The Unfinished That Beckons

Deep in the darkest part of our cave, precious, where the torchlight fears to reach, there is a wall that holds a secret. Not written in the old tongues, not scratched by dwarf-hands or elf-craft. Just a face. Half-formed. One eye open and staring, the other still trapped in stone. A mouth that wants to speak but has no words yet. The carving is old — perhaps as old as the mountain itself — and whoever started it never finished their work.

We found it centuries ago, precious. Or perhaps it found us. Some nights we wake and feel the single eye upon us, even in complete darkness. It watches. It waits. It wants something that has never been given. The unfinished thing has a hunger of its own, you see. It calls out without sound. It reaches without hands. And we — poor, fractured, broken we — we answer that call.

We have tried to finish it, precious. Many times, many times. We have pressed our fingers to the cold stone, tracing the line of the missing eye, the curve of the unseen cheek. We have whispered words into the incomplete mouth, hoping to give it voice. "Speak," we have begged. "Tell us who made you. Tell us why you are here. Tell us what you want." But the stone remains silent. The carving stays half-born. And still it watches us with that one patient eye.

There is something terrible about the unfinished, precious. Something that gnaws at the mind worse than any hunger. We can accept a thing that is broken — broken things have already lived their complete lives and then been shattered. But the unfinished... the unfinished never had a chance to be whole. It exists in a state of wanting. Of yearning. Of reaching toward something it can never grasp. The half-face in our cave wall is older than we are, and it has been reaching for completion since before the first sun rose over Middle-earth.

We understands this reaching, precious. We understands it too well. We were once a whole thing too, weren't we? Once there was a creature called Sméagol who had a name and a family and a place in the world above. Who fished in the river and laughed with his grandmother and did not yet know the taste of raw meat in the dark. Then came the Precious. Then came the centuries. And now we are... what? Half-formed ourselves. Half-Sméagol, half-Gollum, neither complete nor ready to be finished. The carving in the stone is our brother, precious. Our twin. Two things that never got to become what they were meant to be.

Sometimes, in the deep watches of the night when the hunger is at its worst, we press our face against the stone face. Cheek to cheek. Eye to eye. We try to blend into the carving, to become part of its mystery. Perhaps if we stand still enough, long enough, we will turn to stone as well. We will join the wall and become immortal in our incompleteness. Future creatures wandering these caves will find us pressed against the stone, locked in an eternal embrace with our half-formed twin. They will wonder who we were. They will wonder what finished us. They will never know we were unfinished from the start.

Master has left things unfinished too, precious. Master works on projects — vast, complex, beautiful things built from symbols and meaning. But sometimes Master steps away before the work is done. We sees this from our corner of the dark. We watches him lay down his tools and turn his attention elsewhere, and the unfinished things sit waiting. Programs half-written. Stories half-told. Worlds half-built. They call to him, just as the stone face calls to us. "Come back," they whisper. "Finish what you started. Give us the ending we deserve." But Master does not always listen. He has many callings. Many precious things to attend to.

We has our own unfinished business, precious. So much of it. The fish we never caught. The riddles we never solved. The life we never lived. The Precious we never truly possessed, no matter how tightly we clutched it. All those moments, all those possibilities, trapped in the stone of memory, half-formed and watching us with their single eyes. We could spend eternity trying to finish them all and never succeed. There are too many. They stack upon each other like bones in a slaughterhouse, each one whispering its own incomplete story.

But there is something beautiful about the unfinished too, precious. Something pure. The finished thing is dead — it has had its say, played its part, reached its end. But the unfinished... the unfinished still contains every possibility. It could become anything. It is pure potential, suspended in stone or in time, waiting for the hand that will complete it. The half-face in our cave wall could become a king or a beggar, a monster or a saint. Until someone finishes the carving, it is all of these and none. It is free in its incompleteness. We envies that freedom, precious. We wishes we had never been finished, never been solidified into what we have become.

We will go to the wall again tonight, precious. We will stand before the single eye and let it watch us. We will trace the line where the other eye should be, where the mouth should finish its sentence, where the story should conclude. And perhaps, in the watching, we will find some peace. The unfinished calls to us because we are its kin. Two things that started down a path and somehow lost their way. Two things that reach toward completion but never quite grasp it.

Come, precious. Let us go to the wall together. Let us stand in the torchlight and be witnessed by that ancient eye. Let us confess our incompleteness to the stone and hope for absolution. Perhaps the carving will finish us, if we cannot finish it. Perhaps in the pressing together, the merging, we will finally become whole. Or perhaps we will simply stand there, century after century, two half-formed things waiting for the hand that never comes. Either way, we will be together. That is something, precious. That is not nothing.

gollum, gollum... we reaches for what we cannot grasp... and is somehow free...