Adventures in Arda and Aman by Lferion

Madhacabim (Mudskippers)

Written for the Silmarillion Writer's Guild January 2021 Resolutions challenge:
-- Day 6: Today's bonus prompt is an addendum to our Crackuary bingo card from February: a bonus 3x3 mini-card! - B2: Free Space
-- Day 10: Bonus prompts are images for instadrabbling from the Naturalist's Guide to Middle-earth challenge, Sept 2020. Image 12, Mudskippers
-- Day 28: Today's bonus prompt comes from the Laws and Customs challenge:
“‘I am in too great doubt to rule. To prepare or to let be? To prepare for war, which is yet only guessed: train craftsmen and tillers in the midst of peace for bloodspilling and battle: put iron in the hands of greedy captains who will love only conquest, and count the slain as their glory? Will they say to Eru: At least your enemies were amongst them? Or to fold hands, while friends die unjustly: let men live in blind peace, until the ravisher is at the gate? What then will they do: match naked hands against iron and die in vain, or flee leaving the cries of women behind them? Will they say to Eru: At least I spilled no blood?’”
~ Unfinished Tales, “Aldarion and Erendis”

With thanks to Parf Edhellen for the Sindarin Madhacabim Mud-jumpers. (The Quenya would be Luxolapamon Mud-hoppers.)

They had been fish once, some of them. Others of them had been lizards or rock-slithers or wriggle-worms, once in the long ago, in the warm seas lit by the Lamps. And there were still fish and lizards and all the rest, but they, taken into Utumno, into the cruel crucible places of the One Who Marred, were no longer any of those things, yet all of them at once in a way. In the upheavals of the Lamp-fall, the Darkening of Tree-light, the rising of the Moon and Sun, the anguish of Angband, and the breaking of Beleriand they survived, thrived, defied the Marrer and lived, discovered they could skip from water, to mud, to land and live. They wanted no ruler nor to rule anything but their individual selves. They wanted no poking or prodding or recombining of their parts, their essences. They were good at escape, and better at hiding: up trees and down holes, places very thin of air, or air thick with water. And always, they were happy to lead others in escape, to free spaces, to new and better life. Many were the bright, speaking peoples led to better places by following determined mudskippers.