Homecoming by Lferion

Homecoming

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The ships were not as shining, as new, as clean as when they left, a childhood before, returning to the great harbors of Avallónë and Alqualondë, the smaller ports of smaller cities on the shores of Tol Eressëa and Eldamar, at the end of the War of Wrath. They and their crews had never been in the thick of the fighting, transport only, supply, occasional succor to the local fishing-boats, courier-skiffs, refugee coracles and rafts. But they had breathed in the smokes and miasma of Morgoth's malice, fended off the drowned and ravaged bodies of orcs and monsters, things that had once be elves, men, dwarves, in the aftermath of desperate sea-side struggles over the long years the war had stretched. If they had been innocent or ignorant or naive before, they were no longer.

And now they were coming home, the war won, Morgoth defeated, the Exile lifted for nearly all, the way to the West now open. Thus the warriors who survived came home the long way over sea, the Exiles who had seen the Trees, sailed in stolen ships or crossed the Ice, those born and raised under star and sunlight for whom the West was a tale, not a memory, a home they had never seen. There were Falathrim ships in that fleet, battered but sturdy, the cut of their sails and shapes of their keels different from the Telerin ships, and whose hulls had never been white.

Seabirds flew overhead, heralding them from afar, making a racket of sound amid the storm of their wings, gulls and pelicans, petrels and albatrosses and cormorants.

On the docks, the shore, the sea-walls, people working put down their nets, their tools, the things they were carrying, stopping where they were to watch the ships come in. Others ran to spread the news, tell portmasters and town councils, to assemble some kind of welcome. Everyone knew people -- family, friends, guild-fellows, figures out of tales -- who might be on that fleet of ships, the ones coming to their town, their dock, but not who would be coming down the gangway. Who would be coming home. What news there would be of those who were not.

On the ships, people watched the land come closer, rising up out of the sea. Would they be met? Would people be glad to see them? They were not the same people who had left before the Sun rose, even those who had sailed on these very ships were not the same as they had been. And the Sindar, Iathrim, Falathrim, Avari, who had never thought to Sail, would they find welcome? Kin? Their storied dead alive again? Would this land of proclaimed peace know what to do with those whose entire lives had been composed of violence and struggle?

Up and down the coast, people started singing as the various ships pulled into various docks, making fast. Songs of welcome, of gladness, old and new and made up on the spot.

Welcome, well come!