Through Sorrow to Find Joy by Dawn Felagund

Seasons

Tyelkormo's first winter outside of Valinor draws him to ponder the circle of the seasons and their meaning to one immortal. A series of four drabbles.

Tyelkormo plunged his hands against the door so hard that his bones hummed. High in the trees the last of the streamers from the Gates of Summer were swiped by a breeze and disappeared against the bold light of Laurelin.

Yes, it was Valinor; yes, it was perpetual summer here, but Tyelkormo felt a vestigial leap in his blood at the change-of-season, as though his marrow would surge unto bursting its bone-lock and scatter him upon the breeze. He turned and turned and turned upon green grass, swathed in golden light, palms upturned, embracing the sky. He wished for it.

The leaves fell in Formenos and the festivals took their old shapes but the lanternlight, the leaping shadows of the dancers, the jolt of cold air on wine-fevered flesh would not rouse Tyelkormo.

The leaves fell and made a sharp-scented bed amid the oaks and he spread himself thin upon it. "You will not pass like them," Nelyo reassured him, thinking he feared their deaths. "You are bound forever to this form."

The leaves fell and cloaked him in rainbow hues: scarlet and gold and purple for kings.

"That is it," he wept to the silver sky. "That is it."

Winter would be hard, they said, but life in Valinor had not prepared him for the brutality of the cold in the north. An ice storm had passed the night before, and in Telperion's zenith, the trees might have been wrought of silver, not of wood and flesh, like him.

He imagined Vána of the Springtide dancing among them. She exhaled a song, and the ice poured away.

He paused, took a twig upon his palm. Exhaled upon it.

A drop of water shivered at its tip, and his breathe steamed heavenward, dissipating, until all that was left were stars.

His sorrow should have lifted with the coming of spring, but it did not. He heard Nelyo whisper such to his mother as he passed, an inappropriately thin cloak upon his shoulders, out-of-doors.

Only silence hung amid the trees. Is this my fate, to persist while all else dies and lays sodden, barren? He returned to the oaks and lay upon the leaves there, soaked and shivering. He listened for the workings of the world but heard nothing.

Yet there was a tiny leaf, puckered shut like a fist, arisen from last year's leaves. Without a sound it sprang open.