When the sun rises (Naturalists Guide to Middle Earth Challenge) by Tethys Resort

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Chapter 1

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Pilihel died just on the edge of the marsh where the cattails turned to sedge clumps.  Ages later, when asked, she would laugh.  Elves, especially the Noldor, seemed to always expect that death had come in a dramatic rush of fighting, monsters and struggle.

Not a brief jolt and the thought, “Ah, a hippopotamus.”

***

The Halls were quiet and peaceful, but a bit boring without anywhere to explore.  The wicker woven walls and rug-strewn wood floors were homey and comforting though.  She was watching her family in the tapestries again (her little baby brother’s son was finally tall enough to climb the tree outside the house) when the gray Vala came. 

They stared at each other.  The Vala was crying, great streams of tears that trailed down her cheeks and dripped toward the floor.  Pilihel watched in fascination: the tears seemed to evaporate before actually hitting the mats. 

Finally Pilihel asked, “Are you okay?”

The gray shadow smiled, “I am Nienna, my job is to weep.”

“Seems like a painful job.”

“Sometimes, and yet it is mine alone.”  She paused, staring down.  “You were barely grown little one, you barely lived before you died.”

Pilihel wondered about the point of this conversation. 

The Vala continued.  “Your family did not follow Orome.”

Pilihel remembered the stories.  “No.”

“They are not here in Valinor.”

“No.”

Lady Nienna sighed and said, “Sit with me?” 

They sat down on the thick rugs in front of the tapestries. 

“Pilihel of the People of the Lakes, you are healed enough to go out into Valinor.”  Lady Nienna paused with a pained expression.  “But you are the only one.”

“The only one?”  Pilihel doubted Lady Nienna meant she was the only dead elf or even the only dead elf of the Lakes.  Her parents had told her of grandparents, now gone, who had awakened under the stars. 

“The only Firstborn ready to leave.”  She shifted uncomfortably.  “The only one from the Lakes if you go out of the Halls.”  Then she smiled.  “But if you go now, you can see something wondrous.”

***

They gave her clothing that carried such strong echoes of home that she wanted to cry.  Instead, she picked up the travel bag and supplies and walked to the edge of the garden to get dressed under the trees. 

Dressed, she walked along the mountain path away from the courtyard garden, and turning sharply climbed up a little side path that went up the great walls that Sang with Lord Namo’s power.

Lady Nienna had told her the trails to follow so it didn’t take long to wind her way up the mountain and the top of a cliff that overlooked a lake.  She sat on a warm boulder and began to wait.  The stars in Valinor were different than those over the Lakes, their whirl unfamiliar.  The air of Valinor was different, its Song rang different through her.  The mountain was different too, with different plants. 

Pilihel had been named for the thin, high banner clouds.  The wispy ones that trailed on the wind.  She was happy to see those clouds unchanged. 

All around her she could feel Maia, silent and tense. 

Then, far on the horizon, a glow appeared.  It rose round and silver into the sky, bright enough to create shadows and dim the stars.  Spell struck, Pilihel watched as the Maia began to Sing and the thing took flight like the down of the willow tree, lofting ever higher.  It didn’t dim with height but the shadows rounded and mellowed.  Pilihel could see it reflected in the lake at the foot of the mountain, round and white. 

It went East, and she sat and watched its flight. 

Then, she walked into the comforting velvet of the dark and went back down the mountain on another trail. 

It was a long walk, punctuated by the dance of stars that were slowly becoming familiar and the moon now traveling a road from East to West.  She crossed the next mountain range, and wandered into hills that rustled in the dark and moved while she slept – searching for the correct form, she guessed.  She grimly hid her head inside her bedroll and left them to their wandering. 

Lady Nienna said that there were marshes and lakes much like home, all she had to do was visualize them and listen for their Song.  That even if they did not exist now, all she had to do was search for them and they would become.

Based on the way the scenery changed when she wasn’t looking (once an entire mountain silently moved in the time it took her to close her eyes and brush her hair) the Valar were quite busy. 

Pilihel was resting in a little glade of ferns when a Maia crept out from under the rocks of the little rivulet below her feet.  He blinked great dark eyes at her and said, “The next one comes, the bright one.  Come sit with me under the trees?” 

Uncertain of what he meant, she followed and they sat side by side under the spread wings of a cedar tree.

The Sun rose in a great rush of power.  She watched in awe: it was a fire, a lamp.  It burned with power and all the Maia sang as it rose, carried in the arms of a glorious female who laughed as she burned.  As it climbed higher, Pilihel realized the Song of the world itself was changing and adapting to the awesome thing. 

She laughed and darted out from under the tree, glorying in the waves of heat and swinging into her own dance of mixed joy and terror.  It was like standing inside a great bonfire, or a wild leap over its flames and yet untouched. 

She yelled back to the Maia, “This is great!  Come dance!”  The Maia shook his head but laughed at her as he continued the Song that was altering Arda. 

As it passed and the world crept back into the sweet peace of dark, she wondered what her family thought of these new creations.  Finally tired of thinking, she laid out her bedroll and climbed in.  The little Maia came and sat by her head.  He said, “May I come in?  I am tired.”

Pilihel stared at the little Maia, his plump body had grown thick plush fur and long delicate fingers and toes.  He sagged, like a plant deprived of water, and she reflected that Singing the world into something new must be very hard.  She lifted the edge of the blanket and he crawled in, curling up against her chest. 

She hugged him close.  “Is it scary for you too?”

He sighed and whispered, “Yes….” 

The sun rose again, and she watched as the sky crept through a thousand tiny colors of red and purple before settling on bright blue.  The dew glittered like the stars but then melted.  The thin banner clouds stayed. 

When she combed and braided her hair again, and rolled up her blankets, she said to the Maia, “Do you want to come with me?  I am looking for new Lakes for the People when they come.”

She strolled out of camp with the Maia sitting on her shoulder. 

***

“So I can go out?  But my family and my clan won’t be there?”  Lady Nienna nodded.  “Forever?” 

“No…” the whisper echoed.  “Others will return in time.  It will take courage.  But you can search, dream and help create a home.”

***

Every morning turned into a delight, with the rising of the Sun.  Each dizzying turn of Sun and Moon brought more discoveries of mountains and rivers that moved, colors that changed and plants that warped and twisted into something new.

The first one she saw was a surprise. 

A little yellow thing.  Puffy and spiky and soft all at once.  She leaned over and then knelt down to stare, nose to nose with the thing.  She poked at it carefully, it was attached to the long toothed leaves of a dandelion.

“What is it?” 

The Maia nudged it with his nose, today it was a long, thin and flexible nose.  “Something new.  A consolation prize for all that is lost.”

It took her a while to understand what he had meant.  But she understood when she finally walked into a marsh at the edge of a great river. 

The weather had gradually gotten colder, until the dew was tiny sharp edged crystals of perfect symmetry.  Here, the grasses had died and trailed down into the mud, slowly growing gray and disintegrating.  Confused, she Sang to the marsh and the dead grass and it told her a story of endless cycles of life and death.  Of plants that would now bloom, grow beautiful flowers to go with their fruits and grains.  And then die. 

The seasons would turn as the always had, the plants growing in their turn.  But with the Sun and Moon Arda was now a little more Mortal. 

She decided to follow the river, with luck it would lead to marshes and lakes suitable for the raft gardens and little wood houses of the People of the Lakes. 

Instead, the terrain became rough, with great cliffs of striped rocks. 

It was snowing the day she picked up what looked like a tiny piece of ice on the bank of the river.  Ice, but too hard and unmelting.

“A quartz crystal.”  The Maia had gone swimming, trading his fur for scales and flipper feet.  He shook himself dry, fur springing back into existence.  “A pretty rock, though those who follow Lord Aule sometimes make things with them.”

“Lord Aule?”  She held it up to the sun and a tiny ripple in the middle reflected a rainbow. 

“The Vala of making and crafting.”

“Ah Lord Builder, Lady Yavanna’s husband.”  She admired the rock a moment more, then slipped it into her pack as a tiny fragment of memory.  Yavanna and her Maia had planted all these lands.  If she should ever meet Lady Yavanna she would remember to thank her. 

***

Pilihel sat by the ocean amid the dunes and tried not to cry.  The river had led here, to endless salty water. 

The Maia became extra fluffy before crawling into her arms.  “Don’t cry.  Are you hurt somewhere?”

“No.”  She hugged him closer and dried her face against his fur. 

The Maia stretched out into his best approximation of a hug, becoming thin and flat like a large fuzzy leaf.  Pilihel giggled through her tears, he always looked so funny shifting around like that.  He said, “If you are not hurt, you are sad.  Why does the Lost Sea make you sad?  We have never been here before.”

The silence stretched on, and Pilihel watched the clouds.  Great puffy clouds out to the north, bringing some other portion of Valinor snow. 

She whispered, “I am afraid.”  She pulled him back to stare into his eyes.  “What if Lady Nienna was wrong and there are no Lakes?  What if there is a place here for everyone except the People of the Lakes?” 

The Maia smiled, reforming his face to smile with elf teeth in miniature.  “Eru promised, not Lady Nienna.  We just have to search far enough.”

Late that night Pilihel watched the stars through the thin high clouds, blowing in the cold winter wind.  She murmured to the Maia.  “I think we’ll go south along the shore a while.”

In the morning she laughed at the way the spray crashed up the rocks and stared into the pools of water along the shore.  They were full of life and new things she had never seen before.  She walked away from them and into a forest of redwoods, wondering what Elves would live there by the waves. 

***

They were sitting in the cove of a large redwood tree, greater around than the arm span of six or seven elves and covered in red fibrous bark, taking shelter from the rain when Pilihel asked, “Do you have a name?”

The little Maia rolled over on itself to stare up into her face.  “A name?” 

“Something to call you, other than ‘Maia’.”  She settled back into the soft moss and little redwood twigs.

He deflated slightly in thought.  “Do names change?”

“Change?”

“If I change.”  He slithered out long and flat on the moss near the entrance.  “If I change, does my name change as well?”

Pilihel wiggled her toes sticking out into the rain.  “I don’t see why not?  But if you change your name, how will people know it is you?”

“How would changing my name make me unrecognizable?”

***

Spring had arrived in its barest, most scanty way.  And Pilihel had found marshes. 

She Sang to the cattails and the reeds, listening to the echoes and watching the fog curl through the tiny peat islands.  There were more Maia here, and her Maia fluttered off in a thrum of grasshopper wings to talk to them. 

When he came back he landed on her shoulder and said, “We should go around the edge toward those hills.”

So they slogged their way around. 

The area seemed to be at least partially spring fed, and water burbled up in deep blue pools that trickled off into the bog.  The water was warmer on the other edge and plants were already into true spring in a flush of green cattail shoots and the little tubes of young pitcher plants. 

Different pitcher plants, or maybe changed pitcher plants with deep red pitchers and white lacy frills.  Pilihel stared at them and wondered if they were something of Valinor, or if the pitcher plants everywhere had changed with the rising of the Sun and Moon. 

She continued on, jumping from tuft to tuft of sharp edged tule mounds.

Further in, she started to see flowers.  Yellow puffs in cheerful chains around the marsh marigolds.  Little blue spears on the gentians, obviously still growing.  Pimpernel trailing off in the drier areas, now decorated with tiny, cheery pink-orange flowers. 

One more scramble through the mud and she was on the hills, just above the swamp level.  The Maia said, “Let’s go up.”

So they did, between willows with fuzzy toe flowers and unfamiliar nameless bushes just putting out leaves. 

From the top she could see lakes.  Large, flat and interconnected.  Just like home.  Pilihel began to cry.

The Maia said, “Do you like it?”

She grinned.  “Is this the Lakes?”

“If you want.  The Yavannadili have been working hard on them.”  He nuzzled against her ear. 

Pilihel whooped and pirouetted with her arms wide in joy.  She gave one last great leap and ran down the hill with the Maia clinging to one shoulder and laughing at her antics. 

She would have to examine every bit.

***

The sky was that perfect blue and white of mid-autumn and Pilihel was thinking of going exploring again.  She turned to the Maia, currently hanging from the roof of her little house like a bat, and said, “I want to visit the Folk of the Lost Sea again.”

They had moved in a few years ago, a little confused crowd of elves, led by a Maia. 

Pilihel had been excited to meet another elf, yelling and waving at their camp and then trotting down the last hills to their tents.  And then she had gone out and harvested a whole basket of young potatoes and another of berries to greet them.  

They had been fishing, and that night was a grand feast and party. 

The Maia said, “Lady Nienna is coming.”

Lady Nienna was still crying and Pilihel wondered this time if they were tears of grief or joy as the Vala swept her up into a hug.  She said, “Little one, do you like the Lakes?”

Pilihel grinned, they were not the Lakes of home, of Middle Earth, but perfect all the same.

“Good.”  A smile appeared between the tears.  “Would you like to come with me and retrieve your grandparents?”