The Place, the People by Himring

Chapter 1

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Turgon found he did not like Tirion as much as he thought he would.

He had emerged from the Halls of Mandos with a long list of all his errors and mistakes, some of which he was prepared to acknowledge in public—such as loving the works of his hands too much, for which he had become notorious, thanks to the writings of Pengolodh, which seemed to have gained surprising resonance and popularity—and some of which he was determined never ever to speak of until the people concerned themselves emerged from Mandos—which might be a long wait indeed.

It had seemed to him, though, that the one fundamental error that was so obvious it did not even need discussing was that he should never have agreed to leave Tirion or Valinor in the first place. After all, he had opposed Feanor, together with Fingolfin, at that fatal meeting in torchlight. He had built his longing for Tirion into the very foundations of Gondolin. He should never have allowed himself to deviate from that position. Everything else that had gone wrong was the consequence of his abandoning it, of giving in.

Tirion had been perfect. It was only Feanor and his faction who could find fault with it, and they had been proved a thousand times wrong by subsequent horrors. The rest of them must have all have been out of their minds to follow Feanor anywhere, let alone to Middle-earth. His mother had been the only one to retain her senses, his mother and his grandmother. Now they all knew better.

This was the mindset in which he emerged from Lorien.  He walked east along the winding road toward the Calacirya and Tuna. It was spring, the peach blossom was out, and all was well. He was starting anew; he would do better this time around.

But almost as soon as he set foot in Tirion, his feelings changed and that certainty of his began slipping away, no matter how stubbornly he tried to hold on to it, for the city did not feel like the place he thought he remembered. Perhaps it was the unaccustomed sunlight bounding blindingly white off the walls of the Mindon Eldalieva, sparkling garishly off diamond dust? Surely it was just that!

It could not be that he was homesick for Gondolin. He had made that mistake, but he was cured. He was cured of all that!

Because Elenwe had paid a terrible price for his mistakes, for his weakness in giving in to Feanor, for his misguided stubbornness that had dragged her to her death on the Ice, he was ashamed in her presence more than anyone else’s for the unease he tried to conceal. But Elenwe, who had returned a while before him and established herself in Tirion, welcoming him into her home with as little fuss as if he had just returned from a tour of routine administrational duties, in the old days—Elenwe seemed to understand him better than he did himself.

She had made friends with Ninde, a follower of Finrod who had once been the first victim of the Helcaraxe. He had taken that as a reproach to himself, except it emerged so clearly that it was intended as nothing of the sort that he could no longer ignore that fact.

‘I find Ninde easy to talk to,’ said Elenwe, shrugging.

‘I would quite have liked to see Gondolin,’ said Elenwe, a little wistfully.

And eventually, after he had been struggling for a while and dancing around the subject, she said to him: ‘You were as restless in Tirion as anyone, my dear. You found it easier to blame your restlessness on the strife with Feanor at the time—and certainly all those quarrels sometimes made the walls of Tirion seem too narrow to hold in all that boiling anger—because you did not want to know. But I think you might have less difficulty in settling down now, if you allowed yourself to remember. Tirion was not perfect—not for you, either. And it is not now.’

She looked at him thoughtfully.

‘And you know what? That’s all right. As long as you find a way to live with it.’

She kissed him gently on the cheek.