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First off, WOW!  Overall, this is completely amazing.  I love your Erestor and his daydreaming.  It was fantastic how you echoed Elrond with Erestor’s memory of Dior. It was an unobtrusive reminder of Erestor’s age and experience. 

I did snicker at the reference to “tra-la-la-lally”.  Thank you for that moment of humor. 

I really enjoyed this.

Thank you so much for reading and taking the time to review!  I'm really glad you enjoyed this story; I don't write concentrated misery very often, so I hesitated for quite a while before posting this.  It's great to hear the details you pick out work just as they were meant to!  And I'm always glad when someone likes my Erestor, since he plays such an important role in all my fic.

Maybe you don't write concentrated misery very often, but you sure know how to do it! It's like a world suddenly coming apart.

Some obstinate corner of my mind still thinks Melinna was meant to live forever. I guess Erestor thought so, too. But certainly she would have gone out fighting--no wonder she left a lasting impression on the orcs, although with gruesome consequences.

I suspect that after the first thousand years or so, it would be very hard for an Elf to really imagine *their own* death, let alone losing someone who'd survived those same thousand years with them.  And Erestor and Melinna have been together a lot longer than that by now.  I'm very glad, in that particular horrible way, that this is convincing!  And thank you so much for reading and taking the time to review - is it sunny now, where you are?  (It's raining here.)

Picking up the threads--both literally and figuratively?

The conclusion seems sort of right in tone--there isn't, quite, a reconciliation to anything and there couldn't  be, I think, but things move on nevertheless.

(I do sort of wonder whether the literary tastes of elvendom ever stood a chance, between Melinna and Erestor...)

Something like that.  I'm glad the tone fits!  I wasn't going to write the next few hundred years in which everyone slowly picks up the pieces - that would have been too dreary for all concerned, I think.  All I wanted to do was put them all on the path.  (And it's not just the literary tastes - think of the historical record too...)

Oh God, Clodia.  Where to start?  I love the whimsy at the beginning.  It's just gorgeous and thick, like honey.  Erestor's teasing Elrond and his wandering thoughts are just too perfect for words.

And then Glorfindel comes and is frightening in his intensity and you convey that so wonderfully.  The way the air almost becomes heavy and still...that's how shock feels.  You nailed that.  

Glorfindel's protectiveness of his friend is so perfect.  

Erestor's thoughts of the past and Elrond are gorgeous and you weave them in so effortlessly (but I know it's work).  

Ah, poor Erestor.  You've written pain as burning as coals, as visible as starlight.  It is gorgeous and it hurts and made me tear up...and I love it.  What a gift you have for words!

Thank you so much!  This was the first Tolkien thing I meant to write and the last thing I did write - for about three years, it was broken off in the middle of a sentence ("Strangely, he heard nothing," I think) while I wrote all the other stories that needed to exist for this to resonate.  It was pretty grim to write this, but I'm never entirely sure when I reread things how much what I felt when I wrote them comes across.  I am VERY glad that you found this moving.

I can't imagine how hard it was to write this.  I have written on Celebrian's capture, though...it was meant to be stylized and horror.  This is true horror that really happens and is worse for it (which is NOT an insult!).  You capture it so well I'm just really in awe of you.  Arwen, in my mind, has always fought to go help find her mother.  Glorfindel certainly went and woe to anyone who tried to keep him.  

Erestor.  The confusion and the way you have him lose track of where in time he is (I love that and use it often because very ancient elves have so much time and memory to sort through) is painful and perfect.  

Pressing on....

Again, thank you!  I deliberately avoided the details of Celebrian's capture, partly because other people have written about it and partly because... well, no, largely because of that: I wanted this to be an emotional story about how it affected everyone else, not a horror story about captivity and torture and all the rest, which other people can do better than me.

Whew.  That was a tough chapter.  But again, it's horrendous what is happening, but....  Well.  If I say I like it does that make me a monster?  It's stomach-churning, it's terrifying in the imagery, it's awful in thinking and imagining.

It's very much like I imagine it would actually be.  Not clean, not sanitized.  And that is the gritty, grimy goodness of this story.  Yeah, it's tough to read.  It should be.  It should be!  And you don't hold any bit of that back, so brava!

Though, ugh.  My stomach hurts. *g*  Another compliment.  I feel it, baby.  I feel his anger and his pain and the burning.  

Amazing writing.

I'm revisiting this fic myself now; it's been almost long enough since I wrote it for me to read it clearly, but you can never really read your own work as if someone else had written it.  I suppose partly because it's still your own imagination you're revisiting, so all the underlying drives are familiar.  I am really enjoying reading it (sort of) through your reviews!

This story hurts, but as they say, it hurts so good.  It is raw and savage and brutal and so honest.  There is such beauty in it as well, and that hurts.  

It would take twenty more readings for me to absorb enough to say something intelligent, so please just take this:  brava.  I'm bleeding and smiling all at once.

Thank you so much - both for reading and for taking the time to write such generous reviews, which were wonderful to wake up to!  This was a hard story to write and I remember being very nervous when I started posting it; I always think of myself as a pretty lighthearted writer of lighthearted things.  I am very, very glad you found it worthwhile to read.