So We Rise by sallysavestheday

So We Rise

While the Teleri praise with song, and the Noldor with craft, the Vanyar dance. Every feast day finds the great squares of Valimar filled with ecstatic spinners making their way through the gyres, their bright hair buoyant around them in the tide of their passing. The dance is simple: an embodied memory. The rhythmic whirling opens the way to joy.

They turn and turn, gleaming, as the drums pound. The pulse of the step and slide enraptures. At the bottom of each ritual spiral they pause, and their arms arc up, unfolding: shoulder to elbow to wrist to palm. The cup of each open hand offers the dancer’s heart; it claims the light.

Elenwë keeps the custom even after her marriage to Turgon and her move to Tirion; sometimes alone, sometimes with Glorfindel or with Indis. Her body knows the curves of the dance with eyes wide open or shut, in clear air or in rain. The ground holds her up. The sky opens to her reaching.

She has just begun to teach Idril to spin, to rise, to sing with her body’s being, when the Darkness swallows all praise.

The Noldor's bitterness spills into repudiation after Alqualondë and Araman. Still, as they make their slow way across the Ice, Elenwë finds time to dance with her daughter, holding the vanished light in her mind and smiling. Idril is a soft, round ball in her furs, but when the march is over she will shed them and grow tall. She will turn like the pillar of light she is meant to be, shining.

They are dancing when the ice cracks: Idril in her mother’s arms, leaning back, her arms out, laughing. The spin carries them into the gap, and down.

The blood pounds in Elenwë’s throat as she kicks and kicks, chasing a simple rhythm in the choking cold. She pushes her arms up, under Idril. Shoulder to elbow to wrist to palm, unfolding. As the current claims her, she thrusts her heart into Turgon’s hands, lifting Idril back toward memory and the hope of light.