If Ever She Sang by sallysavestheday

If Ever She Sang

The dreams of Lórien begin as an echo of his elder brother’s Song. Tender-clawed, they send a mind down shadowed paths and promise no return. They are the only language Melian knows, formed as she was in that company and bound, once, to the Vala’s will. When she flees his garden’s boundaries, drawn to the coolness of Ennor’s woods and the bright blood of living, breathing things, the tongue of dreams is what she carries with her, singing.

The first wandering Elves stumble among her trees. They come following her song, chasing her nightingales, seeking her luminous face between the fronds.   

She craves their company, but her soft song binds them, pulls souls away from bodies, lays them down amid the roots until they pale and weather into so many glimmering bones. She mourns them: keening, tangling her hair in the memory of their fingers, dropping her tears in what once were the hollows of their eyes. The loneliness of Lórien has pursued her, and she yearns.

She yearns.

Elwë strays onto her paths unwittingly. Bound for Finwë’s camp, he is far down the track of his tireless mind, remembering Valinor, building fantasies of light and air amid Nan Elmoth’s gloom. The nightingales’ trills do not divert him. He barely seems to register Melian’s croons.

The dreams in her mouth hold no image of him. He is a new thing entirely, with hair like stars on the water and long, cool, confident hands.

Undeterred by her darkness, Elwë calls out his own verses in a song of purpose and ambition, of vigorous, exuberant life. He slips through the tangles of the underbrush, his rich voice curling and coaxing, teasing the briars out of his way. His certainty draws her out of her lethargy, reshaping her webs, unwinding her ropes.

Melian breathes and hums, tasting a new music under her tongue. The bones on the forest floor murmur and turn.

Elwë’s pale lips tremble at the smooth jet and spangled silver of her, still as night in the clearing at the heart of the forest. Only then does his proud song falter, tripping over the mysteries in her eyes.

The stars wheel and alter as they weave their dreams together. A dark thread of song winds softly around them, curling through Nan Elmoth's watchful trees; bleeding into the forest's still waters; echoing like the toll of a great, cold bell in the shimmering expanse of the sky.