Thank you! ^_^

Thank you! You know me and creation myths. I think way too much about this stuff and was glad to channel it into fiction for once!

(Sorry that it has taken me so long to reply to your comment, which I read and appreciated very much when you left it!)

I do LOVE lighthouses. I was talking about lighthouses with (to??) Bobby this morning, how they make me feel something very like the Elven sea-longing even just to think of them. I think what comes through, rereading with a more critical eye now that the drabble is a few weeks old, is exactly what I love about lighthouses: their liminal place at the cusp of human habitation, beckoning back those who have gone to that most forbidding of places, the sea.

Elwing as a lighthouse keeper has also been niggling at my imagination for a while now too! :D

Thank you so much for reading and commenting--as always! <3

Aww, thanks! She knows she should not want to journey north with him. But she does. Oh does she. And for all the "wrong" reasons too. (She is not thinking of what she will learn of gemcraft! :^)))

Thank you for reading and commenting! I'm sorry it took so long to repond! ^_^

Yes, exactly! I love creation myths--so weird, teeming with symbolism, and eerily parallel with scientific theories of cosmogony--and so was *very* much drawing from mythic archetypes here. The Fall archetype isn't one I deliberately put in there, but you're totally right that it's there (and one that I find very Tolkienish too!)

Thank you! I wanted something evocative of that clammy, damp feeling of stone but also pale and maybe a little luminous ... I'm glad you noted this particular modifier because I liked it myself! :D

Thank you! A bit of humanity reaches through the distance and the animalistic aloofness--or that's what I was going for, so it's good to see it came through for you! :D 100 words is *really* constricting!

I think it was! I am the rare Feanatic who thinks she should have given the damned thing back but also has sympathy for Elwing (perhaps triggered by my recognition that Earendil doesn't bear *nearly* the scorn from fandom as Elwing does and blossoming there into something like empathy for the situation she was in). I tend to see her as pushed into a pretty tough situation for someone so very young (and already traumatized too). She's really a fascinating character to me!

Anyway! I did not mean this to turn into a thesis on how I see Elwing. ^_^ Thank you for taking a chance on a drabble about a character not-your-favorite and leaving a comment!

Yes, she ain't wanting to learn gemcraft from him ... ;^)))

Thank you! The idea of Elwing as a lighthouse keeper (in Valinor, after Earendil goes on Silmaril duty in Vingilote) has been picking at the edge of my imagination for *months* now, and this was a first overture into looking at how that might have come to pass.

Thanks for reading and commenting! <3

I just learned about it myself! As the endnotes say, I heard about it on "The Great British Baking Show" and looked it up to learn more.

The windfalls were much more comfortable territory: gathering wild windfall apples to make cider or jelly is an autumn ritual here. I really liked the parallels and contrasts between them, in part because the marula felt distant enough to belong more in Valinor versus the comfortable and imperfect world of windfalls.

(Never mind Maedhros himself as a sort of windfall! XD)

Thanks for reading and commenting! ^_^

Thank you! I had to go back and reread it because I'm the world's worst author who cannot even remember what happens in her own frickin stories ... I think I probably did imagine Formenos! In the Felakverse, he spends A LOT of time there (cementing the loyalty of the Northern Noldor compared to Fingolfin and accounting for his followers after the Darkening). So yeah. Let's go with Formenos! :D

Thanks! That's my lighthouse fixation at work there. Canonical possibility of including a lighthouse = There will definitely be a lighthouse :D

I researched it too before writing this! It's interesting because I liked the "Marula" ficlet so much more that I almost didn't include "Windfall," but the comments so far seem to prefer "Windfall" ... definitely a reminder about why not to listen to that little negative voice that gets louder when it comes time to post! :D

As far as I know the "marula" liquor does not exist here, but I heard about it on "The Great British Baking Show," and I loved the "urban legend" feel to it and it seemed a perfect fit for what I was trying to do here. :D

Thanks for reading and commenting, Lyra! (And yeah, ordinary things--going to the movies, eating breakfast at a diner counter--seem part of another world already.)

Thank you! ^_^

Aww, Ziggy, I'm sorry for the loss of your brother too. This has just been an awful year for deaths already (covid aside!) Many fandom people have lost close family due to non-virus-related causes, on top of the stress of living during a pandemic.

Thank you for reading and, always, for you kind comments. <3

I guess we have to give him credit that he wasn't talking about metallurgy ... :^))))

Thank you! I really enjoy this and all the prompts you gave me yesterday. You were definitely the prompting superstar!

Thank you! I've been writing Pengolodh for a long time (he is also a major subject of my academic work). At first, when I got the prompt ("meeting or speaking with a son of Feanor"), I didn't know that I could do it, not because the prompt was hard but because I'd actually written several meetings with Feanorions and Pengolodh already and didn't want to repeat (or contradict!) myself. Sirion seemed a nice solution to that (all other meetings had been before Turgon's people went to Gondolin).

Same with the twins; I researched them fairly recently for a biography, and Tolkien gives us very little about them and never seems to have settled on a characterization. I like to imagine that's because the historians (i.e., mostly Pengolodh) just didn't know!