One More Song by Rocky41_7

One More Song

            The traveler coming up the dirt path moved with slow certainty, winding steadily towards the house. The day was breezy; overhead, a few thin clouds hurried by. The figure wore a simple green cloak with a pointed hood drawn up; the ankles were wrapped in linens beneath the worn hem of short trousers, the feet brown and bare. Fastred stood on the porch and watched the approach through the trees, across the clearing created around the house, surrounded on all sides by thick pine and its accompanying underbrush. The summer vibrance of the flowers had died down, trending towards the green and brown fall that would soon envelop the area. Perhaps so alone, so isolated, Fastred should have felt greater fear, but there was more curiosity than unease. They stood still and waited until the traveler stopped before the first step of the porch as though awaiting permission to move closer.

            “Are you the child? Dior?” the wanderer asked in Sindarin, of which Fastred did not speak much. He was certainly one of the Eldar; he had that ageless, ethereal beauty about him, in spite of the eclectic dress of one long on the road. His eyes were green, oddly pale in his dark face, and his hair bound up in a wrap beneath the hood. There were thin little tattoos on his hands. “Is she here?” he pressed when Fastred shook their head. He spoke as one who is unaccustomed to doing so and worried he was doing it wrong, yet there was a melodic cadence to his voice somehow soothing.

            Fastred did not know why they let let the stranger into the house. Perhaps it was a feeling.

            The Elf stepped into the hall and drifted towards the entrance of the parlor, his delicate hands twisting anxiously at the strap of his bag about his chest, looking around as if he expected to find something lost there. From her bedside by the hearth (for she had grown too weak of late to mount the stairs, and so Fastred had moved the bed down to the parlor), Dior’s mother spoke, as if she and the wanderer had been playing some game which had just concluded.

            “Dae-dae,” Lúthien exclaimed feebly. “You found me!” She spoke in Sindarin.

            The one-time loremaster of the Kingdom of Doriath threw back his hood and crossed quickly to the bed to kneel beside it.

            “Of course I—I would always—if I had thought you—” How unlike him to struggle so for words! In apparent anguish, he gripped the worn, veiny hand which Lúthien offered him with care, trembling to feel she who had once swung him about as if he were no weightier than a fawn in the spirited dances of the Iathrim so frail under his touch. “I am sorry I did not come sooner,” he said. With the distance he kept from society in those days, he was rarely informed of anything.

            “Sit, sit,” she insisted. “Let me see you.” Hesitantly, still dusty with travel, Daeron shifted to perch on the edge of the bed. Lúthien had told tales of the legendary minstrel of her father Elu Thingol, whose song and hand spun harmonies so beautiful as to make Maiar weep; who had created an alphabet of nothing; who could recall anything you liked about Doriath’s history and culture off the top of his head, and make it into a rhyme to boot. Lúthien let out a rusty laugh, peering at him with rheumy eyes. Her hair had gone steely gray where it had once been jet-black, brittle where it had once been supple and soft. “Just as handsome as I remember!” She tweaked his ear. “But what happened to your braids, Daeron?”

            “Tell me what I can do for you,” he pleaded, no hint of Lúthien’s mirth reaching his face. She gazed into those sage-green eyes—how well she recognized that furrow in his brow, that distressed downturn to his mouth! He had not changed a whit; she might have said goodbye to him only an hour ago, in a life that felt almost as if it had been lived by someone else. Was she not someone else then?  

            “Play something,” she said.

            I cannot, he wanted to say. I do not play anymore. I have no songs for grief like this. How can you ask me to play at such a time? Even if all of those things were so—and they were not, he had always known how to weave a melody for sorrow and longing—he should have found a way, for Lúthien. He shed his pack onto the floor and withdrew from his cloak a set of pan pipes: The same set he had carried when Lúthien first remembered seeing him; the same set on which he had warbled before the dais of Thingol and Melian the Maia to win their approval and his place at Thingol’s side—the same set which, to the chagrin of the king and his guests, Daeron preferred above all gifts he was given either to honor his skill or to win favor with Thingol.

            He put them to his mouth and began to play.

            Daeron’s music, so surpassingly, achingly transcendent that it was said to be unbearable by mortal heart, said to carry in it an echo of the Ainulindale, brought tears to the eyes of Lúthien, and to those of her caretaker Fastred, though Lúthien’s fell in silence. Daeron did not hear the snuffling of the mortal behind him as he played; there was nothing in the room for him—indeed, nothing in all the world but Lúthien, now aged and wan and so soon to be beyond his world forever.

            As the yearning, tearful notes of his music filled the room with marvelous pain, she thought of a time long passed when she had pressed herself to his side under the trees and begged him for a song for light gone dark and laughter dead and how in her grief he had piped a voice to her suffering in the wake of Beren’s departure, until even the birds of the forest fell silent to attend his lamenting.

            When he stopped, he was weeping to heavily to carry on.

            “Now, none of that!” Lúthien scolded, her voice paper-thin, as Daeron’s pipes came to rest in his lap. “There is nothing for to weep, Daeron.” It took so much effort to move her body these days, but she struggled against the pillows, to sit just a little more upright, that she might reach out and touch his cheek. Over by the front window, hasty movements as Fastred swiped at their eyes.

            “You are dying,” Daeron said, his lovely voice breaking, now meeting her gaze with a fresh wave of tears.

            “This was my choice,” she whispered, stroking his smooth, unblemished cheek. There was a tremor in her hand that would not stop; she had grown accustomed to it by then. “This is what I wanted.” A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Soon, I will see Beren again.”

            “There will be no beauty in the world again as you, once you are gone,” said Daeron. He took her hand from his cheek and pressed a kiss to her fingers, his lips wet with tears. The joints of her fingers and wrist were swollen and hot.

            “But there will be you to sing of it,” she said, the corners of her mouth upturned. “So how fortunate is the rest of Middle-earth!” He did not reply, and then:

            “How long ago was he lost?” Daeron asked.

            “A few months,” said Lúthien.

            “I’m sorry,” said Daeron, and he meant it.

            “Do not be—already we had more time than I had once thought we would,” she said. “Have you seen our son, Dior? He was here…” Lúthien glanced about and Daeron hesitated, for as he understood, Dior remained in Doriath. It struck him she might suffer from the confusion of her advanced age and the knowledge pierced him like an arrowhead. “There is nothing I regret,” she said firmly. “But now, Daeron, speak not to me as some dying old woman. Am I not still your friend of old? Have you forgotten our adventures?” His lower lip trembled and Lúthien sighed and sobered, stroking his hand. “Oh, my Daeron,” she murmured, sinking deeper into the pillows. “Hush, now. It will not be goodbye forever. For a very long time, perhaps, but not forever.”

            Daeron choked and bowed over her hand, but then steeled himself as much as he could and swallowed down his tears. He wiped his face dry on the back of his hand and raised his head. She was right—and he would not spend the last time he had with her blubbering like a fool over something he could not change. He would have as long as he like to weep about it afterwards.

            “What can I do to please my princess?” he asked, as if they were still laying about his chambers on a lazy summer afternoon while Lúthien concocted a scheme for their amusement and he plucked at his lyre. “Tell me what to do, Lulu.”

            Lúthien’s wrinkled face split into a smile and he fancied even then there was a familiar sparkle in those tired eyes.

            “Play something for me, won’t you, minstrel mine?” she croaked. Daeron nodded, and took up his pipes again, and this time his notes danced with joy, and the memory of many happy years spent under tree in the land they had called home, behind Melian’s spells and under Thingol’s gentle hand, years rich in laughter and dancing and song, when their thoughts had freedom to be childish and carefree. Into his piping he sought to pour all of the love and joy and companionship which he had felt with Lúthien in those years, that he might with this song impart on her his gratitude that she had been a part of his life, that she might know how those memories with her shone in his mind. Perhaps, that she might remember him once she had departed to wherever Ephedrim went when they left Arda, and if he were lucky, think fondly of him still. Once more he filled the small and lovingly-tended home of Beren and Lúthien with his song, and it was the final occasion on which the music of Daeron of Doriath, mightiest musician of the Eldar, would be heard in Beleriand.

Chapter End Notes

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