Xenia and Philia by heget

Chapter 1

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In the darkness of Valinor, after the many acts of evil that destroyed that safe paradise -for it had not been the single murder and theft and the slaying of the Trees but the thousands of murders and the accompanying acts of betrayal and theft that ruined the sense of safety, of trust, of joy and love- that was when the Vanyar came to the blood-soaked beaches of Aman. They walked along the jewel-strewn sand to where the Teleri continued to wrap bodies in what little pale sailcloth survived, cheeks wet with tears and voices hoarse from lamenting and wailing. Few Teleri had ever seen Vanyar in the Treelight, for content had the two people to stick to their respective homes, with only the Noldor as intermediaries on the Pelóri Mountain Pass to connect the sea to the inland. Golden hair shining in harsh torchlight, these white-clad Vanyar knelt among the bodies bagged for burial. “May we offer our hands?” they asked in the dialect that the Teleri thought of as Noldorin, these strangers that were their neighbors. The mourners balked in fear, for too fresh was the betrayal of other neighbors that they had thought good friends and close kin. “Please, may we help you?” said the Vanyar, and their bronze cheeks were wet with tears. There were too many bodies and not enough boats and nets and other tools to gather food, too many tasks facing a decimated community to let pride and fear control them. The Teleri reached out to the proffered hands of the Vanyar, feeling the unfamiliar marks and calluses of a shepherd’s crook and a plow, not the hands of one worn by a smith’s hammer or stonemason’s chisel nor that of rope used to direct a sail or pull an oar. “What would you wish us do?”

“Sing for us,” asked the Lindar, before anything else. “We have broken our voices with crying.”

Embracing their kin for the first time, the Vanyar sang.

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Chapter End Notes

It is canon that the Falmari called the dialect of Quenya that they did not use 'Noldorin' because they had almost no contact with the Vanyar -at least until this event, one assumes- and thus the only speakers that they would be familiar with were the Noldor.

Lindar, the Singers.

 

Hey, eventually I had to write my two favorite elf groups interacting again.