sea stories

They say that Elwing and her husband never returned to Middle-earth, but some know better. The first sea-bird sailors see once the ship is underway sometimes shimmers a little too brightly to be an ordinary skimmer. A sign of a good catch to come, a joyous return homewards. If they are lucky, she will greet them again when they seek the shore, white-winged harbinger of safe harbor. A Númenorean navigator once said he feared no voyage, however distant and deadly, for the same gull always met him without fail three days before land was sighted. With such a guide as Star-spray he could not waver. And of course the star sailed with him.

The fair folk know voices carry in water. Like a child, she laughs in the hidden valley’s falls, so like those for which she was named at her birth. Like a woman, she moans in the sea-caves of the Havens, sings and sobs in each tumbling wave. They hear her and feel a longing for far-off lands, for grey mists and birds’ shrieking, for love once lost thought never to be regained.

When storms blow in and cover the sky in the fishing villages, women weaving nets have heard her calling for her sons. She never finds them. But they temper their fear for their own babes, because children caught by the tide speak of being led home by such a voice, by a ray of pale light, by a hopping sandpiper.

On some summer nights without wind the sea lulls smooth as glass. Light bridges the dark water from the evening star’s ship to the grasses at the river’s mouth. You can see him alight then, despite the gods’ doom. She embraces him, cloaked in white feathers, a jewel at her throat and on his brow. At times she surges up from the reeds’ hidden nests; others, she floats down beside him like a wisp of cloud. On the banks of the undrowned world, they walk together. They meet there still.

wild-wandering by wood and glen

Elves poured out of the palace-fortress that was Menegroth, into the woods that the queen’s magic had made safe again. They were deep and green and dark, starlight trickling faintly down through furled leaves that had never seen another kind of light. The Elves sang, Daeron’s hands flew upon her pipes, and the wood grew more beautiful. Trees grew new bark over the scars made by enemy weapons. Moss covered bones that sank calmly into the thick loam, vanishing forever. Thingol wore the great sword Aranrúth and spoke still of danger, but it was danger’s absence that many felt, for the first time in this land complete and wonderful.

Daeron had her study back, which had briefly been converted into a storehouse for maps and missives. She drew pen to ink and then to paper and began again with a poem set to the notes of a zither. Thingol and Melian laughed and drew into each other’s arms in the beech grove when she played it, as though reeled by a thread.

There was only one restless soul in this new paradise.

“Come away with me,” Lúthien whispered as Daeron packed up her instrument.

Holiday gift fic for @polutrope! Three little moments ft. fem!Daeron/Lúthien | Read here on AO3

elvenkings

Afterwards, they went back. No tale contains this part: no one set it down. Few set out: Oropher, his tall, gangly son, and a handful of others. A small cluster of green shoots. Spring was returning to the forest, and it smelled sweet, like unfurling leaves and old rot melting. They were very careful. They moved and slept in the trees, wishing their foliage fuller and missing Melian’s temperate cradle. But at the rushing Esgalduin, before Menegroth’s bashed-in mouth, there were no boughs to make the going safer.

“Finrod’s brother,” one said, weeping, “wished his mortal’s beauty to live on unmarred in his memory.”

Oropher looked searchingly at his son. Should we not have come back? the look asked. Should I not have brought you back?

Thranduil shook his head. He was serious-faced, with an edge of temper and a merry wit that darted free at times like a bird startled from a branch. No humor glinted in his gaze now. He was named for the spring, but perhaps it had been this kind of spring. “We had to,” he said simply. “Pass me a lantern:” and he crossed the stone bridge and went inside.