The Messengers of Celegorm by Zdenka

Chapter 1

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1. In the Deep Places (Roots)

Below the roots of the earth, Feredwen is imprisoned by locks and enchantment. The weight of the rock above seems to press down on her. Melian’s mercy (or prudence, thinking of her daughter’s safety) spared their lives; Feredwen is not sure she is grateful.

The House of Fëanor protects its own, she tells herself. She and her comrades will not be abandoned. But if it is her fate to die, she wishes it may be under stars or sunlight, with weapons in her hand.

(She is not entirely sorry when she learns that Thingol died deep in his own caverns.)

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2. The King’s Ire (Trunk)

Feredwen is determined to be unimpressed by Menegroth, but she privately admits it has a certain wild beauty. The guards lead Celegorm’s messengers past columns carved like the trunks of trees, gleaming golden lanterns, stone dragons that seem to writhe in the torchlight. She notes the fortifications, their weapons and armor. The deeper they go into the caverns, the more her back prickles.

They stand beneath a canopy of jeweled leaves in Thingol’s hall and deliver their message. “To marry a prince of the House of Fëanor is an honor,” Magor says stoutly in the face of Thingol’s blazing anger.

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3. Release (Bark)

“Lúthien has returned. You are to be released.”

How, and why? What has happened in Nargothrond? Feredwen is desperate for news but will not give them the satisfaction of asking.

“The King ordered me to bring you out of Doriath by the shortest way.” Thingol’s captain rests his hand on his sword-hilt, and Feredwen has no doubt that he would prefer to send them to Mandos. She occupies the journey by constructing useless plans to snatch a weapon and kill the guards. She knows they would not escape, not here where Melian’s power runs beneath the bark of every tree.

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4. Return (Sap)

They pass through Melian’s Girdle, and Doriath is fenced against them. “Do not return,” Thingol’s captain says brusquely, “or you will find no mercy.”

But they do return, when Thingol’s death and the waning of Melian’s magic have sapped Doriath’s strength. They hunt like Celegorm’s hounds through the woods of Neldoreth and the halls of Menegroth, loosing deadly arrows among living trees and trees of stone.

(Two of them return. Magor dies in the Nirnaeth Arnoediad.)

Menegroth is a memory of darkness and light, prison and battlefield and shining lamps.

(Daradir dies on Feredwen’s sword at the Havens of Sirion.)

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5. Memory (Branch)

Sometimes Feredwen considers the branching possibilities of fate. If Thingol’s people had sent them south and west rather than north and east–- if they had gone to Nargothrond rather than Himring-- Would Daradir and Magor have lived? Or would they all have perished in dragonfire?

Would she have knelt before Celebrimbor and asked to serve him as she did much later in Eregion? Or would she have turned her back on him and ridden away? She does not think she could have forsaken the sons of Fëanor while they lived.

She makes jewels for Fëanor’s grandson and remembers the fallen.

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6. The Northward Road (Leaves)

Feredwen watches fallen leaves drift southward in the currents of the Esgalduin as they consider which way they should go.

“Should we aim for Nargothrond?” Daradir asks. “Lord Celegorm sent us, and he expects our return.”

“How long would it take to circle around Doriath?” Feredwen objects. “We don’t know what’s been happening. If we go north through Himlad–”

They look at Magor to settle the matter. “We need news and supplies,” he says. “We go north.” And when they reach the fortress of Himring, Celegorm and Curufin are there, so it must have been the right decision after all.

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7. Walls of Stone (Twig)

Feredwen prefers to keep her hands occupied. She sits with a pile of straight twigs and a knife, stripping off the bark and turning them into arrow-shafts.

“What happened in Nargothrond?” one of Maedhros’s people asks curiously.

Feredwen hunches her shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“Weren’t you there?”

“I don’t know!” She stabs the twig too fiercely with her knife and ruins the half-formed arrow.

“The Oath,” Daradir says resignedly. “We were reminded that we are cursed.”

Feredwen thinks of leaves spinning in the Esgalduin, and that moment when perhaps they could have broken free from the current and did not.

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8. Fair They Wrought Us (Crown)

There was holly in Doriath, Feredwen remembers suddenly. They attacked in winter when the trees were bare, but here and there the holly upraised its stiff green leaves, and the berries were red like blood against the snow.

Here, holly is only holly. The jewel-smiths’ children laugh and crown themselves with living green. The flowers of Yavanna have faded, but inside the forge, flower, twig, and leaf blossom in silver and gold beneath Celebrimbor’s skilled hands.

Feredwen looks upward, to where the brightest of stars burns in the West. She cannot reach it, and that is a very great relief.

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Chapter End Notes

The part of Doriath south and east of the river Esgalduin was called the Forest of Region (from ereg, meaning holly), so I assume that holly grew there.

Title of the last drabble from something Legolas says in Hollin: “[T]he trees and the grass do not now remember them. Only I hear the stones lament them: deep they delved us, fair they wrought us, high they builded us; but they are gone.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, “The Ring Goes South”)