All Hues and Honeys by Dawn Felagund

The Ruin

For image instadrabbling, for the drawing of the castle against the mountains, this one isn't a fixed-length anything, much less a drabble. Caranthir returns to Formenos for the first time after reembodiment. A vignette.

The view was so familiar from afar that Carnistir's heart leaped like clipping the string on a balloon. His knuckles dug at his chest. It hurt, not so much the sudden forgetfulness of centuries--as though he were yet a boy coming home late from a hunt with his brothers--but the remembering, just as sudden, twice as sharp: murder and exile and betrayal and death. He doubled over with it upon rock-bitten knees.

The Light of the Trees was never strong here. The silver light eking over the mountains might have been Telperion's gloaming.

From afar and in such thin light, the wrack of Morgoth was not evident. Perhaps time's slow hands too had smoothed away the tumults of Finwë's contest with the Dark One, restoring the palatial fortress to its former splendor. There was that balloon-string feeling again: the certainty that, were he to pry back the gate and go inside, the halls would still redound with laughter. Carnistir crossed the plain, edging closer, watching for the moment when it changed, when home became a ruin and his past collapsed back upon him.

The moon rose over the shoulder of the mountain, just a bright spot at first. Caranthir stopped to watch it come fully into the sky until it stood bright and perilous as a scythe. He let his gaze drop back to Formenos, to his former home.

Coming here was always such a revel: the winnowing of their lives in Tirion to what could fit upon a pack saddle, the long journey, the bonfires that held the bitter nights at bay as he dozed in his mother's arms--or his brother's, or his father's--and tried to blink away sleep, not wanting to miss a--

He blinked now. Rána full-risen offered no balm to the imagination. There it was: the ruin. The halls tumbled into themselves the way a carcass left to the air shrinks into its own ribs. The towers slumped, wearied by what they had seen and could not forget. The iron gate adorned with his father's crest, wrenched on its hinges, and climbed all over with honeysuckle.