Home's Tale by Haeron

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Chapter 11

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The clock ticked down, one second at a time, and if the night of the festival (now an uncomfortable memory from days passed but a memory all the same) had seen me become detached from the flow of time, well, the day I went apple picking with the kindly women saw me become wickedly attuned to it. I pulled the fruit from the branches and tested their firmness in my hands; an oddly cathartic experience with the promise of drink and dessert at the end of it to boot.

 

Time, my new friend, was counting down to something grand and terrible, a crescendo of sorts and I could feel it in all my being. I would create something awful, horrific, and it was hard to concentrate on picking the greenest and shiniest applies from the orchards when possessed of this grim foresight of the destruction one was about to bring. I could feel the barbed words forming in my gut already and found myself rehearsing the dire speech as we walked, baskets on our arms, along the lines and rows of rosy apple trees.

 

The elder elleth, recovered at last from her festival shenanigans, walked beside me and remarked how much better I seemed in and of myself. I nodded and accepted her compliment finely, with a calmness and sincerity I knew to be false and yet... it manifested so naturally. I shivered when she looked briefly away but restored myself to absolute composure when she began to tell me of her husband.

 

It was a tale I had never heard before and the longing in her voice as she told me of how he was away with a small group of other Gondolindrim seized my heart. I asked when he would be back and she told me soon, and grinned when I linked my arm with hers. She was a wise old thing who offered me a friendship I utterly did not deserve, but I will admit my selfishness and say I am glad, even so, for otherwise and without it I would long have been lost to madness.

 

Our apple picking efforts rather faltered then and we became swept up in conversation. The ticking and tocking was ever present in the back of my head, yes, but I was gripped, as I have mentioned, in the fist of icy coolness. It was inevitable, this thing that was to happen, and the finality of the word and its meaning was reassuring in the bleakest possible way; it meant there was no return from here.

 

There was a comfort in that, somehow, and in how the elleth kept me distracted from thinking too deeply with her tales.

 

Of Tuor and Idril she told me the most wonderfully romantic stories, I bent occasionally to pick up the ripe, unbruised fruits from the leafy ground but listened contently. Of Eärendil she spoke too, and not the stories of legend and fate that cover the pages of history books but instead the anecdotes of his younger years spent toddling after his father’s shadow or into his mother’s wide embrace. The stories were delightful and sated the scholar in me along with the humble servant of the bloodline I was and ever am, and in turn I told her of similar tales of the twins and she laughed at how similar and daft they three were. When I heard of how Eärendil had gotten himself stuck in the helm of his father I could not mask my amusement and the elder looked at me strangely until I explained how Elladan had done much the same thing -- twice. Some things were passed along through the family no matter the generation, it would seem, and we laughed together.

 

She asked of Arwen delicately and linked our arms tighter seeing my face cloud for a moment. I would not speak of her future or ultimate fate, such topics were still too tender to give voice to, but I spoke of Arwen come to bloom and become our beautiful Evenstar of unmatched radiance, of how she rolled up her sleeves to catch frogs and fish in the river with her brothers, how she might scale the trees in her mother’s garden and throw pebbles at my window and greet me from the very top branch with an energetic wave, how we had danced at the celebration of her wedding and said our farewells. The elder listened, stroking delicate fingers over a small, unripe apple and meeting my eyes always.

 

‘You loved her,’ she said. The sun cast patterns through the leaves on the tree branches and we walked a speckled path of yellow and green.

 

‘As a child of my own, as you must have loved Eärendil.’

 

‘True, I did, very much so.’

 

So went our conversation for a time, spinning the threads of the past, she indulging my penchant for recalling the ember days of Imladrian splendour and I listening eagerly to her tales of her husband, and so proud was she of him. He and the others from New Gondolin had sojourned to the forest kingdom to visit newly landed kin and kith and the elleth laughed to see the grimace on my face when she told me there’d more than likely be a festival for their homecoming.

 

‘Ah, do I spy our boys in the distance there?’ she said, looking past me and shielding her eyes from the sun with a long hand. I looked too and indeed it seemed as though the riding party had stopped for a spot of lunch upon one of the orchard hills; there were a number of horses and elves kitted out for a run along the fields and over the low hedgerows. I wished they hadn’t come to pause here, I wished I did not see Glorfindel and Ecthelion dismounting together maintaining rapturous conversation. But you should know I was past most basic envy then, as impossible as it might seem to you, the bonfire had burned the last of it; I hurt and felt only cold regret, as though our doom had already come to pass. ‘Shall we walk up to them?’

 

‘No,’ saidI.‘No, we shall let them have their afternoon picnic in peace.’

 

The elder looked at me, she raised a brow and only raised it further when I smiled to try and allay her suspicions. There was no need, she read me as an open book and I had not the strength to mask it from her -- oh, how she reminded me of Elrond in those moments, and I shuddered to think what Elrond might think if he could see me now.

 

‘Fairly spoken, Erestor,’

 

We should have walked on along the path littered with fallen fruit and brave little jackdaws pecking at the overripe fallings, but as it was we lingered overlong. Ecthelion and Glorfindel were but barely distinguishable shapes cresting the hill, but defined enough that we might discern their actions. The Fountain Lord pulled my husband into a hug, a warm and fierce thing that lasted plenty long enough and went on beyond any normal affectionate count. My throat dried; was it an embrace on consolation or of promise? I swallowed futilely and watched, devoid of hope at either thought being true, and the elder - I felt her watching it too, by my side, neither of us daring break the fragile silence that rested like thin glass above our heads.

 

It’s all ending, isn’t it?

 

I wondered if he’d catch that thought, or if his mind would be too clouded with... other things for it to even register.

 

Where are we?

 

‘Come,’ she said, tugging my arm a little. ‘Let’s turn in our bounties and see about fetching you some of the tart or, even better, some of the ale.’

 

It was a sound idea. I would drink and eat and muse over what was to happen, for this was it, I was quite sure. It was to be the end of all, one way or the other and I could not stop myself though my soul cried not to be sundered, not to be broken apart!

 

This is it. It happens tonight.