Drabbles: The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales by Zdenka

Driftwood

Celebrimbor sees the ruin of Ost-in-Edhil. (Warning for aftermath of violence.)

The workings of the mind are strange, Celebrimbor thinks. He sees his people slain, their bodies scattered, and cannot weep. He catches glimpses, as Annatar’s orcs drag him by, of a hand clutching a broken sword, open eyes staring upward, braids of dark hair trailing in the dust. It is too much, bringing him past sorrow into numbness. Then he sees an apprentice’s half-finished gold chain, with flawed technique Celebrimbor had thought there was time to correct, and Uithel’s metal-working tools, which she always tended so meticulously, thrown to the ground and broken; and suddenly his eyes sting with tears.

Chapter End Notes

Written for B2MeM 2013; edited and posted for Huinare’s June of Doom & Gloom 2014.

Prompt from B2MeM 2013: People of the Jewel-smiths (Day Thirteen):

“In Eregion the craftsmen of the Gwaith-i-Mírdain, the People of the Jewel-smiths, surpassed in cunning all that have ever wrought, save only Fëanor himself; and indeed greatest in skill among them was Celebrimbor, son of Curufin, who was estranged from his father and remained in Nargothrond when Celegorm and Curufin were driven forth, as is told in the Quenta Silmarillion.”

(from The Silmarillion, “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age”)