Flammifer by sallysavestheday

Flammifer

Deep in the velvet bowl of night, Eärendil dreams of dragonfire.

It is cold in the heavens. The Silmaril that glimmers from Vingilotë’s mast is cleansing, but it is not warm. Its radiance pierces, icicle-keen and sharper than diamond: brilliantly, achingly white. In the slow watches, Eärendil has tossed it from hand to hand and tucked it into his breast pocket to pulse against his heart. He has slipped it, secretly, into his mouth, to taste its tingling glow. For him, at least, its chilly purity does not burn. Whatever fire of Fëanor’s sparked its blaze is now only a wisp of memory, its heat no longer strong enough to feel.

Shivering alone with his destiny, high in the arc of the sky, Eärendil wraps himself in quilts woven on Elwing’s solitary loom and filled with the down of the geese that keep her company when he is away. The patient birds pluck out their own breast feathers to place in her yearning hands, their beaks softly clashing, their dark eyes gleaming, wary and wise. She traces the patterns of his nightly voyages across the fabric, her needle darting in and out, holding in the heat, holding in her heart.

The warmth is nearly enough.

He has been Elwing’s since her solemn eyes took the measure of him, weary and bedraggled and homeless, and her small hand clasped his own. Both unlike the known world, they recognized each other with a grateful ease, settling together unasked, unquestioned. What politics made of their raw affection was secondary – had they been fisher-maid and shepherd they would still have fallen into one another, ringing with each other’s echoes, safe at last.

It was no hardship to defer the Choice to her. Her bleak face had suddenly sparked to hunger: for their children, for her mother, for the hope of a new beginning and the possibility of joy. Even weary as he was, with his feet still bleeding from Tirion’s diamond-dusted streets and his head aching with the unfiltered Music of Aman, he could not deny her everything they had both believed was lost.

And they have had joy, woven around his comings and goings, private in their tower in the north of the world. They breathe freely there, unpursued by war or statecraft or the desire of others for beauty and fame. The rhythm of the sea pulses through them; they bathe in the patterns of clouds that color their sky.

That bond secures him as he sails his way through the dome of night, curving out into the icy dark, where other roads whisper and the air tastes, at times, of exhaustion and remorse. Vingilotë’s path circles ever homeward, and Elwing will always rise, wings pink in the dawn, to welcome him, singing.

When he dreams, in the black vaults, of the fierce heat of Ancalagon’s maw, beckoning, it is only the cold speaking.

He is not truly regretful, not poised on the railing, not craving the fall.