Threnody for the Dispossessed by Kenaz

---

Monophony

---

Her tune began on an indrawn breath, but hesitation blunted the opening note. She flicked a glance toward the hour glass on the table, and then toward me, in an attempt to discern whether or not I had noticed. I had, of course.

"Start again, please." I spoke mildly, despite my impatience. "Let the breath simply drop in. Imagine it filling your belly, low and deep. And don't hesitate before you begin."

The girl nodded, gently cleared her throat, and started anew, this time without hesitation, but also without imagination or any vibrancy whatsoever. The tune meandered in the general vicinity of adequacy, the fruits of a nervous and unprepared singer. The accompaniment fared little better: her hands flopped limply at the wrist, and her fingers were not yet tempered enough to pluck the strings with the strength necessary to bring good sound. A middling tune hammered out diffidently by a middling player while sand tumbled grain by grain from the top of the hourglass to the bottom. I do not think she knew that she was not alone in watching it fall. The song, a folk melody well known in Doriath but less so here, stumbled from one verse to the next, coming at last to the bridge-passage, which ought to have brought the piece together, but instead proved a catastrophic collision of fingers on strings. Had it been a bridge of wood and stone, an unforgiving current would have swept her away, and the harp with her. The notes fell flat and dull from her instrument. Her cheeks blushed crimson and she stopped.

"Have you practiced at all since your last lesson?"

The mute opening and closing of her mouth around an awkward apology gave me her answer, though her song had already told me all I needed to know. Finally, she settled on an excuse. "It is this harp. I cannot seem to get used to it. The strings--"

"Only a poor musician blames his instrument. If you had practiced, you would have become used to it." Well, at least she had the good sense to blush. "I expect you to come to your lessons prepared. When you do not, you waste my time and your parents' money."

In moments like this-- and I must add that she was not the only student I had been forced to reprimand-- I regretted my decision to teach. I happily played and composed, and even consulted with other musicians, but teaching was not one of my strengths. Perhaps if it had been, I might have fared better in convincing Thingol of the value of the Cirth. I priced my lessons high, hoping to weed the dilettantes from those committed to learning; but in the main that strategy only secured the patronage of social climbers. They were willing to travel from as far afield as Tírion, and willing to pay any price to play an instrument with surpassing mediocrity, as long as that price garnered them the ability to say that they or their offspring had learned their unremarkable skills from Daeron, erstwhile Loremaster of Doriath.

I stopped her when she lifted her fingers to the strings once more. "That is enough for now." I don't think either of us wished to hear that particular tune again today. Perhaps ever. She quickly packed away her harp, a lovely and expensive instrument entirely unsuitable for a beginner, in its finely-embroidered bag, bowed, and left as swiftly as she decently could, sand still slipping inexorably through the hourglass.

With the remains of the day now free, I turned my attention to my own work, sifting through the sheets and scrolls scattered across the length of the table, simple études and stunted drafts which had failed to yield fruit after the initial blossom of inspiration: all the usual detritus of a failed creative effort. I found nothing there on which I wished to work, so I turned instead to my own harp, and sought the long sun of the fading afternoon. I worked at the scales and exercises as I had done every day since my youth to maintain my agility, simple things done by rote. While satisfying after a fashion, my heart was not in them, and they did not fulfill any desire to create or sate my thirst for some new work. They merely kept my fingers limber.

My last triumph-- the only work I had done in Valinor that I believed held any merit-- had been composed to celebrate the return of Elu Thingol from the Halls of Waiting, a paean to a lost king returned to his glory. In it, I had woven all my memories of Doriath, from the glittering halls of Menegroth to the dance of the hemlock-umbels of Neldoreth. I sang of the rushing of Sirion and the crooning of Aros and the laughter of the Esgaluin. I chanted the names of those we had loved, those we had lost, and those who had returned. Thingol had graced me with a knowing look from the dais on which he sat, and then his eyes closed as he breathed in the story. Melian's hand had curled around his, no doubt sending him visions of their past together in that green and faraway land. For a moment, all who had gathered to listen had been returned to a time and place long vanished, the scent of linden blossoms in their nostrils, the velvet of moss beneath their feet, and the glittering gold of Esgaliant as the sun traced its arch across the river. That is why I sing; that is the music for which I strive: the music that holds memory, that binds us inextricably to the past.

But many years had come and gone since then, and in that time my heart had failed to truly soar in composition. The spark of inspiration had not come to me, and no living verse had blossomed in my imagination or rushed out of my fingertips. My mind was, as it had always been, fertile with ideas... but the ideas failed to germinate, and for every green seed of thought I carefully tended, only weak and stunted themes took root. For commissioned work, I never lacked. I even found some of it quite interesting. Music still held my joy, but that joy had become mundane, pleasing to the ear, but...but not alive. With each piece I finished, I examined it for signs of my detachment, fearing I would be unmasked, and that they would say "Ah, Daeron! Once he was the most gifted of singers, but now he merely trades silver for doggerel and meaningless tunes!" I felt that I was no longer a loremaster at all, but merely a minstrel, writing songs to please an audience, carols lacking weight and gravity and the incomparable magic of the ancient lays.

Finrod Felagund nearly bested Morgoth from the pits of Angband with a song, and Lúthien had roused the intransigent heart of Mandos to compassion, buying an altered fate for her Mortal beloved; what had I done lately but teach and pluck a few strings at a wedding feast and browbeat a disinterested girl over a threshing song no one else had cared to sing for hundreds of years?

Deep purple skies and the slight nip of night air reminded me that I had now been engaged rather too long in introspection. I abandoned all pretense of practicing and shuffled through a small pile of invitations waiting on a small table by the door, each requesting my presence at some function or another, some party, some event someone wished to document. I had no intention of attending any of them; the benefit of my reputation for an 'artistic temperament' allowed me some leeway to ignore an invitation without causing offense, though I tried to abuse that leeway only enough to perpetuate the reputation. If I have learned one thing in all my time, it is that people prefer their artists peculiar. They expect it, even, and who am I not to give them what they expect? In any case, the Elves in the north had the Lambengolmor to satisfy them, though I thought them more a guild of gossipmongers than loremasters, and I told myself I would just as soon spend my evenings composing in solitude than garnering a sycophantic following for singing rondelets for Noldor with gold to burn.

Yet at the heart of it was simply that my inability to create wore on me, made me surly and listless.

Valinor, for all its beauty, could be stultifying. No evil threatened us here-- not now, in any case-- and no deeds of great heroism arose in the face of peace and prosperity. Of bliss and glad life there was little to be said, before it ended. Works fair and wonderful were their own record, and only when they were in peril or broken for ever did they pass into song. On occasion, some legendary figure emerged from the Halls of Waiting to much rejoicing, and to the recounting of old deeds and past battles and glorious deaths, and it seemed almost as if those who gathered to hear those histories sung savored the pangs of remembered strife. Eat enough honey and you will eventually find yourself with a yearning for vinegar, if only to remind your tongue the meaning of sweetness.

The knock on my door was as unwelcome as it was unanticipated, and at first I contrived not to hear it at all. Someone ill-mannered enough to call at such an hour had earned my insolence. But when the knock came again, louder this time, and more insistent, I vacillated between concern that something had happened, hope that something might happen, and annoyance at the intrusion. In any case, I had little choice but to answer the door, and it was well that I did, for it would hardly have been appropriate for an Elf to blatantly ignore a visit from a Maia. There stood, framed in preternatural radiance, Eönwë, the Herald of Manwë. I bowed and bid him come inside, but he shook his head.

"I am come only to deliver a message: you have been summoned to attend my lord Manwë in Valmar."

Summoned? I had few dealings with the Powers of Arda save for Vairë, who had called upon me once, soon after I had come to Valinor, to play for her while she wove. She had spoken little to me while I attended her, save to request a recounting of one event or another, but I had felt the song pulled out of me like a silver thread, and I knew that I had never sang more perfectly than on that day. I could see the music as it was drawn from my heart, like silk from a spindle. She drew the song into the weft of her tapestry, my harp like a shuttle, and set the memory in the cloth. I had hoped often enough that she might call for me again, but she had not; I suppose a Queen of the Valar who weaves the story of the world has little need of my comparatively meager skills. Perhaps Manwë wished for me to play for him, as well. It would be an uncounted honor, not to mention a validation for which I had long hungered.

"Shall I bring my harp? What should I prepare?"

But Eönwë only shook his head again. "I cannot say; I do not know for what reason he has called you. Yet you are storied among the loremasters as the greatest of their number, and should Manwë wish for a song, it would not become your stature to be ill-prepared to honor him with such."

I felt foolish for asking now, and assured the herald that I would leave for Tanequitil at first light, though the journey would not be swift.

"One of the great Eagles has assented to bear you there as a favor to my lord," he informed me, "there is no need for you to bear the hardships of travel."

As the greatest of the loremasters, "Oh," was all I could think of to say.

His duty thus discharged, Eönwë smiled an arcane smile, bade me good night, and turned away, vanishing into the shadows as he left.

Flight, glorious flight!

From Landroval's back, I could see the whole of the land laid out before me: the bold green canopies of Oromë's forests, the snow-capped peaks of the Pelori, the fair lights of Tirion, and the motley patchwork of farmlands, villages, and cities sprawling ever outward across Eldamar. I felt my face buffeted by clouds, protected from the cold winds by the Eagle's thick feathers, feathers to which I clung with all my strength when he pulled up from a steady descent, fanning out his tail feathers and beating hard against the air until we settled on what seemed, to me, to be a perilously steep perch. Whatever request Manwë made of me, it would be worth the gift to have been given such a rarefied view of Valinor. I reveled in the feeling of weightlessness and the freedom of gliding on unseen currents, even the plummeting of my stomach at our landing, committing all of my impressions to memory that I might manufacture some ode to Landroval in thanks. When Eönwë came to escort me to Ilmarin, I barely had time to school my giddy grin into an appropriately thoughtful look. Though I could not be sure, I thought I recognized a smirk on his face.

Slinging my harp over my back, I followed Eönwë into the great hall, and after some time, a page called for me and brought me before the Lord of the Breath of Arda. Though cloaked in the shape of a man, Manwë was at the same time more man than I, and somehow not mannish at all. His great height would humble even the giants among us, and in his eyes, blue and deep and fathomless as sea and sky, no secret could be hidden and no thought concealed. He was both more substantial than the throne upon which he sat, and simultaneously more ethereal; had I the temerity to reach out and touch him, my hand might have passed through those fine azure robes into nothingness, or meet the simulacrum of flesh. Vairë had been neither so intimidating nor so grand. I bowed low to him, and then waited for him to speak, counting the seconds of his long and unnerving appraisal.

"How may I serve you, my lord," I asked, my voice too well trained to sound anything less than strong and unfaltering, despite how my knees were near to buckling.

Manwë wasted no words. His voice resonated within my head and without. "Makalaurë, second son of Fëanor, has been summoned to return to Aman to plead for the lives of his brothers, that they might, in time, be released from the Halls of Waiting."

My jaw dropped. "My lord, surely you cannot--"

"He has been summoned." His voice held finality, ringing like a hammer against an anvil.

A thousand memories flooded my mind: of wholesale slaughter, of the death of my King, of all the miseries wrought directly and indirectly by Fëanor's sons-- all for baubles and an ill-made oath. I thought as well of my own ancient ache: a fated meeting, the most brilliant music I had ever made, a burgeoning partnership of hearts and minds more fulfilling than I had ever dared hope to find...all laid to waste when Maglor and his brothers brought bloodshed to my door. "If you wish for me to sing in celebration of his return, I must humbly decline."

"No, Loremaster," he said, "I daresay you will like your appointed task rather less than that. You will return to Endórë, you will find Kanafinwë Makalaurë, and you will bring him to me."

"What?" I had forgotten myself in my outrage, and did not even try to correct my error. Few strictures had ever been laid upon the Elves, but what few there were, the sons of Fëanor had managed to willfully ignore or brazenly pervert. They had murdered their own kind in cold blood; they had taken children from their families; they had ground the kingdom of my birth to dust under their boot-heels. Showing no mercy for others, they now deserved no mercy themselves.

Manwë did not repeat himself, but looked at me with such sternness that I reflexively swallowed and straightened my spine. "It is not your place, túrelindo, to pass judgment on matters beyond your ken," he chastised, "nor to question the will of the Wise. This task is yours, and yours alone."

I could not stay my tongue from asking, and the words fell from my mouth like water over falls, beyond all hope of recalling. "But why, my lord? Why has Maglor been granted amnesty, and why does it fall to me to find him?"

"Come here, child. See."

He set his hand upon my head. A vision came into my mind, and with it, a song: Two children, alike in form, ragged and bloodied... the scent of fire still clinging to their tattered tunics, the nearly palpable frisson of their abject terror...long, fine fingers gently closing their eyes...an ancient lullaby sung with such sweetness that I wished to curl myself around its refrain and sink into sleep...

...Then, a later time: the boys, older now, laughing and playing with a man whose face I knew well...one of the young ones sitting in his lap, his large hands guiding the boy's smaller ones over the strings...the whisper of a song in a small, foliate ear, the likes of which I had never heard before nor ever would again: the tale of a man who found his peace in a cave by the sea-- it is an intimate song, the song a father might sing to a beloved son. I am not meant to hear it, yet still the voice paints quiet words of simple joy, and the boy smiles...

So many visions I am given, one following another: a rising king of Men, grey Elvish eyes closing in a Mortal's death...the discordant clash of swords, the howl of strife, the ache of despair... in time, the fair visage of Elrond of Imladris, kind and wise and mournful, comes to me, and I follow the line of his house to its end: the bitter loss of the daughter who made Lúthien's choice.

So this, then, is what I have gleaned: that by Maglor's mercy, Elrond and Elros survived the slaughter of the Sirion, and by Maglor's wisdom, they were reared to greatness that they might take their fated places in Ilúvatar's song. And for the many great deeds of the house of Elrond, and as recompense for the sacrifice of his beloved daughter, the Valar have been moved to pity. Maglor will earn his life back with a song.

Manwë's voice resounded in my head and in the chamber like a chime. "It is time."

I do not understand, I said without speaking. Time for what?

"Those who fell have come to the world anew. The Silmarilli rest in the earth, the air, and the water, protected from evil and corruption."

"But their oath--"

I fell to my knees when the next vision came, for it was awesome and terrible and I was ill-prepared: churning black clouds roiling above the Pelori, the sun and the moon cast into the darkness of eternal night, Oromë's horn erupting in a call to arms, and blood glistening on Eonwë's brilliant armor. I see Túrin Turambar holding his sword aloft, and Yavanna's hand reaching out for three stones glowing with the hope of light, lithe fingers stretching to take them, elongating, becoming branches of silver and gold. And then it is ripped from my mind, fading like a dream upon waking. The harder I tried to latch on to one of the dissipating images, the more quickly it dissolved; I was not yet meant to know what I had seen, and I was left, instead, with only the memory of a distant storm.

"Some things there are that we cannot see," Manwë explained, taking back the last flickering pictures from my mind's eye, "neither alone nor taking counsel together; for to none but Himself has Ilúvatar revealed all that He has in store, and in every age there come forth things that are new and have no foretelling, for they do not proceed from the past."

"You will depart at the turn of the tide." Eönwë guided me to my feet. "Olwë will provide you with the strongest and fastest of his boats; Ulmo will bear you forth, and return you when you have found Makalaurë."

"How will I even know where to look?" I asked, a mixture of desperation and resignation, a final, pathetic sally against Manwë's implacable will.

But the High King of Arda merely granted me an inscrutable look and raised his hand, casually dismissing me as if he had not just turned my life on its ear for his own ineffable reasons. The doors behind me opened, and with that, my audience was over.

Eönwë escorted me to Alqualondë the next morning and I could hardly bring myself to look at him. Anger stiffened my limbs and sped my gait.

"You already knew what he would ask of me when you came to me," I demanded, "didn't you."

Eönwë lifted one hand noncommittally. "I inferred. Where is your harp?"

I did not answer the question. "You are his herald; this ought to fall to you!" My words jabbed at him like the impotent little fists of fury which they were. "Why haven't you been sent to make good your own folly? Your soft-heartedness allowed Maglor and Maedhros to go free after they had committed cold-blooded murder right under your nose!"

My anger did not touch him. "I would do the same again. It was not my place to mete out punishment when their fates awaited them elsewhere, and it is not my place to undertake a task that was given to you.

"Now, Daeron," he continued, taking on the tone that a parent might take with a recalcitrant child, "I will ask you again: where is your harp?"

I had left it in my room at the inn where I had passed the night. I had no intention of bringing it with me. Though some traitorous part of my brain had argued that I might use my anger to my own advantage, to mine it for some greater work, I had left it behind. I had not even the time nor the means to arrange for its transport back to my home, but the loss of a harp was not worth as much as the loss of my pride. Had my anger brought out some song in me, I would owe that song at least in part to the one who inspired it, for good or ill, and I would not be indebted to Maglor for that.

"I will not bring it," I told him. "I have no need of it. My task is to find Maglor and and return him to face the Valar, not to sing rounds with him." Even to my own ears, my words sounded sharp and unappealing. A penurious spirit, a more steadfast bit of my mind reproofed, can create no music at all. The rough clasp of Eönwë's broad hand on my arm seemed to echo this thought, and when I turned to face him, I saw an expression of concern and frustration in equal parts.

"Whence your animosity toward Makalaurë?" he asked.

The sharpness of my laughter was not a pretty sound. "Need I elucidate the deeds of Fëanor's offspring for you?"

"Those are abstract reasons. Why are you so angry? Do you see him as a threat? Petty jealousy is unbecoming."

But that was not it. I, who made my livelihood and reputation on eloquence, could not put into words the pain and disappointment and the loss of my last great hope. In Maglor, I believed I had at last found a partner, a glorious rival, one who aspired to greatness with his own music, and who inspired me in mine. A companion who understood our calling, the hard-won victories and daily defeats of a creative life. But through omission, he had deceived me. That alone I might have forgiven; there are many kinds of partnership, after all. But I lay the ruin of Doriath at his feet, and no matter that Elu Thingol and all the others had returned, I did not believe I possessed the capacity for forgiveness.

"This is no mean errand, Daeron. Manwë chose you over all others to find Makalaurë and bear him these tidings. His life, and the lives of many others, will be changed forever by the news you bear."

It would have been unconscionably rude for me to shake free of his grasp, but the impulse bubbled just beneath my skin. "I cannot find the charity of spirit required for the task."

"Then perhaps," Eönwë said, guiding me up the gangway and giving me a firm but gentle shove onto the deck of the ship, "you have not looked hard enough."

The taciturn and hard-bitten Teleri manning the ship left me to my own devices, save to occasionally request that I go below decks when the waters grew choppy, and to stay out of the way of the endless ropes and canvass that made up the complex arrangement of sails. Strange, how little we had in common when we had risen nearly from the same spring. Perhaps I simply did not have the call of the sea in my heart; though I had dwelt long by its shores I had not wished to travel upon the water, but only to learn its songs.

I had not been on a ship since I had left Middle-earth. I had not liked it then, nor did I like it now: it felt, somehow, like defeat. I had come to Valinor disconsolate, awash in self-pity. The woman I had loved had not loved me, and had compounded the insult by cleaving to a mortal man and dying with him. The man I might have loved was a bloodthirsty infidel. The king I had served had been murdered and the home of my birth sacked. The world as I had known it had been destroyed and remade in an unfamiliar shape: beloved forests burned to ash and majestic mountains crumbled before sinking beneath the furious sea. This new world had no need for poets, but only for warriors. The younger generations raced headlong into the fray, riding for victory and glory; they wished to be the subject of epics, not the audience for them. Now I returned to that place of dashed hopes and humiliations: Middle-earth was my past, and I spent enough time looking back to it in my songs that I had little wish to do it with my body. The fact that I did so now for Maglor's sake made it all the more galling.

Time passed with naught but the glassy water stretching out around us on all sides, but on one particular day, a fog descended upon the ship like a shroud. Its touch left my skin unpleasantly damp. I wondered how the mariners could possibly steer through the impregnable gloom, but knew better than to say anything lest I cause offense, or evoke some sinister omen. Only in hindsight did I understand that we were passing out of the realm of Valinor and back into the mortal world, riding the Straight Road down to the curve of the earth. I stood entranced on the deck, silver mists wrapping around me like a living, breathing membrane. I felt the slick caress of fish scales, saw the shimmer of pearls through the clouds. I moved, guided by an unseen hand, to stand near the prow where the great arched neck of the swan rose from the water. The miasma cleared just enough for me to watch the parting of the waters as the boat plowed onward, foamy wake like cygnet's down flowering against the hull. How long I stood there, I do not know. I knew nothing in that time but the brume and the water, ancient and everlasting, unchanging and enduring, and it humbled me: all my life's work, my regrets, my fears...all of it was nothing to the song of the ceaseless sea, and all my thousands of years of living did not signify to that which had always been, and always would be.

When I opened my eyes, the sky had cleared leaving no trace of mist behind, as if it had never been. The mariners bustled about their business and trimmed their sails with bored efficiency, tending to their tasks as if they had seen nothing at all, had not been sailing blindly through impermeable haze for hours, or perhaps days, on end. A new weight hung on my shoulders and a strange sensation sat upon my skin. I was clad in a cloak that was not my own. It glittered in the sun with the luminescence of nacre. I had sung the lay of Tuor and his coming to Gondolin often enough to recognize the provenance of the cloak and the magic it contained. It offered me the protection of invisibility, which would be necessary now that the Secondborn no longer remembered my kind. The last ship had sailed from the Grey Havens long ago, and many generations of men had lived and died without knowing the Elves, and at last even the memory of our presence in this land had languished and died. My task, the cloak reminded me, was not without dangers, and Maglor was the least of them.

A staggering shoreline, like the torn edge of a scroll, came into view. Further down, a ramshackle quay jutted lamely into the water, the work of mortal hands and not of recent vintage, but I sensed that the boat would not put in at any Man-made haven, and in this I was correct. The mariners put me to shore on a jolly-boat. I watched them rowing back to the ship in the risig vapors, my legs loose at the joints after so long on the water. I turned back once to look, but the mists had closed around the ship, protecting it from the short-seeing and suspicious eyes of men. I felt the lack of magic here like a flattening of my senses, a dullness to the colors of the landscapes that spoke to a land caught in the web of slow decay, and Valinor seemed all the brighter to me now for the contrast. I had wandered similar shores singing my grief for many years. Had it been so dreary then, or had it only become so under the eroding influence of time? Little wonder we had departed: to bear witness to this inexorable withering would have broken our hearts. I bundled myself more tightly in Ulmo's cloak and walked on. The sooner this chore was completed, the sooner I could leave this place of sorrows.

Gulls dipped and reeled in the overcast sky, calling plaintively. When I had finally reached Lindon all those years ago, determined to depart, their cries had wracked me like a physical blow. I have tried more than once to recreate their song in my own music, but I have not come close to capturing the longing that sound evoked in my heart, longing which had been resolved in me when at last I had reached the Elvenhome. Here, their song echoed and rebounded, caught in the bay and trapped there, circling, unfamiliar and sadder than any sound I had ever heard. I knew, of course, who had taught them to sing so mournfully, and I wondered how he could stand to linger so near to that sound and the yearning it evoked even in me, a transient visitor. I would not need to seek much further.

Sand gave way to rock, and the strand to a barren stretch of dirt which may or may not have been a road once. If it had been, it was long abandoned. Farther still lay a dark copse, and my heart told me that this was the way. I ventured deep within the trees, treading silently across a carpet of many seasons' dead leaves, looking closely for any signs of habitation, but it needn't have made such an effort. Obscured not only by trees, but by ancient magics not dissimilar to the cloak upon my shoulders, I saw that a simple stone croft within a clearing nearby, a star with eight rays and eight spikes carved in the lintel should anyone require confirmation of its tenant.

I was not so bold as to enter his home uninvited, but I peered through the open shutters and found a simple abode, neatly kept, with a bedstead, a small table with two caned chairs, and a banked cooking fire smoldering in a small but serviceable hearth. A bear hide covered part of the earthen floor. It shouldn't have angered me-- after all, it would have been far more vexing to burn days in fruitless searching-- and yet it did. In my mind, I had imagined him dwelling in some primitive cave, sleeping wild with only leaves and branches to cover him, though a moment's consideration would have suggested that a mind as keen and shrewd as Maglor's, and possessing the innate cleverness of his father's line, would hardly have kept himself in squalor. It did not stop me from wishing that the condition of his dwellings might reflect the condition of his soul. Still, that it was a mere peasant hut with unglazed windows and a dirt floor ought to have been some comfort.

I stood motionless and invisible on the threshold, waiting for him to return from wherever it was he spent his days, and at last he came, an unstrung bow in one hand, a dead pheasant in the other. He appeared mainly as I remembered him, but his body had an insubstantial look to it, translucent, as if it were not flesh and bone and sinew that held him to the earth, but sheer force of will and some inextinguishable inner flame. But if time and loneliness had leached the color from his body, they had not tarnished the bold symmetry of his features nor softened their lines. Pellucid grey eyes, sharp as broken glass, tracked the trees before him from beneath a stern brow, and his mouth curved down in a grim arch. He cut a figure handsome but spare, exceedingly fair in that perfectly-wrought fashion of the Eldar. He carried himself tall and proud, even in the empty woods.

Shielded by Ulmo's cloak, I looked upon him unseen for longer than was strictly seemly and tried not to feel unsporting for it. He trod warily as he grew near; he could probably have discerned the disguise if he had set his mind to it, but it had likely not occurred to him that anyone might come looking for him. I savored this moment of his wary discomfort, knowing it would likely be my last opportunity to do so openly, though when he stepped close enough that I could hear the rapid beating of his heart, I held my breath, and it was all I could do not to step back from his proximity and give myself away.

He turned and looked right through me, dropping the bird and curling his hand around the handle of the hunting knife that hung from his belt. "Who goes there?" His voice was neither strong nor resonant. It was husky, and rasped with disuse, like the creaking hinge on a warped wooden door. "I know someone is there," he said with growing conviction, his keen eyes narrowing as he slowly pivoted and scanned the grove, turning away from me. "Reveal yourself!"

A moment more, and I would have been discovered whether I willed it or no. Not wishing to lose my advantage, or to take a knife to the gut, I did as he commanded and threw back the cloak. He turned and stared at me, mouth gaping, pale face losing the final vestiges of its color and turning as blank and cold as the moon.

"You..." His legs buckled, and he sank to his knees beside the dead pheasant in the leaves. His face turned up to mine wearing an expression of wonder and misery.

"Yes," I said. "Me."