Lockdown Image Instadrabbling by Lindariel

The sound in this gorge was deafening for such a small volume of water. The river cascaded down sheer vertical walls from one improbable flat shelf to another, louder than all the fountains of Tirion at once, greater than the sea at Nevrast. Finrod's guides did not seem to notice. One pointed past the vertical walls, upriver. "There, my lord," she said. "On the eastern bank between the first and second cataracts."

Eager to see the caverns of Narog, Finrod pressed on. If the riverbed were any indication, Aulë would be proud to see what his children had wrought here.

Celeborn reached for one of the jars in the perfume cabinet. Instead of the resin tears he expected to encounter, the jar gave off the smell of rabbit glue. Frowning, he reached for the powdered charcoal only to find iron filings. That red powder was some kind of ground rock, not crushed rose petals. And as for the heavy blue lumps, he had no idea what they could be, but they were not the lavender he had expected when he reached for them. Some other kind of rock, probably.

"What are you looking for in my scribal cabinet?" asked Galadriel.

When he passed for the first time through the Doors of Night, Eärendil drank in the view of Valinor from on high. He looked down from the deck of Vingilótë eastward at something unexpected: a solitary dwelling. Here beneath him, in the lee of the Walls of the World, it stood on an eyot in a littoral of Ekkaia, the outer sea, looking ever away from the world and toward he knew not what.

As the ship passed over the Walls of the World, he saw undulating plains, deep forests, bright gardens, and nearby the Houses of Vairë and Mandos.

The path ended at one of the dry tributaries of the Mindeb, not yet a river at this latitude. Great rounded boulders strewn across the stream bed loomed over smoothed pits, each with its own clutch of smaller rounded rocks. She stopped for a moment, closing her eyes and reaching out her arms to scry the path.

Lúthien smiled. She saw the passing of Beren clear in her mind as an arrow, the living essence of his presence etched upon the rocks, fresh and verdant as their love. Swiftly she passed beside his trail and through the Pass of Anach.

"Watch, Varda!" Yavanna leapt into the air. She stretched out her arms longer, like branches growing in springtime. They budded, greening into leaves that unfurled and drew together just as moss grows to cover a flat rock. She swept them back and they became wings, finer than any bird's, folding to meet one another across her back. She flexed the wings and flew.

The Star Kindler nodded. Tracing Yavanna's form in the air with her hands, she drew a shape, sprinkled it with light from a vat, and flung it skyward. There against the firmament blazed a new constellation: Wilwarin.

Curufin put down the pencil and leaned back to look at the drawing through half-closed eyes. Celegorm's harsh criticism of his initial design had been hard to swallow, but Curufin had to admit that it looked a lot more like an actual bird now.

He could easily imagine there might come a day when no Eagle would aid his family. He began jotting notes about how this armor might give his brothers the ability to help themselves.

As he wrote, the engineer gave way to the designer. He sketched more, augmenting the pattern into a cartoon suitable for wall painting.

Idril gazed westward one last time, down the slope of Mount Taras toward the twilit sea. She was growing accustomed to this feeling of being uprooted. She was glad to set down her responsibility as her father's chatelaine at Vinyamar, but she was still going to miss the beauty the Noldor and Sindar had created there together.

Her cornflowers and roses had already taken to their new location and were growing happily, so her father had assured her. Perhaps she would even be happier to live in a place where the sea that took her mother did not sough incessantly.