His Hour Had Come by polutropos

Chapter 1

The Narn i chîn Húrin explains that Saeros was a Nando (Green-elf) and son of Ithilbor, chief of the Guest-elves. The Guest-elves were Nandor who lived in the forest Arthórien in the southeast corner of Doriath, granted to them by Thingol after the First Battle of Beleriand and the death of Denethor, their leader, on Amon Ereb.

Lechind = Flame-eyes, Sindarin name for the Noldor. (I've let the Nandor use it also).
Belegurth = an altered form of Sindarin Belegûr (= Quenya Melkor) meaning 'Great Death'. I wanted something unique for the Nandor to use but couldn't be bothered to come up with my own name.
Loegeth is a combination of Nandorin loeg ('pool') and the Sindarin name ending -eth.

Violence was rare in Doriath. Nearly unheard of in Menegroth, where Queen Melian’s unfailing songs filled the caverns with soothing rhythms. But my father had always been prone to violent words and violent thoughts, at least since I was born. That was after the battle on Amon Ereb. My mother said that had changed him. He had nearly died, but in the end had been cut off from the fighting and pursued into the hills by orcs. When he returned, it was to the bodies of hundreds of his people and kin piled in heaps among the trees.

My parents stayed behind when my grandfather accepted the protection of the Girdle and left to dwell in Arthórien. Out of an obligation my father felt to those of us who remained behind, my mother said. I was born to them on the banks of the Legolin, under the light of the Sun. A symbol of renewal.

I do not remember much of my father in those years. He often journeyed through Ossiriand alone, and when he returned to us he spoke seldom. When he did, it was with regret and bitterness for all that we had lost. But when Men arrived from over the mountains, he became resentful and bold and spoke often against them. He was angry, which seemed at least better than despair. I, too, was angry. The Aftercomers brought down entire trees with their axes, leaving nothing but a hewn trunk and roots, left to rot beneath the earth. They slew beasts without ceremony, without thanks. We all hated them. It was a hatred that spread like a fire in the wind – until the Lechind put them to use in their wars.

It was not enough for my father. He never stopped fearing them, even when they ceased to trouble us. That was when he took us to join Ithilbor in Arthórien. He devoted himself to governance. He spoke well, passionately, persuasively. He was loved and listened to in Doriath as he had never been in Ossiriand.

And he returned to his art. My mother was well-pleased, for she said he had been a great musician, before the war and the dwindling of our people. He poured himself into his music. He composed songs in our own language, about our history and our beliefs, the way we saw the world. They were sung even in the Great Hall of Menegroth. He became the pride of my people.

He became proud, also. In his pride, he began to scorn those who had not worked as hard as he had for their station. But he kept his scorn to himself in court. It was only my mother and I who heard it, privately, when we visited him in Menegroth. We knew it did not serve him, but it seemed a small thing. Easy to brush aside, because we knew he was a talented performer. We believed he would never let this darkness in him seep out where it should not. Let him unburden himself of it with us, we agreed between ourselves, so that he need not carry it with him elsewhere.

Had we been with him more often, we might have seen that my father already did so. We would have seen the widening hole he had carved in his heart and filled with hatred. Hatred that he turned against Beren’s young kinsman who had been taken as Thingol’s fosterson for no other reason than his distant kinship to that thief who had brought sorrow and discord to Doriath.

(My father was not wrong in this. The King was blinded by love of his daughter, as so many were; he clung to the memory of Princess Lúthien by whatever means he could – that jewel of Fëanor, the kin of her beloved. It is perhaps treason to confess it, but I am not of the Iathrim. And Elu Thingol, whom my heart never truly took as King, was in the end killed on account of his possessive love.)

The night my father came home with a broken jaw, it was too late to change his course.

The doors to his quarters were seldom closed, for he welcomed guests, but he shut them behind him with a clatter of wood against stone. He was otherwise silent and only cast a glance at my mother, seated on a stool grinding spices, as he swept past. Seeing the blood on his sleeve and the palm that cupped his face, she leapt up and ran towards him. She cried out in despair and begged to know what had happened.

“That woodwose!” he slurred between shattered bones. “The marches have turned him into a beast whose only language is violence!”

I watched him flinch away from his wife’s touch, the elf who had been beside him since before our people crossed over the mountains.

“The woodwose will find he is not the only one who can speak…” his threat faltered when his roving gaze caught my mother’s worried eyes.

Man though he was, Túrin was the fosterson of Thingol and Melian, and beloved of Beleg Cúthalion. If any Man could learn gentleness, it ought to have been him. It shocked me that he would bring such violence into the safety of Menegroth. But it was easier for me to understand than it was for my mother. It did not surprise me that a violent man would use it against my father. It made my heart clench with shame, but there were times when I had wanted to hurt him, too.

My father’s eyes were as dark and sinister as the bruise claiming one side of his face. A sneer disappeared into the purpled swelling.

“Loegeth,” my mother said to me, without looking away from his wound. “Bring the salves for bleeding and for pain.”

But when I went to apply the ointment for pain, my father rejected it. We did not ask too many questions. It hurt him to speak, we could see that. I should have said something. I should have found his weapons and hidden them. But I had little love for Túrin, either, and I had spent too little time with my father in recent years to guess what he might do.

I have wondered if the hand of chance had arranged for us to be there with him that night – and if we failed. They say Túrin and his kin were cursed by Belegurth. Perhaps my family was drawn into that curse. Perhaps it was the Enemy’s hand that stayed my mother and I, that allowed my father to nurse his hurt and fill himself with blackness.

Or perhaps I did not try harder to restrain his rage because, quite simply, I did not love him enough.

He did not turn into bed when we did. In the morning, he was gone and so was his sword and shield. My mother did not think it was her place to intervene in quarrels. ‘Let him put the boy in his place,’ she said. ‘Someone must. It would do him well.’ Her fault was loving him too much, and trusting him to act as she remembered him. So it was not until Anor reached its highest point in the sky that I finally went looking for him, alone. Resigned to taking up the role of parent to my own father.

But his body was already broken on the rocks by the time I left. Later, King Thingol judged that he had deserved his fate. I do not think so. I did not love my father as a daughter should, but no Child of Eru deserves to be shamed and hunted to death. Túrin’s life was sorrowful, the stories say. How could he have become anything but brooding and violent? We should pity him. But what of my father? Did he not also have reasons for his violence? They were not so different, my father and the child who drove him to his death.

Chapter End Notes

Title is from the Lay of the Children of Húrin. Thingol is asking the kin of Orgof (later Saeros) to show forgiveness to Túrin.

... 'his hour had come
that he should seek the sad pathway
to the deep valley of Dead Awaiting,
there a thousand years thrice to ponder
in the gloom of Gurthrond his grim jesting,
ere he fare to Faërie to feast again.'

Lines 544-49