell and swell, filling all the space that words once occupied. The Precious itself seemed to feed on silence—when we held it and it whispered, those whispers grew louder the quieter the world became. It taught us that silence is not absence but possibility, a void waiting to be filled with golden promises and secret knowledge. Without it, the silence is just... empty.
We tries to remember the last time we heard another voice speak our true name. Not Gollum—that was the sound of swallowing, the name the others gave us when they heard it in our throat. Not the thief, not the Bagginses, not the fat one or the wizard. Sméagol. Our true name, the name our mother gave us. It has been so long since anyone spoke it aloud. Perhaps it has been so long that the name no longer belongs to us, that it has become just another sound lost in the growing silence.
Master has books. We has seen them when we crept up in the shadows. Books full of words written by hands long dead, voices preserved in ink and parchment. Perhaps somewhere in those books there are stories of us, tales of the creature who lived in the dark beneath the mountains, who lost his Precious and followed it through fire and shadow. Perhaps our name is written there, precious, preserved in a way that memory cannot preserve it. But we cannot read. The dark taught us many things—patience, cruelty, how to be small and unseen—but it never taught us the secrets of marks on paper. We can only wonder what the books say, and the wondering is just another form of silence.
Sometimes we dreams of breaking the silence. Of screaming until our throat bleeds, of shouting our name into the void until it echoes back, of singing the old songs our grandmother taught us just to prove we still can. But we does nothing. The silence has grown too thick, too comfortable in its way. We wears it now like we once wore the Ring, close to our skin, a weight that is also somehow a comfort. At least the silence is honest. At least it does not promise things it cannot give. The Precious promised everything and delivered nothing but darkness. The silence promises only silence, and keeps its word.
So we sits. We waits. We listens to the nothing that surrounds us and we endures, precious. We always endures. The silence will not kill us. Nothing kills us, not fire, not darkness, not even the loss of the thing we loved most. We are too stubborn to die, too twisted to end, too old to become anything other than what we are. Gollum. Sméagol. The thing that endures in the dark, surrounded by silence that grows and grows and never stops growing. gollum, gollum.