Winterlights by Elleth

Mischief at the Feast

For prompt #13: Grinch. Tauriel's visitor knows ways to make a night of guarding more pleasant.

In the distance, already, the drums of the feast begin.

Baraneth sways her hips in the rhythm while she walks, giving Tauriel a glance from beneath coy lashes. “What are we out here for when there is light and music and a feast to be had?”

"So that the light and music and the feast may continue undisturbed. The noise attract less kindly guests, and – there is a story I must tell you sometime, a company of Dwarves that would surely have made off with our feast if not for our guards and magics…"

Baraneth laughs. “Would that I could show you Dorwinion,” she speaks close into Tauriel’s ear, eliciting a shiver. “Sing you our traditions, and teach our magics… more ancient than yours, I wager.”

"And what," says Tauriel with failing voice and weakening knees, for Baraneth’s mouth now nipping down on her neck is magic itself, "would you wager?"

"Hmm, perhaps just that, teaching you – taiai,” hums Baraneth in a peculiar tone, and Tauriel, opening her eyes finds herself and Baraneth becoming shadows, feeling a warm hand tug her forward, hearing her sun-bright laughter, seeing nothing. “Let others do the guarding, we have a feast to plunder.”

Chapter End Notes

I decided to make the inhabitants of Dorwinion Avari of the Hwenti tribe, and taiai is a hypothetical plural formation derived from Primitive Elvish daiâ, shadow, based on the one-word corpus we have of that language.