Many Journeys by Elleth

A Show of Mastery

How Lúthien swayed Mandos. Written for Indy at Trick or Treat 2015.

There was this, also, in Lúthien's song, as she sang and wept in the dark before the throne of Mandos:

Her mother began to teach her young in her childhood, long before the rise of sun and moon. First it was language - a tongue that hurt to listen to, the quick merciless slices of a bright sword glittering in starlight given shape and sound. She fought down the fear, the desire to press her face into the cool grass, or to climb a tree and hide among the leaves. She had still been a child, after all, while her mother stood tall and radiant, cutting at the very air with the syllables - the lyrics - from her lips, her pride, her heritage, her birthright.

When the sounds ended and Melian knelt before Lúthien, she was no longer so shining, her face soft and worn and beloved, the one that Lúthien had always known, and opening her cupped hands, let go a nightingale of coloured light. A feather fell when it fluttered into the trees, downy and brown, a glimmer along its edges. Lúthien remembered touching her finger to it, and finding an answering whisper from within her.

But she was young and her body small and tired, and her mother rocked her to sleep in her arms, speaking of the language and in it until Lúthien drifted into a dream of Ayanumâzân and its powers, and the way it might create a world or shiver her life to breaking.

What powers song had she came to know soon after, more than wonders and visions. She had learned, by then, how to wrap her tongue around the sharp, intricate sounds of her mother's language and to speak them without cutting her lips bloody. It still made her head hurt, and for all her practice, near unceasing whether alone or with her mother, mastery had not yet come to her. She could tell Melian was frustrated, and though she remained kind she was struggling for patience when her half-elven child released the nightingale she was meant to evoke - unlike her mother's, hers was white light only, not yet adorned with the blush of colours, and it hopped or fluttered but would not fly, or did not sing - and worn out by her trials, she fell asleep in her mother's arms when she was carried back into Menegroth.

And yet, always, there was the thought, in her song and in her practice, in her love to Beren, in the growth of her hair and her cloak of shadow and in the grasp of pale fingers on bat-wings, in the fall of her body into the grass under Hírilorn:

I will one day prove worthy, whatever unknown shadows I must enter to show my mastery. Until then, I shall not cease.

Upon his throne in the shadowed hall, Mandos could not help but smile amid his tears.

Chapter End Notes

Ayanumâzân: A tentative Valarin word, “Ainurin”, composed of ayanûz, “Ainu”, a supposed plural suffix -umâz and a possible adjectival suffix -ân.