Bits and Pieces Under 300 Words by sallysavestheday

Pebbles in Thy Mouth

Erestor and Pengolodh manage their lovers' quarrels through language. A brief extension of Examined Lives.

Erestor has always been fond of Dwarves. They are a blunt-spoken people, with a practical approach to problem-solving, quite unlike the elegant, deliberately-mystifying, knife-edged rhetorical wars of the Eldar. With eternity ahead of them, his own kin tend to play the long game in interpersonal conflict, through processes of delicate maneuvering and attrition that are as much entertainment as they are negotiation. Death by a thousand cuts of the tongue, Azaghal used to call it, watching the battles unfold.

Erestor himself has been known to savor a victory constructed over centuries when it finally arrives. He is not above planting the seeds of a minefield and waiting for the slow accretions and subsidences of time to set it off. Loremaster’s prerogative, he would claim, in Rivendell, when a tale spun to Elrond’s advantage, or that of the House of Fëanor. It was an appropriate corrective, in his opinion, to history’s slander.

Now, however, he must watch his pen, and his tongue, and curb the urge to always hold his own people in the light. It is the lover’s bargain he and Pengolodh struck: they will argue, but with honesty, and kindness, and care.

And when words fail them in Quenya and Sindarin, there is Khuzdul to turn to: that frank, Dwarvish tongue they share that is native to neither. Its spare, strong architecture offers a neutral meeting place, when they have wandered apart, and a straight road home. They step toward each other from boulder to boulder, confident in the bedrock, with no farther to fall.

This love is a new thing they are growing between them; a strange seed. It is tender yet, and the blossoms have only started to open, but it roots well in stone.