And in spring be reborn by Calendille

And in spring be reborn

Read And in spring be reborn

 

 

I was born in spring and died in winter. Had I been a character in my mother’s fairytales, I would have flowered back to life once the snow cleared; but Beleriand in its last throws of agony was but a long lament, and in tragedies heroes remain dead.

Was I a hero? As I walked alone and bereft of light in the Halls of Mandos, I wondered. I had died an old man by the count of men, a child by that of elves, and yet carried many names: Heir of Thingol, King of Elves, the Fair; but there were some here who whispered others when they looked upon me.

The Greedy.

The Reckless.

The Foolish.

Dior the Foolish, he who had believed he could hold a Silmaril and live happily ever after.

I do not know for how long I wandered the Halls. To some, they brought welcome peace for self-reflection; to me who had been attuned to the harmonies of Beleriand, they were chokingly empty. I wandered under grey arches and past colorless tapestries without seeing them and recognized myself in faded craftsmen with idle hands and voiceless singers silenced by the echoless halls.

When I walked out, winter threatened and my heart still bled from the sword of kinslayers; I was alive, but barren as if my soul were still covered by snow.

 

***

 

Valinor rang as empty as the Halls.

To Alqualondë I drifted, where I was welcomed by kin unknown. Their lips formed the name of an Elwë that wasn’t the grandfather I knew, and their Beleriand had been dark under the stars; the sea crashed in the background, deafening always.

Alqualondë I left, knowing not where I should go. I covered the raven-hair I inherited from my mother with a rough spun cloak and disappeared, seeking the heart of a land unknown to me.

Beleriand had sang. Her waterfall had been chorus of crystal upon rocks, her forests brimming with tales of nightingales and spirits long dead but not departed. Valinor was only it; everywhere I wandered, and nowhere found the welcoming echoes of my sunken home, until I sought one of the primal woods falling under the patronage of Oromë. I had been warned not to go there, as shadows of broken things released from Mandos but not from the vigilance of the Valar made home in the green shadows and tangles of roots; feral things that could not be healed and were left to their own devices to hunt and feed with their teeth from the bloodied corpses of beasts.

I was reminded, faintly, of the woods of Nan Elmoth. I had wandered there only once in search of the remnants of Grand-Mother’s tales, hoping, perhaps, that she had not entirely deserted Doriath, but only retreated to where she had met Elu Thingol. I had found only shadows, wisps and semi sentients things born of Eöl’s witchcraft, weeping for their departed master and his lost family. It had chilled me to the bones, that ancient feeling of sorrow and faint threat that kept trespassers at bay.

Would Eöl be one of the sorry souls reembodied here to wander in misery? Or was I reminded of Nan Elmoth only because I craved the lands of my birth?

I hovered at the edge of the woods as the Moon and Sun rose and set, and in my hesitations discovered how little I knew of myself: was I a broken thing? Did I believe myself so irrevocably damaged and unworthy that I must banish myself from the society of elves, and dwell in darkness as Eöl had?

 

***

 

I had lingered for a full cycle of the moon when the first warning appeared: crosses engraved into the bark of gnarled trees I often sat under, filed with blood-red sap that stuck to my fingers like Celegorm’s blood had stuck to my alabaster skin. He had gurgled helplessly at my feet as I watched with detached coldness, one tear of his blood sliding down my cheek. In this cold detachment I had not felt his brother Curufin come upon me with the scream of an enraged beast.

I walked back to the edge of the forest, sickened to the core.

And yet I did not leave.

Someone had marked the trees, and I suddenly felt crushing loneliness, for I had not spoken to anyone since I fled Alqualondë. Whoever was there must be as miserable and despicable as the failed king I was, if not worse, and I found that thought oddly comforting: that whoever wished to exclude me from Oromë’s woods could not afford to look down on me.

 

***

 

I hovered for some nights until I summoned the courage to disappear into the forest – though I did not get far until the trees started to actively oppose me. Roots would appear in front of my ankles, branches clawed at my cloak, disconcerting shadows clouded the distance. A deep mist filled the space between ageless trees until I could no more make north from south, and after one last stumble in thorny undergrowth, I found myself at the edge of the forest.

“Go back to your people, son of the nightingale. You do not belong here.”

I could not recognize the voice. It bounced against trunks and through the filters of half decayed leaves sounded like the angry whispers of the errand spirits mother had warned me about.

“This is not for you to decide,” I said, Melian’s power rolling on my tongue, trying to find footage in the heart of whoever listened.

Magic ran in my blood from birth, but mine was a capricious thing, and a dry, angry laugh met my attempt.

“Tell me then, little bird: what have you done to deserve a place amongst us?”

I thought of Celegorm’s blood on my skin, of my wife’s throat cut open in my children’s nursery, and told the forest spirit or whatever it was of my deeds; of the killing I committed, of the greed that had led Doriath to its finale demise. I pilled up my crimes at the feet of those ancient trees as I had pilled them for the Judge’s eyes to dissect.

And was met with a long silence, only broken by the occasional, far away shriek of a lone bird.

“You do not belong here,” the voice said, so long in coming I had almost believed it gone. “This is a place for genuine murderers, not foolish children.”

“I have blood on my hands. Eldar blood.”

“The blood of he who convinced his brothers to attack your people. I hear no crime.”

“Who was it who, in pride and grief, refused to return the Silmaril? No need would they have had for war, had I been wiser!”

“Wiser princes doomed themselves for those jewels, little bird. Go back to your family.”

I did not, and remained at the edge of the woods. My reserves of food dwindled to nothing, until even the last crumbs of Lembas were gone.

I did not consider turning back. What for? I was sick of being surrounded by emptiness. I remembered the tales of the Avari about those who refused the calls from the West and wandered, disembodied, to live in the hearts of trees, flow with rivers and become one with the land, and though I despised Valinor, I thought that, perhaps, if I shed the raiment of my flesh, I would hear it as I had heard Beleriand.

Whoever the forest guardian was, he saw me as I remained, and I woke up one morning with nuts and wrinkly apples pilled under a tree. I ate with ravenous hunger; above me, tiny dots of fresh green heralded spring.

 

***

 

“Why did you keep the jewel?”

I had pondered over this, of course, while I was still a resident of Mandos, and the answer was both simple and: not.

The jewel had been beautiful.

Simple as that.

And yet not.

For the beauty of the Silmaril had not been that of a simple jewel. Doriath, while Melian ruled, had been magical. In her presence sunlight was as Laurelin reborn, and Tilion’s arrows living memories of Telperion. Flowers grew under her feet; the mist of dawn was as the dust of pearls. Her death had left Doriath bereft of songs. Grieving, decaying even, as the forest mourned and returned to a mundane state devoid of divinity.

My Maiarin blood had felt Doriath diminish as one feels thirst and hunger. Yet when the Silmaril had been laid upon my naked palms, my heart had been sated, for in it shone still the mirages of past glories, and for a time Doriath breathed again, the long agony of Autumn halted as a false Spring grew around us.

An illusion, of course. The Sons of Fire had descended into the glittering caves, and their swords struck eternal winter into the heart of Melian’s woods.

All of this I told to the forest guardian, with words inadequate, for there is nothing the tongue can do to resurrect the past; to paint and to sculpt and to talk and to make music for a hundred instruments would never suffice to give life back to the simplest of memory, to the content of the heart upon sunrise, to the sensation of dew on frail fingers. And so my tale seemed to me like a poor rendition of what laid wide awake under my skin.

 

***

 

“Why are you still there?”

I toyed with the guardian’s question.

“I am a murderer.”

A kinslayer, soiled by the life of another. The Judge must have deemed me innocent enough to let me go, but while I did no deny the legitimacy of the Valar, I did not feel their justice absolved me. As if their pardon had washed the blood off my hand but left small, barely noticeable crusts under my nails.

“You were defending yourself. Your realm. Your family,” the forest whispered back at me.

“They would not have needed defending, had I been a better king. My mother would have found a way.”

My mother; heavenly Luthien, cloaked in glorious songs. She had been light: the joy of Doriath, the hope that ultimately gave birth to the last great army of the free people of Beleriand, the ancestor of their final saviors; and I, I had been trapped in the long shadow of such glorious star. By ruse and charm and art she had defeated the monsters; those clad in elven garments first, the infamous Fëanorian; the dark sorcerer upon the isle of wolves next; and at the end, the highest evil of Arda.

Had I been her, I would have saved Doriath, and my hands would be clean.

“And yet,” the guardian says, “I would take your sword to my heart a thousand-time, little bird, rather than deliver it to her once more.”

 

***

 

“You need not be there. Alone.”

“I am not alone.”

I knew better than to look into the forest. Whoever the guardian was, he would not let me see him. Yet I felt like he was never far. I was left standing precariously at the edge of two worlds, and he was barring me from entering that of the forever lost; for that I did not know if I resented him, or felt an odd sense of relief.

“Why will you not let me in?” I asked at least.

I sat under a birch tree at the edge of the forest. His bone-white branches stood out sharply against a perfect blue sky, bejeweled with innumerable leaves, and swayed gently in the wind.

“You do not belong here.”

“Why are you so sure of that?”

“Because,” the guardian said, his voice oddly free of distortion, “because I forgave you a long time ago, little bird.”

I rose from the roots of the birch tree. The guardian stood under the naked branches of a great oak, and the Sun through the swaying branches dappled his fair hair with gold. Those eyes I remembered, blue and glazed over by wrath, fear and death; now they were merely blue as the sky, free of pain, looking at me with quiet acceptance.

And at least, as I looked into Celegorm’s eyes and received the gift of his smile, Valinor started to sing.