Quietus by UnnamedElement

---

Chapter 1

---

Four Years Old

Sun spattered the ground like lace caught in the wind, and Lómion tumbled in it. The child sought to do the impossible, and Aredhel laughed as he leapt again and missed the patch of gold he had been targeting, catching himself on one foot to the left of the dancing light. He had been trying to catch the sun in one of the shaded, brush-cleared areas about the cottage for an hour now, and his cool, fawn-tone cheeks were finally darkening with frustration—berry-red patches bloomed along his cheekbones.

Aredhel put down the shirt she had been darning, tucking the needle so it was flat against the fabric she weaved, and then called:

“Child! You cannot catch the wind and sun!”

Lómion looked up from where he had sunk to the ground in defeat. He held his hands out in front of him and showed her how the dancing light lit him so gold his palms were white as cold stars.

“Yes, it can touch you—can you feel its warmth?”

The child nodded silently.

“But you cannot hold it back, nor pin it beneath your feet. It is more tricksome than even the water in your creek.”

He closed his hands around it until they were tightened fists lit blindingly between them. 

“Come,” she said.

But he shook his head and stayed where he sat:

“I want it.”

Aredhel brushed her hands over her skirt and tightened the laces of her leather boots before answering. When she looked up, his fists were clenched on his knees and he watched her so intently—with eyes the color of the darkest, deepest woods—that her chest was flooded with a gripping, distant cold.

But she stood and took him up beneath the arms and hefted him onto her hip, where she balanced him and uncurled his fists: one by one, finger by finger.

“I know,” she finally said.

He stared up at her.

“I want it, too, Lómion.”

He pressed his small hands flat onto her chest and she took him and stepped into the darker woods, routing them toward the trees and the edges of the forest. They walked for a long long time—until her feet burned with reopened blisters—and then she sat him down and knelt beside him.

The world opened wide before them, and it was high-noon in early spring in that world outside the Woods.

The child held out his hands and felt the breeze catch at him, felt the sun soak into him all the way up to the elbows.

The broomgrass was the first thing to return in the spring, and its pale green waved in the wind, rippling like the sea. Closer to them—nearly within reach from the forest—the thistle was just shin-height, and it would be long months before it burst into towering, and vibrantly purple, royal life. For now it was short and sharp—stiff and unsightly—and her son reached for it in wonder:

“No! It will prick you, child.”

He jumped and withdrew his hand into the dark.

“We must be careful when we linger at the edge of the woods. Father cannot know we have been here, yes?”

Lómion nodded.

“So that means no scratches from things we are not supposed to have seen.”

He nodded again.

“Here,” she said, and she lifted him into her arms and scooted on her knees as close to the edge of the treeline as she could, until there was thin grass in addition to the winter refuse beginning to pad her legs. 

She lifted him and rearranged him until his feet stood one on each of her thighs, and she grabbed him round the middle and bid him lean out.

“Put out your arms as if you could fly,” she whispered.

But he stretched them wide before bringing them in above his head as if he could—instead— dive , and he leant so far forward that the sun kissed his shade-pale face, and he sighed.

She held him there for hours, and he leaned like a sapling too crowded by its older brethren; as the sun crossed the sky, his young face followed it like a flower.

Finally, she pulled him back from his journey and settled him into the woods. She stood and massaged her sore arms, brushed any evidence of the forest-edge from her knees, and took the child up again.

They turned back toward the darkest center of the woods, and she glanced at his sun-kissed face and asked as they went:

“And what do we tell Father if he asks why you glow with the warmth of a new-born fawn?”

“That we spent the morning soaking in the treetops.”

“Good boy,” she said, and she pressed a kiss to his temple. 

She sang to him as the wide world became distant behind them, as they came closer and closer to the heart of the place as if drawn by a magnet; she sang to him until the light was a pinprick far behind, lodged deep and firm and burning like a dart in the center of her chest.

She opened the door to the cottage and they stepped into darkness.

 

.0.

Seven Years Old

Rain pounded on the high-set windows while Lómion lay on the carpet near the fire, organizing tumble-smooth gems by color. He was alone in the room with his father, who sat  in a stuffed chair nearby, bent double over a writing box and making notes on things Lómion knew from previous experience he had no interest in yet, but assumed he would one day.

There was a burst of thunder so loud it rattled the high panes, and when Lómion jumped he sent his white and yellow stones skittering across the floor to clink at the hearth.

His father looked up and Lómion froze, hand extended.

“You have spilt your stones, child.”

Lómion swept them back and reorganized them.

“Which are your favorite?” his father asked. “I did not know when I was at Nogrod, so I brought many.”

There was a moment of silence, filled with the subtle scraping of stones on the carpet, pushed back into place with small fingers.

“The yellow and the white,” he finally said. “Like the sun and the moon.”

“Ah,” said Eöl, and he put aside his desk and pens and dropped to the floor in front of him.  He reached out a hand to select a perfect white stone and laid it flat in the palm of his hand. “This is the color your mother was wearing the day I met her.”

Lómion’s hands froze once more and he looked up at his father suddenly. In the moment their eyes met, Lómion felt a zing as powerful as the lightning in the storm chase him from head to toe, and the image of his mother dressed in white and stumbling—feet red and sore, hair dark about her dirty face—flashed across his mind.

It disappeared with the next crack of thunder and he frowned as his father still stared. 

“White and silver like the moon,” he continued.

Lómion tucked his hands into his lap but did not look away from Eöl’s gaze. 

“Not like you and I,” he said, and he rocked back onto his heels and continued to watch him. He picked up a handful of stones casually: darkest obsidian, deep garnet, and cold pyrite. Lómion tucked his hands deeper between his knees and watched as his father’s hand bloomed open around them, the gems on full display.

“When you grow older,” he said firmly, and he closed his hand over the stones again with a flourish, “your mother will tell you stories that are not true, about me and my kin.”

He opened his hand without looking away from the child, and the gems fell like bodies into heavy water—one, two, three—in their pillowed clatter onto the carpeted stone.

Whatever spell of silence had been cast over Lómion as his father spoke broke with the tension of the fall:

“Father, who are your folk? You will not say, but I hear whispers in the forest, and yet when I walk close to listen—”

But his father held up a hand and did not let him finish:

“My folk— yours , Eölchín—are Teleri. We are not golodhrim like your mother. She will speak to turn you from me, as you grow, as even she does now, in her small ways.”

Eöl suddenly lifted a hand and gently tipped his chin. 

“But,” he said,  “you are the son of Eöl , not Lómion, nor whatever else it is she calls you when you slink together in the dark, when I go abroad.”

Lómion watched his father from below, and he tried hard to push away the images of gold-kissed broomgrass that suddenly overwhelmed his mind: he and his mother’s view from the edge of the woods. 

“Do you understand this?” Eöl insisted, and his hand was heavy at the child’s jaw.

Lómion blinked hard and the endless waving grass was gone. It was just the dark sitting room now, lit with lamps like the memory of muted sunlight that would stream on cloudless days through the narrow windows set parallel to the ceiling. The light that made it through would  be shivering and weak, like the stream-bed where he sunk his toes in winter cold on those brightest days of spring... As he thought, his eyes flicked toward the yellow gems for just a moment, and his father’s hand tightened on his chin infinitesimally in response—Lómion reprimanded himself for showing his thoughts and, yet, he said with conviction:

“Yes, Father.”

(Yet Lómion did not understand, for he was but seven. Still, with need, seven years is time enough to learn how to guess hearts and minds—to catalog events, to record the look on the face and all the precursors to avoid them—even if one does not understand the conclusion one is coming to that allows them to survive...)

“I understand, Father,” the child repeated again, more emphatically this time. “Of course .”

Eöl dropped his hand from his chin and grasped Lómion firmly at the shoulder, instead—he pressed a kiss to his brow. Lómion brushed all the gems into a pile and scooped them up hurriedly in grasping hands, dropping them as quietly as he could into their waiting box.

“May I go outside, until nightfall?” he asked finally, with a glance up at his father that chilled them both.

“Go, Eölchín,” his father said, and he took the box from him and tucked it away beneath the chair. “Go!” He swatted at the child gently. “Run the woods like your folk are intended, but listen for the evening call to return.”

And then Lómion was off, fast as an arrow and more true. He was out of the house and into the trees before his father had finished his request.

Aredhel stood around the corner from the sitting room, and she watched her child go. Eöl turned his attention to her, then, and she emerged from the shadows to attend him.

.0.

Ten Years Old

Lómion sat against the door to his room and listened. His father had told him that if he began to listen to him and better follow instruction, he would take him on his journeys outside the woods, a place Lómion had never been, though he knew the feel of the sun’s soft fire and the way it wrapped his skin in a golden armor that sheltered his heart for weeks and weeks. And his father had told him stories of men and dwarves, too, of elves that were not he or his mother or those few he knew who lived about their homestead; and, while they would not see elves, his father said, the dwarves he could meet, and maybe the men, and they would like him. 

How he wanted it, and craved. 

He hungered for it: the light of the sun and the light of lives that were not he or his mother (his mother the moon, his mother a reflection of the dimming light around her).

And tonight, too, how he hungered, but he was meant to be good; he was meant to sit quiet and still if he wanted to leave these woods, his father had told him so and yet—

It was hard to sit still when the second crock in as many minutes hit the ground and shattered. A shard thudded into his door like a javelin; it shook the frame and chased down his spine from his head to his toes.

Tonight, it seemed, was a silent battle, but for the destruction of things . 

His father wanted answers to questions he did not even have to ask aloud for his mother to decide she would not answer them. It had started that night with a whisper he had caught on the wind, Eöl said, of tales of towers long forgotten, and a maiden lost and saved, ungrateful. 

But it had started that night, in truth—Lómion rather thought—with the discovery of a frond that grew only at the edge of the woods trailing the hem of his mother’s dress.

He had been sent to his room then, ushered by his mother with a whisper and a prayer, and he had looked up into the night of his father’s towering form, of his mother’s calm face as she circled away from him like a distraction and pulled his father by the hand, who only paused long enough to slip the latch into its place on his door to lock him in.

The sound of a vase exploding in the fire came next, and Lómion leaned his head against the door and began to count the silence that followed.

One, two, three, four—

A door opened and closed somewhere. Perhaps one of his father’s folk leaving out the back.

Nine, ten, eleven, twelve—

He breathed, and there was the sound of soft, barely there footsteps on the flagstone, and then the carpet.

Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—

And then the sound of shifting linen, of a soft brush of fabric and skin, as if someone ran a hand from the shoulder of a tunic to the elbow and, then—at twenty-nine —his mother:

“Let us go into the woods together, love,” said she. “Let us walk beneath the light of the stars, the way you like it, in the treetops. Let me gather the light and shine for you.”

There was a gasp from his mother, then, and a minute of long silence broken by—

“Fetch your cloak.”

Next, the door to the cottage opened and closed like a breath on the wind, and Lómion was alone.

He opened his door just enough to knock the latch on the outside free with a thin book, and he pushed it open as little as possible so as not to disturb the glass and give himself away. Picking his way around the shards, he stretched his hearing and crept to the lauder. He returned to his room with two shrunken apples tucked beneath an armpit and several hearty strips of deer jerky in his hands, a dark thin shape in the quickly falling night.

It was not until he had shut his door behind him; re-latched it with a switch he had fashioned for that very purpose; settled back onto the floor and chewed halfway through one of his pieces of jerky, that he noticed his foot bled.

He had stepped on a shard of crock and not noticed, perhaps, and now he would be caught, but there was no use going back out now.

The sun set, and he sat in the dark alone for a long time (feeling the aching pulse of his foot, watching the shadows of the tree in the waxing moon play at the far corners of his room) until, finally, he fell into dreams.