Cradle of Stars by Dawn Felagund, Elleth

Cradle of Stars

I was still ill when the first exchange between the Noldor and the Teleri transpired. Eärwen had decided, it seemed, to renew the codependence of our people. Without me (but perhaps because of me?) she established contact with Arafinwë. A cart set out from Alqualondë with barrels of smoked fish and crates of fresh seaweed and rice; a convoy from Tirion brought tools, medicine, and workers. There must have been a point on the road where they passed each other. I would imagine hands raised in awkward greeting: the first rekindling of our long alliance.

It would be inaccurate to say that Eärwen and her love for me filled the space vacated by my children and husband. Rather, the love that had been long between us strengthened in the way that the hearing will sharpen with the dulling of sight, or a left hand becomes skilled in the absence of a right: You never stopped missing the absent but something new can arise that you never expected. But there reached a point where, instead of the blackness that had occluded my dreams of Irissë, I dreamed of Eärwen, of her pushing herself up each morning from the bed beside me to steadily go about her errands. Her body, wearied and weak, pushing forward because someone must. I felt the emptiness left inside her by the crossing of her children to the forbidden Outer Lands, and I will never deceive myself that I filled—or even could fill—that void, but I saw through her eyes as she looked upon me: a dull astonishment that I'd come to her. In the midst of everything, I'd come through the darkness to her. My gratitude and devotion that she'd once chosen me—at last, she understood.

How could I not, my first love? I wanted to ask, but even when I was strong enough to totter to the balcony for meals, so my room could be aired and the bedclothes changed, my tongue still lay leaden and silent in my mouth. She didn't say much either, although her strength was growing. She became possessed of a spare beauty—not the frail, breakable look she'd had when I'd first arrived in Alqualondë but the raw beauty of one who'd stripped away all that was unessential and founded her strength upon the remaining essence. Her hair, grown past her ears now, had a slight wave to it that it hadn't when the weight of its length pulled it straight. Her eyes no longer glittered with laughter but were deep with wisdom, like the sea.

When my people arrived in Alqualondë, I dressed to meet them on the beach where they were to be welcomed to the nightly feast that followed the fishermen's return to shore. But when I looked in the mirror, the transparency of my skin—the blue veins giving me a frostbitten pallor—terrified me to where I could hardly subject them to my grief. I removed the gown, put on my nightdress, and stayed in my room.

I heard them in the street as they went to the homes of their Telerin hosts. Their Noldorin accents awakened anew the absent space inside me.

Suddenly restless, I wandered to the balcony where Eärwen and I took our meals. The air—almost uncomfortably warm earlier in the day—had cooled considerably, and the collision of heat and cold was fomenting a storm over the sea to the south. I picked up a shawl Eärwen had discarded across the back of a chair and climbed down the stairs to the beach.

Distant lightning lit the dunes in silver light upon velvet shadow. My legs ached as I climbed them, slipping backward upon the sand, but I pushed forward, suddenly craving the sight of the sea that separated me from my children. And there it was, gnawing at the beach, silvery with starlight where the storm hadn't yet come; as black as the sky where the thunderclouds had already passed.

I slid down the other side, trying to slow my fall with hands but staggering when I reached the flat of the beach. I could see the husks of firewood from the feast and the tangle of footprints in the area around: my people and hers. I went to the verge of the sea and knelt to try to find the difference—the Noldorin larger and shod where the Teleri went barefoot—but I could not.

I rose and walked to the edge of the water. I dipped my hands in, imagining Irissë on the other side, putting her hands in the water while her brothers bickered over something petty about the camp. This was nothing I perceived—Irissë could have been far from the sea, with no thought of me, bickering with her brothers herself, even dead—how would I ever know?—but the image I allowed to grow in my mind was comforting nonetheless. I imagined how her story might go—how all their stories might go—told as an epic adventure in the swaying rhythm of a traditional Noldorin song, the kinds of songs that brought forth the memories of the Great Journey before there was time or care for paper and ink. A drowning: departed from Aman as my children, as the recipients of the blessings of the Valar, and arisen in the Outer Lands as venturers and kings.

It was my own story where I was lost. I still could not imagine in what form I would arise, if not foremost as their mother.

I rose and let the rising wind dry my hands. The storm was keeping to the sea, tumbling to cover the stars and turning the sea to a sheet of volcanic glass, except when the lightning flashed and revealed the waves grasping, grasping, as though to pull back something they had lost.

I was watching the storm when the kiss pressed my back between my shoulder blades. I stiffened even as a shiver ran through my body. There was the ache of absence inside me but, beside it, something new grown alive and strong. A body, addled by the tumults of a storm but suddenly kicking strong for the surface.

Eärwen's arms circled my waist. I felt her face press against my back and the thought came unbidden of the Noldorin tale of the cradle of stars, of the first venturer to dare to enter the unknown that was the sea.

I lifted my hands—cold and bluish though they were—and grasped hers. I meant it to be firm, unquestioning, but my body was still weak. I could only hope she felt the meaning in my touch.

I do, came her thought against mine. I do.

In her arms, I turned until I faced her. Never had her mind touched mine but, suddenly, there is was: something grown previously shaded and stunted by the years of our husbands and children, now stretching toward the feeble, unclouded light of the stars.

Behind me, the storm growled. A surge of water lapped over our ankles. Did it recede? It must have, for time paused for nothing, I now knew, but when she kissed

my mouth, awareness of the storm, of the sea passed from my mind.

Who guided whom up the beach to dry sand? I only felt it beneath my back, almost warm, as she lowered me to the ground. She knelt over me, her beauty stark in the lightning, then softened by the dark, as she drew her dress over her head. She was bare beneath—small breasts and a concave belly and a smooth silver triangle of hair. I clawed out of my nightgown, suddenly warm with desire for her.

Our hands found the places on the other's body that we'd long ago discovered, willfully forgotten, and only recently come to know again. The delight in the familiar and forgotten—of a memory drawn back from the abyss—drew a gasp that might have been joy from my lips that she answered with a sigh—almost laughter. Her thumb graced my nipple, drawing a different sort of gasp from me, before her hand slid lower, delving my wetness before touching me so that an arrow of ecstasy made me call her name to the stars.

When we at last lay spent in each other arms, the storm had passed. The stars were bright and the sea strangely calm, reflecting them in quivering perfection so that it seemed they must be born from its depths. Hand in hand, we rose and walked to the edge of the water and fearlessly passed forth. The movement of our bodies marred the illusion but the sea rose to meet us, to wrap us and keep us. Eärwen suddenly laughed and swooped a hand down into the water, to fling silver droplets against the sky.

And I dove down, arcing along the seafloor, pulling myself forward with the strongest strokes my feeble arms could muster, rising only when my lungs begged for air to find Eärwen waiting for me.

I arose as many things: a stateswoman and a leader of my people. Eärwen's lover and great friend. The mother of my children, always, though that chapter of my life was written, the ink dry and pages turned, and ever cherished. A reason for the survival and allegiance of the Noldorin and Telerin people, entirely witting or no.

Chapter End Notes

The art displayed in this chapter can also be found on Elleth's deviantArt, featuring all stock image credits.