Luthien's Choice by Grundy

Chapter 1

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Luthien looked up, meeting Namo’s gaze easily.

One part of her had only once before known anything so different, almost alien, and was whimpering at being in the presence of something so beyond itself.  Another part of her recognized kin and felt it had come home. 

She could let it stand at that. She could leave this place at any time, free to return to the body she had forsaken. Or equally free to walk living from the Halls, to take up her abode in the land of her people- both her peoples. No more wondering where she belonged, no more whispers, no more questions. A half-maia, half-elf might not be a curiosity at all in Aman. Perhaps there were many like her.

But.

She would always wonder, if she choose that, what she had given up. What might have been. 

Beren.

Finrod.

If she left now, whether to Doriath or to Valimar - as Namo expected her to do, as he wanted her to do - their suffering and trials would have all been for naught. 

Unacceptable.

She gazed back at him, steady and unafraid. She had no need for fear, not here. She is not talking to the Judge, she is talking to her uncle.

“No.”

Reality whirled and danced around her, the song unfurling in a new and unforeseen direction. She could feel just as he could. The world has changed, and it is up to her to set its new shape.

“I will go back. With my mate. And when he comes to the end of his natural span in Arda, I will go with him then also. We will not be parted.”

She paused. Something in the music was still expectant, there were words yet to be spoken. Oh, of course. 

“You must return Finderato to his kin in Aman. Without delay. He had no part in Kinslaying, and if it is rebellion to fight the Enemy, than I am no less a rebel than he is. My cousin has surely missed her son these many years.”

A cousin she would never meet, she realized. Her uncle did not need to tell her the price of her choice. She could feel it in her bones - her no longer elven bones. She has chosen, for better or for ill. She is now of her mother’s kind, for her father’s people were bound to Arda and would not have been able to follow Beren beyond it.

“There is more, child.”

Namo’s voice is like none she has ever heard before, perhaps because it is not entirely meant for ears. It comes from the depths of the earth and the mists of the highest peaks all at once, from both the beginning of time and its end. 

“This choice will fall to all in your line as well. Each in their turn will decide their kindred.”

Or not decide, Luthien thought impishly. There may come one who refuses to pick one option only, and in so doing forge a new choice. 

“Be that as it may. I have chosen my mate, and I will not be parted from him.”

That is all I have chosen. My son will be elven and ainurin and mortal, and he will have the freedom to decide for himself what that means.