Look, It's Spring by StarSpray

Chapter 1

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It was spring when she woke. The air was filled with the scent of wildflowers and fresh grass and damp earth, and with the sound of running water and birdsong, and other sweet voices singing. For a moment Nimloth lay with her eyes closed, soaking it all up and just breathing. Almost she could imagine she was back in Ossiriand, listening to Lanthir Lamath, and Lúthien singing to the children nearby…

But Lúthien was dead, and she’d not been back to Ossiriand since Dior had taken up Thingol’s crown. And when her eyes had last been open it had been winter in Doriath, and the smell of niphredil had been replaced by the tangy bitterness of blood.

Oh. Of course.

She had died.

Funny, though—she couldn’t remember the Halls of Mandos; it felt like she’d been only sleeping. Nimloth opened her eyes to the draping vines and flowering branches that made up the bower that held her and the soft pillows on which she lay. The flowers were pale and fragrant, but unfamiliar. But the sky beyond them was the same blue, and when she sat up Nimloth spotted a bluebird flitting away from a nearby bush.

This was Lórien, then, the garden of Valinor that had inspired the halls of Menegroth far away across the sea. Nimloth had fallen beneath beaches carved of stone, and now she woke beneath the living boughs after which they had been modeled.

Nimloth rose and took a few steps into the sunlight. The breeze picked up, blowing her hair into her eyes and mouth, and sending flower petals swirling about her feet. The singers somewhere in the trees reached a crescendo before fading away into silence, leaving Nimloth alone with only the birds and the water. A few paths wound away through the trees in different directions, arcing softly over streams and rivulets that sparkled in the dappled sunlight that danced over the ground with the breeze.

Her body felt strange. Clumsy and stiff, like new boots that needed broken in. When Nimloth looked at her hands and arms, she found no sign of old scars, from knives and various mishaps in the forests, and one memorable scar she’d gotten from a particularly irritable badger. This body had no callouses, either. Her skin was smooth and soft as a newborn babe’s. This body had not raced Dior through the treetops, or danced by the Esgalduin in spring. It had not borne three children or fought for her home.

She had died in bloodstained Menegroth and woke again in flowering Lórien, and now she did not know what to do. Maybe if Dior were there…

No sooner had she thought Dior’s name than a nightingale flew out of the trees to land on a branch level with her head. As Nimloth looked at it, it hopped back and forth and trilled a short song, calling out to someone. I have found her! it sang, shrilly triumphant.

Someone else replied, a short burst of staccato whistles, and Nimloth turned to find a woman coming down the path, fleet-footed as Lúthien, with the same dark hair falling like feather-light shadows about her face. But Lúthien had never worn white, and anyway that was Nimloth’s own nose and mouth, and that was the Nauglamír on her breast, lacking the Silmaril but still beautiful beyond words—

Oh. Oh. “Elwing,” she gasped, the first word to come from these new lips. “Oh, my daughter—”

“Naneth!” Elwing’s smile was brighter than any jewel, her embrace warmer than the summer sun in Ossiriand. She smelled of fresh air and, faintly, of the sea. “Oh, I’ve missed you!”

There were so many questions—how had Elwing escaped Menegroth? What had happened to Eluréd and Elurín?—but they had all the time in the world, here, now.

Dior would come from Mandos or he wouldn’t. But Nimloth had never been one to pine. She was happy to leave the dark past where it was, and to step into this new life, to see what awaited her beyond the trees.

“Come,” she said, taking Elwing’s hands as the nightingale started singing again. “Show me what spring looks like in Valinor.”