The Dance of the Lights by Narya

Chapter 1

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The air was somehow thin out here, the scant light grey and quiet and gone too soon. Aredhel drew her knees up to her chin and pulled her fur-lined cloak tight, as though she could squeeze out the cold and dissolve the snarling ache in her stomach with the warmth her garments trapped. Salt wind licked her face. They were nearing thin ice, or else straying close to a breaking point, one of the jagged edges where great flat floes tore free from the frozen wastes and nudged one another out, out into the open sea. 

“Room for another?” 

She lifted her head and made herself smile, though the freezing air bit her nose and cheeks. “Always.” 

Egalmoth folded his long limbs into the space beside her. Behind them the wind hissed over the single sealskin she had rigged up as shelter, spraying ice-dust over its lip. He didn't ask how the hunt had gone. Instead he held out his arms and folded her against his side, and she pressed her cheek into the warm curve of his neck and closed her eyes. 

“I remember when I was taller than you,” she murmured. 

He laughed tiredly. “Not by much, and not for long.” 

The matted, oily fur of his collar prickled against her chin. “And when you used to steal my clothes.” 

“You started it! You didn't want to wear dresses; what was I to do, go prancing naked through the streets of Tirion?” 

She gave a soft snort. “And when we'd swapped, our own mothers could barely tell us apart.” Her smile faded, and she caught her lip between her teeth, remembering Anairë's face as she and her brothers had walked away. She was glad her mother couldn't see her now.

The sparse sounds of their makeshift camp echoed through the steel-cold night. The wind dropped to a scraping whisper like the sharpening of a knife – and then the air shifted and crackled, its taste a metallic sting in her mouth. Voices gasped and called across the snow. She opened her eyes and sat up – and cried out in amazement. 

Light flared on the horizon. A thin green arc stretched and rose in the sky, trailing sheets of shimmering colour that hung and swayed like bolts of shot silk. Violet bled into seafoam blue; darts of white shot through soft, deep pink. It glowed and faded and then shone again, drifting through the borderland between ice and stars as though blown by some unseen spirit, rippling, slanting, folding, breaking into wild, irregular curves and deep, jewel-bright pools, opening out over the heavens like the petals of some great spectral flower. 

Aredhel glanced away for a moment to study Egalmoth's face. The colours kissed the elegant curve of his cheekbones, and in the ethereal glow his silver eyes burned with a fire that would have made her cousins quail. Gently she slipped her hand into his, and he squeezed it, but did not take his gaze from the ghostly patterns weaving their way through the sky. 

She put her hunger and her memories from her mind, and she leaned against him, content for now to watch the dance of the lights.