The Strands that Bind by AdmirableMonster

Chalcedony was hiding in the cellar again.  It was quieter in the cellar, and if she squinted, she could use her candle to reread her storybook from Gondor, and even the damp cellar was quite comfortable with the little lamp oil heater on.  Of course her father would happily read it to her if she asked, even when it was well past dinner-time, but that would inevitably attract a crowd of young cousins, and she was not currently willing to put up with being begged for pig-a-backs and called Boromir until her heart ached.

It shouldn’t ache, she knew: she knew this fiercely, intimately, a sharp spine lodged beneath her breastbone.  She had been named for a hero who had saved her father and his best friend when all hope seemed lost, and he had died for it.  But the name, so glowing and wonderful when it was applied to the Man who had battled against the Ring during the adventures well before she was born, was nothing but a thorn working inwards at her heart, and she didn’t know why.  

(She did, really, if she thought too hard about it or dwelt on it for too long.  She knew why the name Chalcedony felt right—such a pretty gem, especially when it was placed underneath the lens apparatus that Uncle Sam had found in Mr. Frodo’s basement after he left.  It made such patterns as she had never seen before—like feathers and flounces and lace, all rolled into one.  Oh, if she could stitch herself a fine dress of stone and gemwork!  But she was not a lady, and she could not be a lady, and no amount of wishing would make it so.)

Ah, she was too restless to read.  She rose abruptly, the storybook slipping from her lap and falling onto the dusty ground below.  Normally, she took more care with her things—especially the books—but she felt cramped and constrained, itching in her own skin.  She plucked nervously at the shapeless woolen sweater she wore, though it wasn’t really the culprit.

There were boxes piled up to the ceilings in places—more than she’d realized—and she found herself sorting through them just for something to do.  They had writing scrawled on them in Da’s broad, messy handwriting.  In a few places she found her mother’s handwriting as well.  Maybe some of them had never been unpacked when they moved to the larger burrow.

The realization that some of these things might be forgotten piqued her curiosity and made her chest thrum.  Perhaps she could be a famous scholar, searching for answers in the ruins of a forgotten city.  She opened the first one and pulled out a set of earthenware plates that she had not seen in years and barely even remembered.  This would certainly have to be inspected beneath the lens apparatus.  A second yielded three fluffy and rather poorly-stitched sweaters.  She rather thought that Ma might have made those before Da took over all the knitting.  The third—she had not expected what she found in the third.

At first it seemed to be just a series of wrapped packages of odd shapes.  Then as she began to unwrap them, she realized with a queer little thrill that this had been part of Ma’s jewelry.  She must not have realized it was all still down here.  Chalcedony unwrapped a jade pendant and a pair of pretty crystal tear-drop earrings.  There was a brooch, too—a serpent with iridescent, enameled scales coiling across a base of gold.  And finally—

The box itself was wooden, and it looked old.  The careful curlicues of carven flowers had probably once been sharp, but now their edges had worn away into smooth lumps, and in places the carvings themselves had been all but erased.  A white material in the center formed an inlaid pattern of a daisy with eight kite-shaped petals.

The others she remembered.  Somewhere in the back of her head she recalled her ma wearing them.  But this box did not even look as if it had been opened.  There was a wax seal across it, though the wax had melted and run and whatever had been imprinted into it was long since effaced.  For a moment, she hesitated.  She did not want to be in trouble for this.  But the box was warm in her hands, and probably it had been opened before and the wax had just melted over as if it hadn’t.

She broke the seal and pulled up the wooden top of the case, heart pounding loudly in her ears.  It was a little anticlimactic when she found nothing more than another box, small and made of tarnished metal with a series of worn-down grapes imprinted on the lid.  Chalcedony frowned and flipped up the lid, half-expecting this one to be empty.  

Her breath rushed out in a noise like oooohhh.  

The necklace lying on a bed of surprisingly plush velvet was not like any jewelry Chalcedony had seen before.  It was longer—it would probably have come to her mother’s waist and might fall even lower on her.  And although it had been in this box long enough for the wax to melt, the bright yellow color of the little metal beads and the housings of the larger glass ones shone bright and pure.  Chalcedony frowned and reached out to touch one of the purple-brown spheres like fruit clustered on a golden vine.

She is staring at a young Mannish woman, who is frowning and leaning forward, nose nearly knocking against the slightly discolored glass in front of her.  No—it is a mirror—Chalcedony is looking into a mirror at someone who is not herself.  She has a brief moment of terrible disorientation when she realizes that she is falling into the mind of someone who is as uncomfortable with the pretty breasts swelling beneath the dark red-purple gown as she is being still without them even as she nears the halfway point of her adolescence.  Then she is swept away beneath the tide of thoughts and feelings.

Nimruzimir stared at himself in the mirror; he did not like what he saw.  This gown revealed far more flesh than it concealed, and it made him feel even more like a stranger in his own body than usual.  Worse, one of the handmaidens his father had brought with them on the journey had insisted on doing up his face in a manner that he did not particularly appreciate.  His own dull brown eyes peered out from inside a mess of blacks and purples, as if he had been in a fistfight.  It could hardly be called attractive.

But this was what the young ladies of the island were wearing, so he supposed he had no choice.  His father had spent more than a few coins on the necklace, as well, and if he would rather have loitered around the smithy and asked probing questions about the process of its manufacture, well—a proper young lady could not do such a thing.  It would have the smiths whispering amongst themselves about both of them, and the mere thought of that sent a horrible hot blush crawling up the back of his neck.

The necklace was not ugly, at least—it was a beautiful thing, made of dark brown-purple glass beads set in gold, and it had come in a sumptuous little box made of silver metal and ornamented with grapes painted the same color as the velvet interior.  It was like his father’s love for him, he thought, with an uncharacteristic sentimentality—rich and beautiful and intended for a totally different object than Nimruzimir himself.

He wanted to be the perfect daughter, if not for his mother, who had left, then at least for his father, who was trying very hard.  The worried furrow never left his forehead these days.  But he also wanted, so terribly badly, to be able to be himself.

* * *

Chalcedony snatched her hand back as if she had burned it.  Her heart was thumping with a terrible frenetic rhythm in her ears.  What had that been?  Who had she seen?  She flung the little box across the room, and it rebounded off the far wall and landed on the ground with a soft little thump.  One end of the necklace was dangling out of it, as if the box had swallowed it nearly whole but left a bit of its dinner dangling from its chin.

She must have imagined it.  She could not really have been there, in that cramped little dressing room smelling of what she shouldn’t know had been salt water, staring at a body that would have been perfect for her but had been all wrong for its actual occupant. 

Hovering at the edge of the cellar steps, she considered going back upstairs.  Things might have quieted down by now.  She could just leave the necklace here and forget about it.

She started up the steps and then paused and looked back.  It was just a necklace, and it was such a pretty one, too.  What kind of famous scholar would she be if she just left it here, without trying to discover where it had come from?  Nothing had happened until she touched the jewelry itself.  She was being a ridiculous little faunt.

Her heart pounding in her chest, she turned around and ran back across the room, scooping up the box without touching the necklace, and then pounding up the stairs as if the Orcs of Mordor were at her heels.  She reached the top and stopped, panting, feeling rather silly.

Nothing had happened.  Nothing at all.

* * *

She found her parents blowing smoke rings outside on the patio, looking happy and relaxed.  They had probably eaten a great deal more dinner than she had, but then they both seemed to like company more than she did.  Perhaps she would like company more if—

Deliberately squashing this train of thought, she tiptoed up behind her dad—an old game, but a fun one.  Before she could grab his eyes and shout, “Boo!” he had rolled his head back and grabbed her wrist.

“Nice try, kid,” he chuckled.  “But you’re going to have to be faster than that before you get one over on the hero of the Pelennor Fields!”

“Daaaa.”  She extricated herself and sat on the wide arm of his chair, trying to seem casual.  “Do you know what this is?  I found it in the cellar.”

“What is it?” Her mother yawned and leaned forward from her own seat.  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.”

“Let me see.”  Da plucked the box out of her hands.  “Was it sealed?”

“Um…I’m not sure.  The wax was melted!”  She really hoped she hadn’t done something to get in trouble for.  Her entire family was well aware of the sorts of trouble that you could get into if you delved out cursed jewelry.

Da said a word that made Ma click her tongue at him.  “Ah, sorry, dearest.  But if this is sealed, it means that it was never opened.  And I had planned to give it to my sweetheart if I ever had one.”

This made Ma giggle and blow a smoke ring at him.  “Well, you certainly didn’t do that, Merry.  What is it?”

“I don’t know, it was sealed.  I got it for a few coins in Gondor from a trader who said it had traveled a long way.”

“A long way?  How far?” Chalcedony wanted to know.

“Up the Greyflood and down the North-South road, at least.  Though he thought it might have come further than that.  He promised me it would be very beautiful, but it looks as if Estella’s fool husband—” He smiled at Ma, “—completely forgot it was there.  Well, what is it, then?”

Chalcedony’s heart thumped, loudly, once in her chest.  Then she opened the box, brushing her fingers gently over the necklace inside.  Nothing happened, and her breath rushed out in a whoosh.  She had imagined it, then.  She picked up carefully and held it out, dangling from her hand, the gold and glass glittering in the last light of the evening sun.

“May I have it?” she blurted.  “I, I mean, I want to look at it in my lens apparatus, it’s—so—”  She bit her tongue, afraid of what she might say.

Da chuckled.  “It’s really your ma’s.”

“Nonsense,” said Ma briskly.  “If you want it, my lad, you may have it.  Finders keepers and none of this nonsense, Meriadoc.  You’re the one who never gave it to me.  What would I do with such a gaudy bauble anyway?”

Chalcedony found that she was clutching the necklace to her heart immediately.  It was so pretty—it was the prettiest thing she had ever owned.  And she did, she told herself, want to look at it in the lens apparatus.  Maybe there would be a clue about where it had come from.  A real clue, not something that she imagined out of nowhere.

Yes, she told herself again, she would find a real clue and not imagine any more nonsense.

Chapter End Notes

“Chalcedony” is a mineral, a category of silicones with a number of gemstones belonging to it, including agate and onyx.

There was a pond near the northern border of the Old Forest that Chalcedony’s father said he used to play beside when he was a child, but none of the Shire children were allowed to go there anymore.  It was said to be poisoned.  There were no fish living in it now, and no plants, and several stray cats had gotten very sick.  Some of the nearby hobbits maintained that it was enchanted, because the cats had nearly “danced themselves to death,” but Chalcedony felt that this lacked evidence.

If the fish and plants were dying, poison seemed to be a much simpler explanation, and by all counts, before she was born, Old Man Sharkey had gone around poisoning everything.  Her da said that Uncle Sam had taken it particularly hard—he used to go fishing there with the mythical Mr. Frodo.  Some of the places that Old Man Sharkey had hurt had healed over the years, and some were in the process of it, but the little pond was not one of them.  No one even dared to go there.

Chalcedony liked Uncle Sam very much, and somehow this pond had captured her imagination.  She didn’t get too close, but she did sometimes hover well back from it, peering at it from a distance and wondering whether there were some way it could be healed, or if it would forever be a place of death now, which seemed very sad.

Because she thought about it quite often, it wasn’t very surprising that she dreamed about something like it that night.  A little too old now for her parents to read her to sleep, she usually curled up with a book—either one from her own house or one she had borrowed from Elanor—but tonight she took the necklace and a little leather-bound notebook with her, thinking she might sketch it or take some preliminary notes before examining it with the lens apparatus the following day.  She was certainly not planning on falling asleep the moment she tucked herself into bed.

It is like seeing a view through a dark window stained with grime, at first, browned and blackened and smudged, but the view wavers and comes slowly into focus.  She is looking at a small hand encased in a thick glove of some dark material and holding out a tube of glass.  (She is dreaming, clearly.)

Nimruzimir frowned, feet unsteady on the wet sand, crouching by the water’s edge.  The glass beads of his necklace he had wound carefully about his wrist, and they knocked together with a slight noise as he bent to submerge the test tube.  He had learned his lesson well enough from some of the burns he had received when he was younger; now he would not even take samples from the ocean without some sort of protection.

“You really think it’s contaminated.”

“Do you doubt me?”

Lilóteo sighed, and Nimruzimir glanced up at his lover.  “No,” he said.  “I just wish I did.  And where would it have come from?”

“An abandoned outpost, I imagine.  I have it on good authority that there was a site nearby that produced weed-killers and fertilizers.  Many of the colonies have been withdrawing towards the central authorities in the north and the west, and I find it difficult to believe that they would have sufficiently contained the poisons.”

A grunt, not quite an obscenity.  Lilóteo frowned, walking back and forth.  “I guess I should start going door to door to see if anyone is willing to be physically examined.”

“If the children start getting sick, they probably will be.  People will not move until they see a threat, and by then it is often t-t-too l-late.  There.”  He stoppered the tube and tucked it away at his belt.  “Come.  Th-There are s-several more locations I w-would like to test.”

A hand dropped onto his shoulder and squeezed.  “Nimruzimir,” Lilóteo said quietly.  “This is good work.  You know that, right?”

The sense of comfort was greater than he had expected, and he found himself turning to lean his head briefly against the larger man’s chest.  “It is n-n-necessary work,” he said, and his own voice sounded so dry and clipped to his ears.

The window seems to frost over, clouding as if crystals of frost are forming across it.  Chalcedony stirs and half-wakes, but the room is dark, shadows playing along the walls.  Beyond, faint white starlight filters in, terribly distant, and then melts away to become lights too bright to be fire, glittering fiercely on black water beneath a flat stone bridge.

Nimruzimir frowned at the flask, pushing his glasses up his nose.  The liquid appeared to be clear, but he had prepared it meticulously.  How it would help them to know for certain if there was, as he suspected, quicksilver present in the reservoir, he did not know.  Would the children stop playing there?  Would their parents finally listen to him, stop shooing him away and whispering witch behind his back?  Or would nothing change at all?

The latter, probably, but at least he would know, one way or the other.  He picked up the vial containing the water he had harvested from the reservoir, in a hand that trembled slightly too much.  He paused, trying to recall, but he had taken his tonic.  He might not have had a meal today, though, come to think of it.  Well, he’d get something after finishing up here.

He took a deep breath, steadying his hand to the best of his ability as he tipped the vial of water into the flask of dissolved coal tar extract (corruinë, the Elvish texts called it, or some modification thereof).  A drop of the water still splattered on his counter, which was not ideal, but he supposed it could be cleaned up.  More pressing was the fact that he had immediately seen the liquid inside take on a pale violet.  Over the course of the next little while, it steadily darkened in hue.

So he had been right.  Quicksilver contamination.  He stripped off his gloves inside out and wondered what he ought to do next.  One hand went to his eye, slowly fingering the tender bruise around it where the father of one of the ill children had struck him.  It stung rather less than the memory of the mother scolding her husband for striking a woman.

* * *

Morning sunlight speared through the curtains; Chalcedony winced and blinked, rolling over with a groan.  The necklace glittered on her pillow, looking like nothing so much as a string of droplets of murky liquid.  Beneath the beads, the pillow-case looked stained.

Chalcedony rolled away from it, staring at it.  It could have been a dream, she told herself; as much as it had unsettled her, it hadn’t felt—ugly.  It had been queer and strange, the world seen through a darkling glass, but it had not felt—she groped for the words.  It had not felt the way Uncle Sam had described the Ring.  It had not felt like the way Uncle Pippin had described the Seeing Stone.

(It did not look foul, not precisely—eerie, perhaps, the shadows clinging to it oddly.  It did not feel fair, precisely, either, but it did not feel foul either.)

Gingerly, she brushed her fingers across the top of it.  Nothing happened, not even a static shock.  Gaining a little courage, she gathered the beads up quickly in her hand and then tucked them back into their metal case, which she put back into the wooden case.  She took a deep breath.  She needed advice, and she needed it from someone who would not react too energetically when she explained what was going on.

* * *

Uncle Sam was working in his garden when Chalcedony arrived.   Chalcedony was a fair gardener herself, and often helped out with it.  She enjoyed herself here.  It was quiet and remote, and she didn’t have to talk to anyone if she didn’t want to. She could even get away with wearing one of her ma’s old aprons while she was doing it.  She’d had a whole story ready, about how it would keep the dirt off better than anything else she had available, and Da didn’t have anything like that—but Uncle Sam hadn’t even asked, he’d just nodded at her and set her to weeding the carrots.

Now the necklace made a heavy weight in her apron pocket.  She couldn’t help feeling oddly guilty about it.  Something inside her was telling her that he would tell her that she must give it up, and the things she had already seen frightened her, but—but it was hers.  It was her necklace—her very first necklace—and as much as the visions disquieted her, she wanted to know more.  More about Nimruzimir, about who he was, where he was—or where he had been—and how the necklace had gotten from him to her.

“Uncle Sam?” Chalcedony said, and she heard her voice quavering a little, which she had no patience for.

He looked up with a wide smile, rubbing his forehead with the back of his hand.  “It’s good to see you, lad.”  

She twisted a hand in her hair, which was growing long, then in the next moment wished she hadn’t.  Her father had made a few noises about her cutting it, but recently she had managed to avoid drawing attention to it. Uncle Sam didn’t seem to notice, at least.

Shifting back and forth on her feet, she shoved one hand deep into her apron pocket and clutched at the box.  “I have something I want to talk to you about, sir?”

Sir wasn’t what she usually called him, but she felt all out of sorts, too hot for comfort, once again as if her own skin were a heavy sweater.  To her relief, he didn’t comment on it, but only nodded to the basket lying beside him.  “There’s another pair of gardening gloves in there.  It’s always better to talk while you’re doing.  Come help me weed.”

Thankfully, she nodded and joined him.  A few minutes of very vigorous weeding settled her mind a little, brought the beat of her heart to a more reasonable tempo.  “I found something,” she blurted.  “In the cellar.  A necklace that Da was going to give Ma, but he never did—it came from Gondor, he says.”

“Mmm.  From Minas Tirith?”

“He didn’t say, but I guess so.”

“It’s a beautiful city,” Uncle Sam said quietly.  “There are many things out that way that you should see some day, Boromir.  It’s hard to say why, exactly, but it makes you think different—like being in a story—and that thinking different helps.”

Chalcedony pursed her lips together.  She did want to see Gondor, very much, but it also wasn’t going to help her to talk around the thing she wanted to ask.  “I think it’s making me see things,” she blurted out, in a wobbly voice. “The necklace.”

Uncle Sam set down his trowel.  “What kinds of things?” he asked neutrally.

She took a deep breath and sat back on her knees, rubbing her sweaty palms on her apron.  “A Man—a Big Person.  It’s like I’m seeing his…memories?  When I touch it.  Sometimes.”

This time concern did flicker in his eyes; he settled back on his knees.  All his motions were calm and careful, and Chalcedony remembered how much the animals loved him.  No wonder.  “How does it make you feel?” he asked at length.

“Frightened,” Chalcedony mumbled, looking down at her front.  “But—but also curious.  And I don’t think he’s a bad person?  It seems like he’s trying to heal the land, and I, I, I was hoping that maybe I could learn something that would help some of the places in Buckland and in the Shire.  But—” She sighed sharply.  “But curiosity can be a problem, can’t it?  I mean, look at Uncle Pippin and the Seeing Stone.  But I don’t want to give this up, it’s mine, but not—not like the Ring was, not like that, I don’t think.  It doesn’t feel like it’s magically mine, it’s just—”  She was making a terrible hash of this.

Uncle Sam blew out his breath and wrinkled his nose.  “Well, this is a right pickle,” he said.  “Lad, how would you feel about giving me the necklace for a bit while I write a letter to someone who might be able to give it a good look over?”

She put her hand on the little box and squeezed.  “You’d give it back after that?  I mean, if it’s not evil?”

“I surely would.”

“All right, then.”  She put out her hand and passed the box over to him; Uncle Sam’s shoulders seemed to relax a little, and it was only then that Chalcedony realized that that must have been a test.  If she couldn’t give it up—

Sometimes people said Uncle Sam was a little bit stupid.  Next time Chalcedony heard anyone talking like that she was going to knock them down.  “Who are you going to write to?” she asked.

“Someone Mr. Frodo and I met in Minas Tirith, some years ago.”

“A Man?” Chalcedony brightened up eagerly.

Uncle Sam’s smile went a little peculiar, and a little forlorn.  “No, he’s not a Man.”

She frowned.  “I don’t understand, I thought there were only Men in Minas Tirith.”

“These days I’m told he lives in Erebor with the Dwarves.”  Sam’s eyes went very bright.  “Boromir, it’s time for you to meet your first Elf.”

Chapter End Notes

“corruinë”, “round blaze” (with thanks to calimë for the translation) is intended to evoke pyridine, a simple chemical compound comprised of a single ring deriving its name from the Greek “pyr” meaning “fire”.

*Ter*pyridine, a derivative of pyridine, has been used in some cases as an indicator for mercury (also known as quicksilver) [Shunmugam, Raja, et al. "A highly selective colorimetric aqueous sensor for mercury." Chemistry–A European Journal 14.13 (2008): 3904-3907.]

Cats “dancing themselves to death” is an observed phenomenon in areas badly poisoned with mercury waste products; mercuric compounds build up in the body and act on the central nervous system, causing convulsions, and cats are affected before humans because of their lower body mass.

Erebor was very far away, and Chalcedony knew this.  Even with the ways that the roads had grown much better and easier to traverse in the last twenty years, it would take a few weeks for a message to reach anyone, and if he did decide to travel to see them, it would take even longer for him to follow it back.  

She tried not to be impatient. She found Elanor and coaxed her to come and spend some time at Brandy Hall.  They were nearly of an age, and Elanor was one of the few people Chalcedony felt…quiet around.  They could spend together in silence, reading or sewing.  Chalcedony often wished she could do more of her schooling with Elanor, but they didn’t live close enough.  Now, though, it was summer, and the days were empty except for tending the gardens and the farms.

Days rolled by.  She went out on walks with Elanor, who seemed to have forgotten how to wear practical clothing unless coaxed.  This caused Chalcedony some frustration, but she had noticed that as they grew older, things seemed as if they became more complicated.  Not that she really understood why.  She had other things to worry about, mostly.

It was going to be a long summer.  She had resigned herself to this, so she was not at all prepared when, less than a month after her visit to Uncle Sam, a summons came for her and Elanor to return to Bag End and greet “the guest that Boromir wanted to meet.”

How could anyone have come from the mythical Lonely Mountain so quickly?  Even a Man, traveling by himself through the wilderness, long-legged and hardy, would have taken weeks—the letter might have gone faster, but it would not have been taken the whole way by one person.  

Chalcedony’s stomach tied itself into knots as they bumped along the road on their little ponies.  She had thought she would have more time, and what if she did have to give it up because it was dangerous?  How would she ever learn who Nimruzimir was?  Or whether his memories could help her, somehow?

When they arrived, there was an old Man sitting folded in a chair across from Uncle Sam, and the two of them were sharing a pipe.  The chair was one of the fancy too-big rocking chairs that was sometimes brought out when the King’s Rangers visited, as they did, occasionally.  It was normal to Chalcedony, though she knew some of her neighbors whispered amongst themselves about the visitors that the Gardners especially had.  You didn’t get much whispering about queerness among the Tooks and Brandybucks; it tended to be expected.

The old Man could not be the visitor, could he?  Uncle Sam had told her to expect an Elf, and this did not look anything like his stories of the ethereally beautiful Elves.  He was hunched over rather ungracefully, puffing on the pipe, and he wore an enormous black eye-patch on the left side of his face, which was the side presented to the two approaching Hobbits.  His ear was scarred raggedly, as if someone had sheared part of it off, and his face, or what she could see of it, looked lined and seamed, like any old Man.  Perhaps he was the Elf’s servant?

As they came closer, a rangy old cat that had apparently been sleeping at the old Man’s feet put its head up.  It, too, wore an eye-patch, and its tail lashed in warning as they approached.

“Stinky,” sighed the old man, and was rewarded with a warbling yowl of displeasure from the cat.

Chalcedony ran up the stairs to the porch, with Elanor following close behind her.  The old man turned towards her, and she stopped in her tracks, for about a quarter of the right side of his face was unblemished, and the eye that regarded her from beside his sharply pointed right ear shone silver like a predator’s in the night.

“Ah—oh, um,” stammered Chalcedony.

Uncle Sam waved them both over, and somehow she managed to go, although her cheeks were burning hot with embarrassment.  She probably looked frumpy, to this Elf; she probably looked—graceless.  Why wouldn’t she?  Boys weren’t supposed to look graceful, and the Elf wouldn’t expect it.  But that grey eye made her heart thump painfully, and she dropped her gaze away from his.

“Boromir, this is Celebrimbor,” Uncle Sam said, sounding joyful and gleeful at the same time.

“So you’re named after—”

“The dead hero.  Yes, that’s me.”  She shouldn’t have interrupted the guest, but it rankled.

The single untouched elegant eyebrow went up very slightly.  “Pleased to meet you,” he said, as if she’d been perfectly polite.  “This rascal is Stinky.”  Outraged noise from the cat.  Celebrimbor grinned, an expression that oddly synthesized the two disparate halves of his face.  “He prefers to be called Annamir, though.”

Elvish, Chalcedony knew, though she didn’t know what it meant.  “Pleased to meet you,” she said in turn, her voice wobbling slightly and then steadying.  She wished that she could curtsey, but she bowed instead, rather clumsily.  The cat was easier.  She crouched down and put out a hand. He sniffed curiously, then tiptoed closer and made a noise like prrrrp.

“Does he like to be petted?” Chalcedony asked.

“Sometimes.  He seems to like you well enough.  Don’t let him convince you into trying to rub his belly, though.”

She managed a hesitant smile.  “Oh, I know that trick.”

Annamir responded well to a cautious scritching behind his ear, rubbing up against her knees and purring.  But Chalcedony felt as if one of the oliphaunts from Uncle Sam’s tales was here in the room, leaning over her and breathing down her neck.  She didn’t know how to start the conversation, but her heart was beating so loud in her ears.

Either Celebrimbor knew, somehow, how she was feeling—Elves were supposed to be able to read your thoughts, weren’t they? Some of them, at least—or he had already been planning to speak of it quickly, because he said, “Sam tells me that you have an interesting necklace.”

She swallowed hard against the way her stomach knotted up.  “Yes,” she agreed.  “Well, Uncle Sam has it right now.  I don’t think it’s evil, but it—it made me see something?  It made me share someone’s memories, I think.”

There was a slight pause, and Celebrimbor leaned forward, that cat’s eye of his own glittering silver and wholly unearthly.  “It’s important to you, isn’t it?” he asked gently.

Her fingers caught in a knot in Annamir’s fur, and he protested, loudly.  She pulled them back carefully and apologetically smoothed his coat down again.  “Yes?” she tried, her voice coming out high and wobbly.  “I want to know—more about him and more about the things—the things he knew, I think.”  More about the man who wasn’t a woman just like I’m a woman who isn’t a man.  And whether he had ever done anything about the poisoned water.

“Well, I’m happy to look it over.  Between the two of us,” he gestured, for some reason, at Annamir, “it should be obvious if there’s something wrong with it.  We’ve had quite a lot of experience with jewelry, haven’t we, Annamirënya?”

The cat made a contemptuous noise and wandered back over to rub his knees.

“Will you need to—to do anything to it?” Chalcedony asked, in a slightly wobbly voice.  She didn’t like the idea of the poor necklace being pushed or prodded or tested as the water in the memory had been.  

“Not unless there is something very fearful about it indeed.  May I see it?”

She looked over at Uncle Sam, who had apparently been expecting this, because he reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and produced from within it the wooden box with the white flower on it.  He handed it over to Celebrimbor, who took it and ran his fingers along one edge.

“This was sealed?” he asked, touching the broken remnants of the wax.  “Where did it come from?”

“My da brought it back from the war.  He says it came along the Greyflood and maybe further.”

“This looks—”

Annamir jumped into his lap, poked his nose at the box, then arched his back and hissed angrily.

“Is—is that bad?” Chalcedony asked hesitantly.

“No,” Celebrimbor said neutrally.  “Not necessarily, anyway.  He’s just grumpy.”  He opened the box, took out the second box, and turned it over in his hands before opening it as well.  “Oh, this is lovely.”

She nodded jerkily, clasping her hands behind her back to keep from even seeming as if she wanted to reach out and take it from him.  The glass beads glittered in the sunlight, dark and mysterious.  Celebrimbor raised the necklace up to the light, apparently squinting through one of the beads with his one good eye.  “Interesting.  Colored glass and gold beads.  But there was no spell woven into their creation.”

Maybe she had just imagined it, Chalcedony thought.  How stupid, if so, dragging such an important personage away from whatever work it was that he did, just to come here and make a pronouncement.  But she could still see Nimruzimir’s sharp gaze staring at her in distorted reflection.

Annamir settled in Celebrimbor’s lap, his little tongue flickering in and out.  He sniffed, his single golden eye glittering in a way that seemed as queer as the silver flash of his master’s.  

“There does seem to be something,” Celebrimbor said slowly.  “This is not a sort of enchantment with which I am familiar.  It’s a shame Galadriel has sailed West already.”

“Oh, I’d never dare to ask the great lady for such a favor,” said Uncle Sam, in his most wondering tone of voice.

Celebrimbor laughed.  “You’ve put me in my place, Master Gamgee!  Ah, Master Gardner, isn’t it, now.”

“Well now, sir, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”  Uncle Sam was turning slowly red across his cheeks and the tips of his ears, as he often did when he was embarrassed.

“No, no, it’s fine.”  Celebrimbor’s laughter was infectious; it was hard for Chalcedony not to chuckle as well.  He shook his head, and all of a sudden, she could almost see the lines of his face without his scars, and oh! but he must have been beautiful!  “I’m from the disreputable branch of the family, after all.”

Annamir sniffed, as if he were more offended than Celebrimbor.  He pushed his nose against the beads, put up a paw, swatted them, then settled down again with a rumbling, quizzical noise.

“It doesn’t feel as if it is dangerous,” Celebrimbor said slowly. “And I think Annamir agrees.”  He rubbed his fingers across the beads.  “It isn’t a deliberately woven enchantment, and it isn’t part of the creation, but I don’t feel any sort of—ill will, I suppose.”

What Chalcedony had not quite realized until this moment, staring at Celebrimbor with all his attention upon the necklace, was that she had been thrilled at the notion of a secret—not quite friend, she supposed, since you could not be friends with someone who would never know you existed—but someone just for her.  But she had not really thought that it could be possible.  She had assumed that anyone who touched the necklace would share the same memories—but there was no indication that this was happening.

“You don’t see anything?” she asked timidly.  “None of the…memories?”

Celebrimbor shook his head.  “That, I think, is not so surprising,” he said.  “Lest you be concerned, either of you.  Such things can be very specific in their resonance.  Perhaps it recognizes something about you that it does not recognize about me.”  He lifted his hand carefully up and down, as if he were weighing the necklace in it, and then he held it out.  “Here,” he said.  “It is yours.  I can find nothing in it that would give me pause in returning it to you.”

She found that she was smiling widely, almost ear to ear.  She put out her hand, and he let the necklace go, so that it fell into her palm, coiling up bead by bead.  The brush of it felt warm—hot—almost burning-hot, and they gleamed with that almost secretive brown-purple-red color in her palm, and

what she sees through the glass is not her own palm.  At first, she thinks she sees a woman in white, who lifts her face, and it is streaked with black, tarry tear-tracks that lead all the way down her white dress, turned purple-brown by the tint of the light.  She has a hand out-stretched, slightly luminous, and she is standing knee-high in brown water.

“Nimruzimir?”

“I do not have the materials to synthesize a proper testing apparatus.”

“Yeah, you said that already.”

He blinked his eyes and staggered slightly, leaning sideways against Lilóteo.  “Fuck,” he spat.  “How long?”

“No more than a minute or two.  How do you feel?”

“Fine.  Fine.”  A minute or two did not indicate that the tonic was not working, at least, even if he hated it when such a thing happened.  “Slightly dizzy.  I’m all r-right.”

He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.  The beads of his necklace clinked softly together, and he wondered what had possessed him to put it on again.  It hardly suited him.  A woman’s trinket—he had hated everything it stood for.  And yet—he could not quite claim so, for he had not hated the thought of his father’s love, if only his father could have seen him for who he really was.

“All right.  The testing apparatus.”

“Yes.”  He frowned down at the partial laboratory setup they had managed to put together in the basement of his father’s old house.  It had seemed like a convenient location when they traveled out here, since he still possessed the deed to the house, in case anyone cared.  It had been abandoned, in any case.  He was now beginning to doubt the wisdom of the notion, for every day he seemed to be walking into another half-forgotten memory.  Today, apparently, it was sitting with his chin on his hands halfway up the cellar stairs, while his parents shouted at one another a floor above.

No wonder his mother had left.

He ground his teeth together and shook off the persistent malaise, but some queer tightness in his throat forced him to cough out, “Stay with m-m-m-me?”

“I wasn’t planning on going anywhere,” Lilóteo said, sounding puzzled.  “Unless you need me out of your hair, I guess.”

“No, I m-m-mean—never mind.  It was a—a f-foolish thought.”

There was a pause.  “Tell me about the damn apparatus already,” Lilóteo grunted, and Nimruzimir seized on the distraction.  Or had it been the original main topic?  Never mind.

He set out several different glass dishes, in each of which he had put a generous portion of his latest batch of growth medium.  It had been somewhat difficult to obtain the raw materials, in particular the jellification agent isolated from algae, but he had succeeded.  And he had been able to guess at the amounts of sugar, potato, and the algae-produced derivative well enough that he was relatively confident that this would work.

“Since I do not have the materials to be able to derive proper agents to identify everything that might be contaminating the water, I have decided to take a different tactic.”  He reached for another set of vials, carefully setting them out in front of him.  His hands were reasonably steady, which would likely help.  “Based upon my studies and previous reading, I have reason to believe that both plant and fungal life may prove efficacious in removing toxins from the water, even quicksilver and similar such devastating ones.”

“So you’re going to grow those—”

“And see which of them flourishes despite the taint.  The next step will be to introduce it into a controlled environment, along with some of the local wildlife.”

“And you’ll test to see if it really makes the water livable again?”

Nimruzimir nodded.  It was refreshing to be able to present the ideas to someone who understood him quickly—who tried to understand him.  Who had faith in him this way.

“It’s a good plan,” Lilóteo said, his thumb tapping against his bottom lip.  Probably the best you can do, but I’ll keep an eye out for some of the more obscure reagents on the market.  Might still be able to find a few things, even after the fall.”

“Thank you,” Nimruzimir said, then wondered if he had said it too sharply, but when he looked up Lilóteo was smiling at him, and he was helpless to keep from smiling back, an impossible warmth flooding his chest.

The glass fogs, and the vision shimmers.  The lady in white raises a single oil-stained finger to her lips.  “Shhhh.”

“Oh!”  Chalcedony staggered backward before catching herself.  For an instant, Uncle Sam’s porch seemed terribly far away and muddy, the sounds distant, as if she were watching it from underwater; after a single shuddering heartbeat, it snapped into focus, and all of a sudden everything was too bright and too loud. 

Annamir caterwauled, and Celebrimbor leaned forward. Uncle Sam stood up and moved over towards her.  “Are you all right?” he asked.

“Fine, I’m, I saw—”  The bright sunlight of the Shire afternoon was so different from the gloomy cellar where Nimruzimir had been growing his fungi.  The queerest part of the whole thing was that he had thought about making the thing he had called a growth medium—perhaps not in those words, because it occurred to Chalcedony suddenly that he did not appear to speak the same language.  She understood the words they spoke but when she tried to think back to the memory, the sounds did not add up to anything remotely familiar.  

In any case, Nimruzimir had thought about the growth medium, and now Chalcedony had a vague idea of how to make it herself.  You would need potatoes and sugar—easily come by—and a sort of spongy seaweed jelly, which she had no idea how to obtain.  But if you had that—well, if you boiled them in clean water, strained them, added sugar and the dried powder of this seaweed jelly and then boiled it again for long enough, you would get something you could use as a place to grow plants or mushrooms by themselves without unwelcome guests showing up.  If you were careful.

That meant you could try different sorts of plants and mushrooms along with the water from a poisoned place, and if they grew well, then you know they were probably doing it by cleaning up the little house you’d put them in.  And if they could do that, well, then more of them planted in the poisoned place could clean it up neatly too and make it safe.

She thought of the little pond, still and cool and lonely, hurting everything that came into contact with it.  What if you could heal it, the way Nimruzimir was trying to heal the waters outside the town where he was living?  (Where he had lived, perhaps very long ago?)

It wasn’t much—there were so many places in the Shire that had been burned and poisoned and despoiled during the War of the Ring—but it was a start.  And Chalcedony’s parents and her Uncle Sam were very clear that any little good thing was worth doing, even if it didn’t seem like so much.

She realized she had just been standing here, that Celebrimbor was leaning forward as if waiting for her to finish, that Uncle Sam looked puzzled and concerned, and that Annamir was winding himself about her legs.  “I saw another memory,” she said, finally.

“If I didn’t know any better, I would have guessed that to be foresight trance,” Celebrimbor murmured to Uncle Sam.  “They’re not dangerous, usually, though they can be uncomfortable.  But I’ve never heard of a hobbit with foresight, have you?”

Uncle Sam blew out his breath.  “That’s a question for a Took or a Brandybuck,” he said firmly.  “Not for someone like me.  Come on, Boromir, my lad, why don’t you come in and have some strawberries with cream?  You look right pale.”

Though Chalcedony flinched a little, again, at the mode of address, and though she was fascinated by what exactly a foresight trance might be, she had to confess that she did feel a little wobbly, and strawberries and cream would probably sort it out.  Uncle Sam was always good at reminding you to eat when you needed it.

Chapter End Notes

Fungi really can do this! It’s called mycoremediation, and it’s one of some different ways of environmental remediation. There’s also phytoremediation, which is where plants do it, but basically the idea is they’re both capable of removing certain toxins from the environment, including heavy metals, which are both particularly horrifying and particularly difficult to deal with (and often end up in the environment as the side effects of careless disposal of chemical plant waste products—if you are feeling strong, reading up on Minamata disease may give you some context but serious content warnings for people dying in pretty horrible ways and other people being just genuinely awful about it.)

If you want more of Celebrimbor and Annamir-the-Cat, you can check out my series “Open Gates and Holly Trees;” I did not plan to have them in this fic but they invaded it anyway. Annamir is like that, I suppose.

“Ma, can I borrow your dress?”

“What do you need my dress for?”  Chalcedony’s mother popped her head into the bedroom.  Chalcedony hoped and prayed she wasn’t going red in the cheeks, because she had a perfectly good reason for the request, and it had nothing to do with her desire to wear a dress, any dress at all.  Her hair tickled the back of her neck, making her feel self-conscious and elated at the same time.

“It’s for a—an experiment,” she explained.

“One of those dreams of yours?” Over the past week, Celebrimbor and Annamir had accompanied her back home to Brandy Hall, and Da and Uncle Pippin had been only too excited to host an Elf, even if he was the most piratical and least graceful Elf anyone could have imagined.  He wasn’t much trouble. He spent most of his time smoking outside or sleeping outside, or occasionally asking if he could take a look into the library.  That part was a bit more troublesome, as the library was Chalcedony’s refuge when the cellar wasn’t, but she had enough to be thinking about and getting on with, in any case.

Annamir was more trouble than his master, or at least Chalcedony thought so.  He had a habit of popping up when she wanted to be alone and was surprisingly good at ferreting out her hiding places, to her displeasure.  And she just couldn’t read him.  There was something about him that didn’t seem like a normal cat, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it, and no one else seemed really to notice.

“Yes,” she managed in response to her mother.  Back at home, Celebrimbor had started making gentle inquiries about the ‘foresight trance’ that he had mentioned.  Da had muttered something about wishing that he had Frodo here—which didn’t mean the Frodo who was nearly Chalcedony’s age, who gave her the oddest feeling if she thought too much about him—it meant Frodo Baggins, who had sailed away over the sea before Chalcedony was born.

Frodo Baggins, the hero of the War of the Ring, whose absence still seemed to be felt by everyone, most especially, somehow, Uncle Sam.  He worried Chalcedony, sometimes, or perhaps it was more accurate to say that she worried at him, like she might have worried at a loose tooth.  It was hard to keep from thinking of him, hard to keep from seeing his touch smeared across so many places in the Shire, his ghost hovering at Uncle Sam’s and Aunt Rosie’s shoulders.

Elanor had met him, when she was very young, but her memories weren’t much use in painting a proper picture of him, and somehow the adults just whispered about him as if he were dead.

Anyway, he wasn’t here, and Da had gone hunting in the library by himself.  He hadn’t found much, but he had found a little.  There were some records, mostly in the Took family, of women and girls who had seen snippets of the future.  “Only women, though,” Da had said, rubbing his forehead.  “A few stories call it fairy-sight, which I suppose everyone thought was a reference to the Took Fairy Wife.”

“A corruption of foresight isn’t impossible,” Celebrimbor said, leaning over his shoulder and looming, his silver eye gleaming like a lamp in the dimmer light of the library.  “Or perhaps it’s coincidence.”

“Funny that it’s all girls, though,” Da said, sounding puzzled.  Chalcedony had slipped away at that point.  Nimruzimir wasn’t a woman, she was certain, but he also wasn’t a hobbit, or hadn’t been.  But she—she wasn’t a woman either, she told herself, no matter how much that thought made her stomach ache.  She was Boromir, and it might feel like a knife to her breastbone to think such a thing, but what else was she to think?

There was no way out of being the person you were.  (Was there?  She brushed aside thoughts of caterpillars becoming butterflies.)  And even if Da was puzzled, he and Ma certainly seemed to believe in Chalcedony’s dreams.  Maybe they were something different from fairy-sight, but they were real.  They were definitely real.  Nimruzimir was real; he had to be.

“It’s a good, thick cloth, and it’ll keep anything from splashing my skin,” she told Ma, shaking herself out of the reverie.  “And it fits me, and I can move in it easily.  I can’t put an extra pair of trousers over my trousers.”

Ma sighed.  “If you ruin this faithful old dress, I will tan your hide, child,” she said, which just made Chalcedony smile.  Neither of her parents had ever struck her, or any of the other cousins, and she was perfectly confident they never would.

“I promise I will protect it,” she said solemnly, telling herself again quite sternly that she was only taking it because her dreams of Nimruzimir told her that you ought to have an extra layer of covering as a precaution in a laboratory, just in case.  But the thought of being able to wear a dress whenever she wanted thrummed through her system with a wild feeling she refused to try to put a name to.

“Good.”  Her mother patted her shoulder.  “Oh, go on then.”

Chalcedony couldn’t keep herself from hugging the dress tight to her chest.

* * *

With the necklace looped around her neck or wrist at all times, the memories rise up at odd ones, without any seeming pattern to their arrival.  She dreams of a woman in white, mouth shaping incomprehensible syllables.  Rain falls from her eyes towards the earth, and Chalcedony stirs in her sleep.

The weather could hardly have been worse, Nimruzimir thought, blowing on his reddened hands to warm them as he paced back and forth at the end of the dock.  And who knew what poisons lurked in the rain lashing across the land, this near to the coast?

All of which was a distraction, of course, from the main point, which was that he would have to speak with someone.  Nimruzimir did not like speaking with people, particularly with people he did not know.  Lilóteo could have done it, he supposed, but something stubborn inside him rebelled at the thought.  Although perhaps he ought to have told Lilóteo where he was going, he thought, a little guiltily, particularly when the weather was so execrable.  But Lilóteo was a grown man, he would be fine.  He was not Nimruzimir, to jump at shadows.

(Those shadows laugh; a gleam of red eyes focus on him, unblinking. Damn his foresight.)

It was not that late in the afternoon, but the heavy clouds piled high upon one another made the shore nearly as dark as evening.  Fortunately, perhaps because of the foul weather, he did not have to wait long before a little fishing craft pulled up at the dock.  The fisher seated in the front and calmly wielding her oar was clearly not the descendant of one of the colonists, with that straight black hair and round face.  Probably for the best.  Nimruzimir steeled himself and moved forward.

She maneuvered the craft neatly into the dock, securing it before she started to climb out.  Nimruzimir hovered, uncertain whether he ought to offer aid.  He had never found it facile to interact with people.  Somehow, frustratingly, no matter how simple the world full of metals and poisons and flasks became, the world of people remained a terrible mystery.

Faintly, as she turned back to her boat, presumably to unload her catch, he said, “Exc-c-cuse m-me?”

She turned to him, eyes flickering along him up and down, and he held himself rigid, trying not to flinch.  “Who are you?” she asked bluntly; she did not speak Adunaic but Dunlendish.  Nimruzimir had a sudden queer sense that his vision had inverted itself; he could see his mother’s round face above him as she whispered a story to him in her native tongue, an old fairy tale about a princess who turned herself into a prince and rescued a girl confined in a tower.  He had not spoken Dunlendish in years, other than a furtive word or two when necessary to help a stranger.

He managed to stammer out something that he hoped sounded like an apology and then stalled.  How could he explain the rather complex nature of his errand when he could hardly recall how to structure a complete sentence?

The woman looked at him impassively.  He licked his lips, wondering if he had ever known the Dunlendish word for the thing he needed.  Finally, he managed to scrape together what he thought was, “Plant? I give money for plant?”

“Plant?”  She shook her head and said something, pointing at the boat.  It took him a minute to force rusty brain muscles to realize that she had said fish.

“No,” he said, shaking his head.  “No fish.  Plant.”

She laughed and said something that was probably uncomplimentary.  

“It’s important,” he said urgently, falling back into the island’s language with some despair.  “I m-must have s-seaweed.  I n-need it for the g-growth m-medium.”

She raised her hands in an expressive shrug and then waved them as if to shoo him away.  His heart sank into his boots.  It was not so immediately urgent, perhaps, but a delay might nonetheless be detrimental.  For all he knew, the fish piled high in the bed of her boat might already carry quicksilver poison within their veins.

A hand fell onto his shoulder, and he nearly jumped out of his skin.  “What are you trying to ask her for?” Lilóteo demanded, and he sounded quite cross, for no reason that Nimruzimir could discern.  

“I—I—I have heard it given several names.  Red algae is the one I know the best, but I have no idea how to—”

Lilóteo turned to the woman and said something in a few broken phrases that nevertheless were more put together than Nimruzimir’s halting attempts.  She looked at him quizzically, but nodded slowly, putting out her hand.

“She wants payment,” Lilóteo said.  “I didn’t bring my coin purse.”

An odd oversight for him, Nimruzimir supposed.  He himself did not have much coin, but he had at least thought to prepare for this interaction, and he had hoped he might be able to form a more permanent contract.  He pulled out the ring he had stowed in his pocket for this purpose.  “It is real gold, though the stone is only glass,” he said, holding it out.  “Can you tell her that I will give her more if she is willing to continue supplying me?”

Lilóteo made a face that he could not read, tugging on his beard.  After a moment, he said another few words.  The woman took the ring, holding it up to the light and turning it over.  Nimruzimir’s stomach clenched queerly at the way the light played on the funny zigzag housing for the bead.

After a moment, the woman nodded and said a few words, gesturing at the boat, then at Nimruzimir.  Lilóteo crossed his arms, but nodded and said something back.  Nimruzimir caught the words for ‘now’ and ‘home’, or perhaps it was ‘house’.

The woman threw her arms into the air, then gestured expansively to the mess of fish in the boat, talking too rapidly and with too much of a slur to her words for Nimruzimir to catch anything.  His face burned.  Here was Lilóteo translating his own mother tongue for him. Abruptly, he wanted terribly to hide, but he had no choice right now.

“Come on,” Lilóteo said, a little gruffly.  “She said we can have some of it now, if we want to pick it out ourselves.  The rest she’ll deliver to us.”

Nimruzimir followed his lead, and they made their way down to the small fishing boat.  The fish were indeed covered in the gluey, red strands that Nimruzimir recognized as the algae he needed to complete his recipe for the growth medium.  Of course, he did not have much that would be useful for conveying it other than the pockets of his greatcoat, but they would do for the time being.

There was another point, however, that he still felt was needing resolution, and that was the way that Lilóteo seemed uncharacteristically gruff, even for him.  Nimruzimir, who generally did not have a particularly stellar record of noticing the emotions of others, was quite proud of himself for having observed this.  Of course, just observing it did not leave him with the knowledge of what to do with that observation.

Surely he ought at least to indicate that he had noticed?  “Is s-s-something the matter?” he hazarded, as he got down to sit at the edge of the dock so that he could reach out to collect the algae from the cargo of fish.

Lilóteo turned to him, eyebrows drawing down and together, the corners of his mouth twisting in a rather ugly manner.  “Really, man?” he snarled, and Nimruzimir took half a step back at the unexpected force of it.  “You fucking vanished without a word!  I thought—” He cut himself off.  “I ran out without my fucking hat, my fucking handkerchief, or my fucking coin purse, because I thought you might be lost or dying or gods forfend taken by one of the wraiths, and here you are trying to bargain for equipment when you don’t even speak the language!”

“I d-d-do speak the language,” was all that Nimruzimir could find to say.  “I j-j-just—I m-m-mean m-m-my m-m-mother w-w-was—”  It was suddenly difficult to breathe; he felt frozen in a way that he could not account for.  “I’m…I’m…s-s-sorry?  I d-did not th-think y-you would…be angry?”  He found he had to speak through gritted teeth.  His forehead was sweating, a cold sweat, and his throat was so tight that swallowing had become painful.

Lilóteo shut his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.  He appeared to be taking a deep breath.  Nimruzimir cringed, not quite trembling.  “You—you d-did not have to c-come to f-find me?” he quavered.  “I d-did not m-mean to be a b-b-bother.”

“Gods,” sighed Lilóteo, and he no longer sounded so terrifyingly, all-encompassingly loud.  “Nimruzimir, I was worried.  Forget worried, I was scared out of my mind.”

“Scared?” Nimruzimir echoed in confusion, some of the fizzing adrenaline in his veins starting to ebb.  “What is there to be afraid of?  I g-grew up h-here.”

“Which would definitely protect you if the wraiths found you, or the members of the Faithful who think you a blasphemer, or…” He trailed off, sagging, his hands still working—perhaps automatically—to gather up algae.  “I probably overreacted, but, fuck, man, you could have taken the time to tell me where you were going.”

“I—s-suppose I c-could.  I did not think it would—I did not realize you would—I am sorry.”

Lilóteo rotated his bad shoulder, as he often did when he was under stress, and deflated a little more.  “I’m sorry for yelling.”

“Well.  I s-suppose neither of us b-behaved in the manner the other would have p-preferred, so that makes us—even, perhaps?”  Hesitantly, he reached and brushed his fingers across the top of Lilóteo’s hand.  Lilóteo nodded jerkily, and turned his hand over, taking Nimruzimir’s.

Their reflection shimmered in the water by the boat, red strings of algae falling from Nimruzimir’s coat pocket.  One had caught on his hand and, though he had not noticed it when he reached out, now stretched across their clasped hands like a string or rope binding them together.

Certainly worth the cost of the ring.

* * *

Chalcedony found that as she saw more of Nimruzimir’s memories, her curiosity grew, putting out shoots and roots beyond what she had expected.  She still wanted to know the things he knew (he had known?  so far she had no idea when he had lived, or whether he lived still, or whether, somehow, impossibly, the necklace was sending her visions of things that had not yet happened), but she also wanted to know more about him.  The things that he had learned about being himself, not just the things he had learned about making the universe work for him.

Of course, she very much wanted to learn the things he had learned about making the universe work for him.  In this particular case, she already had a very good idea of how she might perform a similar experiment as the one that filled her dreams at night, and it might even lead to the rebirth of Uncle Sam’s pond, if it worked.  (She didn’t dare to dream that if it worked on that pond, it might work on others, as well.)  But she was stuck on the matter of the seaweed.

The Shire was, rather unfortunately, nowhere near the seaside.  Chalcedony had never seen it, though she had seen shells sent back.  One big pink-and-white conch shell sat in the kitchen window of Brandy Hall, where the sunlight struck it just so.  Da said that Frodo had sent it to them from the Grey Havens.

The shell was lovely, and there were some other smooth pebbles and round crystals as well that had come from the sea.  But seaweed?  Who would think to send seaweed?

If she were older, perhaps she could simply have traveled to the Grey Havens herself.  But she was too young, and in any case, that would take such a long time.  She stalked back and forth across the kitchen.  There were reams of potatoes piled high in the pantry, and the sugar-tin was full, and clearly mocking her.  If only she had something that she could use to make a proper jelly out of the potatoes and sugar, but Nimruzimir had used seaweed, and now she was back here again.

“Boromir, love, why are you pacing back and forth through my kitchen?” her mother asked, popping her head through the door. 

Chalcedony felt herself going red in the face.  “I wanted to make…potato jelly,” she said, shuffling her feet.  “To feed mushrooms.  I know that sounds ridiculous, but…”

“I’ve never heard of mushrooms growing on potatoes,” Ma said thoughtfully.  “But I suppose they could do.  What’s the trouble, then, lad?”

“It has to—to jellify, but the only way I know how to do that is with seaweed, and there isn’t any.”

“Seaweed!  What sort of cookbook have you been looking in?”

“No, it’s something that I…” she trailed off.  She hadn’t spoken to her mother of this, really, though she knew Uncle Sam had sent a note round to her Da.  “I just sort of found it out.”

“Well, you don’t need seaweed to make jelly.”  Ma patted her arm.  “I don’t care what sort of queer mushroom food you’re trying to make, you can just make it as a sort of aspic, if you need it to set like that.”

Somehow, this had not occurred to Chalcedony—the idea that it might not have to be exact, that if she could just get it to set at all, it would probably behave well enough.  She was a decent enough cook, herself—they had a few folk round to help out in the kitchen sometimes, but you couldn’t be a hobbit and not know your way around a kitchen by the time you were half-grown—but she had been stuck thinking of this particular thing as Nimruzimir’s alchemy.

It wasn’t magic, though; she ought to have known better than to think of it that way.  Nimruzimir himself might have scolded her for that, if he had been here.  No—she mustn’t be silly.  Nimruzimir didn’t know of her, not at all, wherever he was or had been, and he never would.

The thought gave her a surprisingly sharp little pang, but she set it aside in a box next to the one containing her feelings about her name and who she was.  The important thing was that Ma was quite right.

“Do you think you could help me with the mushroom food, then?  I need to do some experimenting.”

“That sounds fascinating.  I would be delighted.”  Ma grinned, her nose wrinkling up with pleasure.   “Although usually I’m feeding us the mushrooms, not the other way round.”

Chalcedony wondered if she had spent too long hiding in the cellar, instead of with her own mother.  A little treacherous voice whispered to her that perhaps Ma wouldn’t be so upset, if she found that she had a daughter, instead of a son.

No, she told herself sternly, she was named for a famous hero.  The other thing was—was just a passing fancy.  She would work this out.  She would be the son her parents could be proud of.

(Would Nimruzimir have scolded her for that thought, too?)

Chapter End Notes

Modern growth media are based on agar, which is derived from red algae. Potato dextrose agar can be used to grow fungi. Agar is a better jellification agent than the western equivalent because it’s stable up to higher temperatures, but people were still doing growth cultivation in places that didn’t have access to it until it became more globally known. Chalcedony doesn’t need to be perfect to get her experiment working.

There was a neat little row of saucers set along the back row of the table.  Chalcedony peered at them with interest.  She had spent a few complicated weeks traveling all over the neighborhood sticking her nose into dark, moist places, clambering up various trees, and splashing around in ponds that were known to be relatively clear, trying to ferret out samples of different sorts of mushrooms.  

Oddly, she found that Celebrimbor’s cat seemed to enjoy trailing her.  Every so often, she would turn around and find him sitting there, tail lashing, regarding her with his one bright gold-red eye.  Or he would simply stalk over impatiently when she was struggling to find anything, and—point.  There was no other word for it.  He would just stuff his nose into a small dark cranny, and when she looked, she’d find some tiny smear of fuzz that had to be some sort of mushroom.

After quite a lot of this, she had managed to cobble together an eclectic collection of mushrooms and spores and little fuzzy bits and bobs that hopefully weren’t lint.  With Ma’s help in making the growth medium, she had lined up a number of different saucers—all of them neatly labeled with where she had found the sample and when, just as Nimruzimir had done in his own cellar.

The memories did not come so fast and easy all the time—sometimes the necklace would do nothing but lie in her hand growing warm, as if it slept.  Sometimes, when she kept it by her pillow, she would dream, but often the dreams would be fragmented and vanish upon waking like soap bubbles.  There were bits and pieces, though, and most of them helped with what she was trying to do.

She had collected a jar of water from the poisoned pond, too; she hadn’t told anyone about that, although she had put a big sign on it saying “DO NOT TOUCH OR DRINK.”  She had dangled it from the end of a fishing rod to make sure not to touch it, just in case.  Annamir had watched her from the shadows—she was almost certain she had seen the orange gleam of his eye—and she had done nearly the whole thing while holding her breath.

For every one of her precious little samples, she had set up two saucers, both of them with a slice of potato jelly in the bottom.  One had nothing but that and the scrapings of the mushrooms that she had found, while she had used a hollow reed to transfer a measure of the poisoned water into each of the others without touching it.  

Some of the saucers were empty—quite a lot of the ones with the poisoned water were empty—but some of them were not.  She had only half-believed that anything would happen, but after a few days, she had started to see spots on some of the saucers—white and green and grey.  They had grown at different rates—she had a wobbly notebook sitting on the table in which she was taking notes on how much there seemed to be, which was something that Nimruzimir seemed to think was very important—but by now several of them were very evidently growing quite effortlessly.

Many of them were radially symmetric, with either a round central island and secondary rings striped around the outside, or with only a dense ring near the edge.  In some of them, a few isolated little spots poked up in the sparser areas.  They were like the rings inside a great tree, or perhaps more like forests dotted across a flat round plane with a little island in the middle.  They were so tiny it was almost impossible to tell what the individual components were—none of them really looked like the big wrinkled ear-like mushrooms that they ate for dinner, but they maybe shouldn’t.  From Nimruzimir’s memories, that might be a different part of the mushroom, the way you could have a rose-bush growing with no roses on it.

She almost wanted to pet them, they looked so fuzzy and welcoming.  She knew it wouldn’t be a good idea, but she couldn’t help leaning over and peering at them, worrying at her lip with excitement.  “You’re doing so well,” she whispered to the three that were growing happily despite the poisoned water.  

When she glanced up, she saw the jar of poisoned water gleaming in the low light and something made her clutch her hand about the beads of the necklace.  There were no windows in the cellar, and the flame of the candlelight behind it bulged queerly, like a single red-flame eye peering out of nothingness, like…

Shivering in a fever dream, the eyes of the High Priest that she never has met boring into her soul, as if she can see into Lilóteo’s dreams, as if all the blood and torment are for her as well as for him, and she, Chalcedony—

No, he, Nimruzimir—

What would we not suffer for those we love?

Nimruzimir blinked and shivered, tearing his eyes away from the hooded lantern to run his gaze over his neat rows of samples.  Several of them were growing nicely, producing a coat of mycelium across the agar and even in some places what might be small fruiting bodies.  This was hopeful—and more than that, he found himself feeling oddly protective.

“Oh, you’re down here again.” Lilóteo’s footsteps were usually heavy on the stairs, but somehow he had made it halfway down without Nimruzimir noticing his approach.  “Everything okay?”

Nimruzimir found himself flushing slightly.  “It is fine.  I was just…checking on them.”  Even as the words came out, he knew that they sounded terribly foolish.  The fungi would grow, or they would not.  There was nothing he could do about it, other than to check the conditions daily, and he had already done that.  The temperature in the cellar was reasonably steady, and he had already checked the acidity levels earlier in the day.  He had no reason to be back down here.

As ever, he could not read the look on Lilóteo’s face.  He wished, futilely and with a little wistful exhaustion, that he had any ability at all to comprehend the emotions of others.  Was that twitch at the corner of Lilóteo’s lips a smile?  Was it laughter?  Was it a grimace?  He sighed, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand.

“What are you th-thinking?” he blurted without meaning to, then flinched, one hand clutching at the side of the table.

“Just that you look like a mother hen.”  Lilóteo finished descending the stairs and came over to him.  “You’re brooding, Nimruzimir.”

“I am not brooding!  I am in perfectly good cheer.”

That was most certainly a grin, and he rather thought there was some mischief in it.  He still wasn’t expecting it when Lilóteo kissed his forehead lightly.  “I meant brooding as in sitting on an egg.”

“Hardly!  I am b-being quite objective.”

Shrug.  “If you say so.”  One big hand squeezed his upper shoulder gently.  “Hey, Nimruzimir.  This is working.  You’re doing it.  You.”

The unexpected praise hit him harder than a blow would have.  “I—I am only d-d-doing what is n-n-n-necessary.”

“You always have, and that’s what I l—what I admire about you.”  Lilóteo tugged at his beard.  “Sorry, clearly I’m too sentimental today.  Maybe there’s a storm brewing.”

“I hardly th-think a low pressure system would—”

“Could make my arm hurt.  Maybe pain makes me maudlin.”  

“Absurd,” Nimruzimir sniffed, but he snaked an arm around Lilóteo’s waist and leaned against him.  Their reflection wavers, dim and far away, in the glass before them.

* * *

The stars wheeled overhead, distant and serene, hard to see against the warm red glow of the bonfire.  Chalcedony stood well back from it; she felt awkward and stiff and itchy in her good suit, her cravat half-choking her, but it was expected, and she supposed the summer solstice did not come often.  This year was a little better than most: she had managed to avoid having to cut her hair, and she had tucked the necklace underneath her shirt, where no one could see it.  The bumpy outline was not terribly comfortable, but it was comforting.

Elanor approached her, flushed and laughing, and Chalcedony tried not to stare too enviously at the outfit she wore—a light green summer frock, embroidered with yellow flowers at the throat and hem, with a necklace of her own made from little jade stars that twinkled with white gems inset along the chain.  “Boromir, would you dance with me?” she asked, sounding almost shy.

“I’m not much of a dancer,” Chalcedony temporized, wishing that she needn’t, and knowing that she ought to.  She looked around to see if she could find a way out, but most of the hobbits were dancing; only Master Celebrimbor remained seated, with his cat twining about his legs, in the dim half-light just outside the ring of firelight.  “All right, but I’m sorry in advance if I step on your feet.”

Elanor was lovely, she thought, with the way the firelight sparkled in her golden hair, and the way her dress clung pleasingly but modestly to her form. She was beginning to suspect that Elanor was looking for something other than friendship, which would make sense.  They were, after all, very good friends already, and she thought that Elanor was pretty, and they knew each other very well.  They were a little young to do much more than look at one another, probably, though Chalcedony didn’t have a very good idea.  Well, there was the dancing.

Da and Ma were dancing together; they loved to be the center of attention.  Ma’s blue skirt described a round circle, and she and Da leaned back in each other’s arms, dancing twice as fast as some of the other couples, one arm in the air each, leaning back and balancing one another perfectly.  Their feet barely seemed to touch the ground, and they were both laughing.  What would it be like, Chalcedony wondered, with a queer little ache in her chest, to trust someone that much?  To balance them that perfectly?

She felt too big and too clumsy as she stiffly pivoted Elanor in a not-so-tight circle, trying to remember which way to go next while avoiding standing on her feet.  It was mostly automatic, hours of practice meaning that her body remembered the figures on their own, but she felt distracted and at odds in her skin again.

A turn on the boys’ side of the dance brought her face to face with Frodo, who was dancing with Primrose Proudfoot.  The firelight glittered off his hair, as golden as his sister’s, and when he smiled at her as they revolved past one another, she felt as if it warmed her from her toes right up to the roots of her hair.  It was like sunshine; it was like watching the baby mushrooms grow; it was like—

Lilóteo’s stubborn face, his arm around Nimruzimir’s shoulders, the slightly wistful look he got when he stared off towards what had been their home—

She nearly tripped over her own feet as she found herself back with Elanor.  Something cold and terrified unfolded in the base of her stomach, because the way she had felt when she caught sight of Frodo—that first flush of warmth—it was like the way Nimruzimir felt when he woke up in the morning and rolled over and saw Lilóteo snoring on the other side of the bed.

She was a boy; she was supposed to like girls, wasn’t she?

(She was a boy—wasn’t she?)

Looking through a window should not be painful.  Looking into a mirror should not be painful either.

Nimruzimir eyed himself with distaste in the mirror.  Ringlets were fashionable, and his triangular face was now surrounded by them, dyed from boring mouse-brown to something closer to a rich gold at his father’s instruction.  He hated them.  They matched the setting of the ring his father’s choice of son-in-law had given him.

Well, that was perhaps too generous and too unfair at the same time.  The chosen son-in-law had not really given him the ring; his father had supplied it.  And his father had, Nimruzimir thought, tried to choose someone who would be—kind, perhaps.  Protective, certainly, and kind; he had seemed confused by some of Nimruzimir’s interests, but hardly judgmental.

But—Nimruzimir twisted the ring viciously on his finger.  If he went along with this now, this last thing, if he was his father’s perfect daughter in this as in all else, he would lose himself entire.  He thought he understood, now, why his mother had left.  He was no worshiper of her ancient, terrible, incomprehensible gods, but no more did he desire to bow his head to the island ones, such as they were.  They were kind, in the tales, and protective, just as the chosen son-in-law would be.  But the universe was a mechanism, empty and old, and those gods had even less to do with him than his mother’s ladies and lords.

(Has he seen weeping charcoal eyes peeping out at him from the cracks in weathered cobblestones, where the rainwater collects?  No, no, no—he has seen nothing.  He does not see anything.)

The ring had clearly been made to echo his necklace, or perhaps it had been commissioned at the same time, and his father had not told him of it.  That was not impossible, and Nimruzimir would not even have particularly blamed his father.  He was still uncertain whether the necklace had been purchased after they had arrived on the island, or whether it had been purchased much earlier as a gift for his mother.  It did not matter, he told himself.  None of it really mattered.

He wrenched the ring around his finger again in frustration.  None of this was correct.  He had tried and tried, but it all felt so terribly hollow.  He would never be the perfect daughter.  He would never make up to his father for his mother leaving.  He could find in him no desire to play any of the social games that were apparently necessary here, at least for a woman of his social status.

A woman of the necessary social status to be his father’s daughter.

But he was no fool.  Several times, he had already stolen into his father’s rooms and come out dressed in one of his father’s long black raincoats.  It hid his form well, and with a little judicious maneuvering, he had been able to speak to some of the apprentices to the guild of natural philosophers, many of whom were stationed at the king’s palace.

He was not certain how he felt about the Kings’ Men; his father was careful to walk the fine line between throwing in his lot completely with the Faithful, who were out of favor but presumably seemed more palatable to him, and those in power, who could certainly cause difficulties for the two of them were they to come to their attention.

But they were the ones who had the resources.  Ugly rumors about the Black Temple or no, Nimruzimir thought, worrying vaguely at his lip, the King’s Men had power and wealth and the desire to expand their borders.  And all of that came with a need for technology, and a need for engineers and philosophers, including chemisters.

He had the mental ability, and some of the training—had fortuitously, as an adolescent, attracted the attention of one of the professors at a small local academy.  Despite the fact that the school itself had been for young men and that no one regarded him as such, the professor had taken it upon himself to instruct Nimruzimir for several years.  He was certain he could easily supplement the early instruction with whatever was necessary, as long as he was given a chance to do so.

It was a fearful prospect, to leave everything behind.  To leave his father, who loved him but did not see him.  To leave his father to wonder why his perfect daughter had left him just as his wife had done.  But Nimruzimir could not really see that he could do anything else.  He wondered if his mother had felt this way, like a bird trapped in a too-small cage.

With trembling hands, he reached for the small nail scissors lying upon the vanity table.  He raised them to the side of his head, took a deep breath, stopped thinking, and simply acted.  One of the too-gold curls fell to the table a moment later, and Nimruzimir’s heartbeat expanded in his ears.  He cut again, and again, curls and coils of his hair falling all around him like autumn leaves.  He ran a hand across his head, freeing another handful of it and scattering it across the ground, then collapsed back into the chair, panting.

His face was still the same, white and very thin, but he had left enough length in some places to tug the ends of his hair down in front of his ears like the beginnings of sideburns.  He had an old shirt and trousers that he had stolen from one of the servants months ago.  If he took his father’s coat and threw it over him, the shape of his body would not be so obvious.

As he stood, his body was wracked by a sudden wave of tremors—as if the island whispers her destruction into his ear—and he nearly had to sit down again.  After taking one or two shaky breaths, he decided not to leave the necklace behind, or the ring.  He might need them to barter with.  And a small, small part of him wondered whether they had been his mother’s and whether somehow she might still care, if he went out into this fading twilight all alone.

* * *

She was a boy, Chalcedony repeated to herself as she checked her mushrooms.  If she had had any doubts about this fact, the most recent memory would certainly have removed them.  To become a girl, she would have to leave her family behind, and she couldn’t do that.  She didn’t know a trade, as Nimruzimir had or would or did, and even if she did, she couldn’t leave Ma and Da, she couldn’t leave the Shire, with its happy bustle, Uncle Sam with his garden, Elanor, her friend, or Frodo—

No, she couldn’t leave any of them.  Which meant she had to be a boy.  Her hands trembled slightly as she rotated the saucer, trying to inspect every angle of it.  This set of mushrooms were growing particularly well, despite repeated applications of the water from the poisoned pond.  Several of them had put out tiny stalks now, and Chalcedony was realizing with rising excitement and a twinge of fear that she was going to be able to take them and try to get them to grow in and around the poisoned pond now.  She hadn’t really expected this to work.  Some fundamental pessimistic thing inside her had kept insisting that she had made all of it up, or that even if she hadn’t, she was too young or not talented enough, even with Nimruzimir’s memories to help her, to make it work.

But it was working.  It was working.  And the more it works, the more excited she gets, the more she sees in her mind’s eye the memories of the necklace, tinted aubergine in the glass, falling thick and fast about her like snow in midwinter—

* * *

Skilled hands wind the soft glass around a thin metal rod.  It glows dull-orange from the heat of the fire, matching the shade of the sky overhead.  Voices murmur in the background, but the girl winding the beads pays them no attention.  Instead, she hums a soft little song that wraps itself into the amorphous lattice of tiny humming clouds that make up the glass.

The song is about birds waking, and it’s also about time, harmony, and interconnectedness.  It’s a song the Lord in Black heard from the stars and whispered in a dream, and now the young glassmaker is singing it to her pretty tinted glass beads as she winds them round the inner core.  Once she has finished winding the beads and they have cooled, she will send them to another apprentice, who will use sandpaper to rub the outsides until they look like the icicles that the Lord in Blue breathes onto the trees in the dead of winter.

Later, the jeweler’s apprentices will make little gold beads, tiny golden leaves with molds so small and delicate they might be fairy work.  The gold and glass will be woven together into a long necklace and a young sailor will buy it at market, hoping to win the heart of the black-haired, brown-limbed girl who works at the market as a translator.  It will work for a little while, before their beliefs and backgrounds fracture them apart beneath the looming growth of the colossus to the west, whose vast metal ships spill black oil like blood into the seas, until the tears of the Lady in White no longer run clear.

* * *

Chalcedony’s heart beat like a bird’s, too fast.  She wasn’t supposed to be here, not really.  She was pretty sure Annamir was trailing her again, anyway, and would let anyone know if she somehow didn’t come back.  But really she was less worried about herself and more worried about her cargo.

She had brought the first set of mushrooms with her, the ones that had grown well.  She had gently extracted part of them onto more potato jelly, because if something did go wrong, she needed to have some left so she could try again.  

They had tried so hard and grown so well.  She knew this was a little silly of her—Nimruzimir would not be daunted by such a silly thing.  Her great-uncle however many times removed Bilbo would not be daunted.  And the scholars she had read of in the books tucked away in the libraries—they would not have been worried about the little white mushrooms.

But they had tried so hard, Chalcedony thought.  What if the poison killed them anyway?  The pond was so still.  No sign of movement lurked in its depths.  Little grew around it, either; the nearby trees were dead, grey branches reaching for the sky.  Here and there a limb had fallen to the earth, but little seemed to have decayed.  Even the rooting of new life in the dead seemed to have been curtailed.

Chalcedony took a deep breath, set down her pack, and began to get out her equipment.  “You can do it,” she whispered to the mushrooms.  “I know you can.”

* * *

Nimruzimir dreams of hyphae, white as snow, spreading beneath the earth.  In the dream, he has a little sister, sleeping beside him, older than the one who slipped away from them before she was born.  Almost of age, as his mother’s folk would reckon it, this new living little sister.  They dream of the hyphae together, and of the way each tiny, questing tendril finds another, and another, braiding and entwining to make a mat beneath the earth of fine white fibers.

Altogether each one reaches for its neighbor, and Nimruzimir’s little sister takes his hand and squeezes.  Nimruzimir reaches out his other hand to Lilóteo, who murmurs something gentle under his breath and then starts to snore.  Half-here, beneath the eaves of his father’s old house, with the rain pelting down outside, half-somewhere else, with the fungi knitting their mycelium, then pushing their way up through the constricting earth to bloom, white and wrinkled above the soil, waiting for a gentle wind to carry their tiny children away on the wind.

Sparkling poison in the water at their feet does nothing; they suck greedily at the moisture and secrete the glittering treasure where it can do no damage.  They are not bothered.  The fruiting bodies emerge, carrying the poison away, captured in their semi-rigid structures and inert.  The hyphae quest ever outward.

As they grow and bloom, gloved hands pluck them like flowers, laying them across the bottoms of baskets.  Not to be eaten, these mushrooms, but to be safely dried and entombed.  Harvesting poison as if it were grain.  This is of no concern to the hyphae, which spread and spread until they are cut off by the roots of curious plants.  As the poison begins to recede, other brave life roots and surfaces, leaves turned upwards to the Sun above.

Nimruzimir has never known if the things he sees lie beyond the world or only behind his own eyes.  When he is unflinchingly truthful, he does not know which prospect he fears more.  But for once, he wants this thing to be true, or at least rooted somewhere outside of himself.  The girl at his shoulder stirs, clutching at her throat, and he hears the soft almost-musical click of glass against glass.

The Sun spins onward, the planet rotating madly, years churning past.  Mosquitos return early to the stagnant water, and the spiders follow them.  Lilóteo sometimes speaks of a historian friend at the palace who used to talk at length about the spider iconography of the pre-islandic civilizations, and it tended to be rather negative, but Lilóteo himself says—occasionally, and only when he has had rather more than a cup or two of wine—that those are not spiders but only spider-shaped things.

After the spiders come the birds, the frogs, and the fish.  The place bursts into new life: green leaves and green grass, brown reeds sprout up all around the turquoise water.  

The cats return last.

It looked like some of the mushrooms might be growing.  Chalcedony couldn’t be certain, because she had finally cracked and told Uncle Sam what she had been trying to do, and this time he had insisted on making the trip to the pond with her, which meant he was also keeping an eye on her to stop her from getting what he considered to be too close.  She didn’t bother to protest that she had planted the mushrooms closer, because then he would just have worried more.

At any rate, they weren’t so far away that she couldn’t see the patch of white where she was fairly sure the mushrooms were growing all right.  She could come another day, when he was less worried.  She didn’t have to concern herself with potential harvest and ways to do that safely just yet, anyway.

“I’d never have thought of a thing like this,” Uncle Sam was saying to her.  “It was well done, lad.”

“It’s because of the fairy-sight,” she said, and then remembered that it couldn’t be fairy-sight, because she was a boy.  “I mean…the memories, I suppose.”  This half slip of the tongue felt fearful, so she walked away as if to get a different point of view to look at the pond.  The whisper of a noise drew her attention to the undergrowth, and she saw that Annamir had followed them again.  He seemed almost to arch an eyebrow at her; his tail lashed once.

“I haven’t done anything,” she said, coming back to Uncle Sam.

“You have, you know,” he said gently.  “I know it doesn’t feel like anything, but that’s because you’re the one who did it.”

“We don’t even know if this will work.”

“No,” he said slowly.  “But it’s a thing that’s worth trying.  And it’s a thing that wouldn’t have been tried if you hadn’t tried it.”

Chalcedony had never found it easy to receive praise, and this was worse than most, because it felt like such a queer lie, though she couldn’t really explain why.  She cast about for something else to say, the pressure building inside her as if she needed to speak.  They could just hike back now; it had been a longish trip for poor Sam, but she had been clear that there wasn’t much to see.

He was carefully circling the pond again, keeping his distance, his hands shoved into his pockets.  “You know, when I was young, I used to come out here when I could—it wasn’t always easy, but I often went on long trips when it wasn’t schooltime or planting or harvest.  Master Frodo and I—we’d go on walking tours together, sometimes.”  He glanced at her, his eyebrows drawing briefly together.

“That—sounds nice,” Chalcedony hazarded, not quite sure what he was driving at.  

“It means a lot to me, this place,” Uncle Sam said quietly.  “So thank you for trying to save it.  I don’t have so much of him left in the Shire, you know, it’s mostly places more than anything.  The library at Bag End is like that, but that was always his, not ours.”

He had a wistful look on his face, his eyes soft and faraway, and Chalcedony was struck with the sudden, horrified realization that there were unshed tears gleaming in his eyes.  Even if she had been good at comforting folk—and she was not—she would not have known how to comfort someone more than twice her age.

“That’s, um,” she said.  Annamir stalked out of the bushes and twined round her legs.  “Look!” she said hurriedly.  “The cat’s here.”

“Well, tell him to stay well away from the pond, at any rate.”  Uncle Sam arched an eyebrow.  “Sorry, old fellow, was I making Boromir uncomfortable?  Don’t worry about me, lad, I’m all right.”

Lad made her flinch, somehow, even though she knew it was right, and all of a sudden she had the wildest urge to tell him how she felt.  The words pressed at her mouth like bile, almost impossible to suppress, I know who I am but sometimes I want to be somebody else.  Sometimes I want to be a girl, even though I know that’s impossible.  Sometimes I want to be Chalce—

Light gleaming green-gold on the surface of the water, ducking beneath the black edge of a rain-cloud as it begins to travel onwards.  The rain still striking the water disturbs the surface from a glassy reflection into a churning smear of colors.  With the fine misting rain and the light shimmering through it, the day seems very soft.

Nimruzimir turned the collar of his coat up against the damp, frowning down at the pond.  A small part of him reminded himself that this particular location had been fruitful before, in terms of seeking out particularly useful fungi.  But he was tired, and he did not think he had the energy to try to look for samples right now.

He was not even quite certain what had brought him out here, or how he had remembered what day it was.  Something about the air, perhaps.

“Hey.  I don’t mean to interrupt, but I thought I’d give you a hat.”

He smiled faintly.  “Of course you m-managed to find me.  But th-thank you.  I—” He licked dry lips.  “I d-do not actually want to be alone, I d-don’t think.  I j-just—s-something made me—”  He clutched his fingers about the too-warm necklace.  Something had made him think of it; the weather, or the scents in the air, or the knowledge of it, resting heavy at the base of his belly.  “Th-this was the d-day I left my father.”

Lilóteo gave what might be termed an encouraging grunt and held out an oil-skin hat.  

After a moment, Nimruzimir took it.  “I am not usually this f-fanciful,” he said morosely.

“Fanciful?”  Lilóteo leaned against the willow tree, with its branches dragging towards the earth.  The leaves made a dappled pattern that rippled in the same breeze carrying the fine mist of rain in to film on their eyelashes and skin.

“I am—” Nimruzimir stopped himself with a cough, because he did not know how to word this.  He did not even quite know if he should.  Lilóteo just waited, his eyebrows vaguely raised.  “I am not much of a s-storyteller,” Nimruzimir said stiffly.  Lilóteo remained silent, and he was as incapable as ever of reading subtle facial cues.  “D-Do you s-still want to know?”

“Yes, of course, if you want to tell me.”

Nimruzimir gnawed on his lower lip and walked back and forth.  The Sun was beginning to emerge more, and the rain was lessening.  He felt as if he were emerging from the breaking of a fever, covered in sweat.  The air was very clear, though laden with moisture, the only scent on the wind the scent of rain.  The day he had left, it had been hot and smokey, the light a peculiar faint yellow-gold that arose from its refraction from all the particulate matter in the air.  “I s-simply am h-having some d-difficulty,” he began haltingly.  “It is—my f-father never knew.”

“Never knew what?” Lilóteo prompted, not exactly gently, but with interest.  The intensity in his dark eyes had not bothered Nimruzimir in a long time.

“Me.”  Nimruzimir found his hands were clutching at the rucked cloth of his oilskin coat beneath his elbows.  “It is as if the girl—the g-g-girl that I w-w-was d-died, but no one m-mourned her.”

He thought that Lilóteo might protest that he had never been a girl, which would even have the advantage of being true, but he had no other way to put words round the feeling bubbling inside himself.

Instead, Lilóteo nodded, tapping his thumb against his bottom lip.  “Among the Druédain, it’s common for people like us to be treated like our roj to begin with—sorry, I don’t know the right word in Adunaic, and I think an anthropologist would argue it isn’t exactly the same thing.” He shrugged.  “Anyway.  The point is, occasionally someone slips through the cracks or doesn’t realize or marries into the enclave, and when that happens, they have a ceremony, where they bury a token representing the former self.  Is that something—I mean, would you want to do something like that?”

“Oh—ah,” stammered Nimruzimir.  “I d-d-don’t know.”

“Sometimes it’s not as formal as a burial.  They cover graves with white flowers, so sometimes they just put the token away marked with a white flower.”

“I will—have to think about it,” Nimruzimir wrenched out.  “But, but, th-thank you.  I—”  Why was it so hard to breathe?

“Ah, shit, man,” Lilóteo’s voice murmured, far away.  “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

The vision blurs apart like the reflection in the water with the light rain breaking it up.  Chalcedony’s chest aches.  She sees a little brown box with a white flower emblazoned on it.  A box that she has opened, and what does that mean?

The girl it mourns is dead.

She blinked and shuddered slightly.  “All right there?” Uncle Sam’s voice asked from somewhere far away.

“I,” said Chalcedony.  “There’s something—” she stammered.  Would Uncle Sam listen to her? Would he laugh?  Desperately, she cast about for some way to introduce the conversation.  “Can I talk to you?”

He smiled the slow smile she had known all her life.  “Let’s walk and talk, shall we?  We can gather some herbs for dinner, and perhaps there will be strawberries.”

He was, she rather suspected, trying to give her an extra thing to think about to distract herself, because he was probably aware she was worried and all mixed up inside.  She didn’t think she was hiding that part of it very well.  “Mm, all right.”

Annamir slipped along in the shadows beside them as they went.  Chalcedony normally enjoyed nature rambles like this and was very focused on them, but today her thoughts whirled about, half of them still lodged with Nimruzimir on the bank of a little pond somewhere—somewhen.  He didn’t know she existed, and a little part of her was sad about that.  He’d have been such a good brother.

Uncle Sam didn’t push her.  He never did.  He just offered his presence, and sometimes this just meant you felt better because you knew he was there, and sometimes it meant that you confessed to him that you were the one who had broken the jam jar in his pantry and it hadn’t been any of his children.  Of course, that had been when she was very young.

“It’s something about the festival,” she said finally.  “What would you think, Uncle Sam, if someone felt like, like they’d rather maybe be dancing on the other side?”  The words came out thickly, in a rush.

“Hm,” said Uncle Sam.  “I’d say maybe that’s a sign they might want to explore that.”  He scratched his head, pushing his broad-brimmed straw hat back a little.

“But isn’t that, don’t you think that’s weird?” she pushed.

“I think there’s a great many strange things that people do,” Uncle Sam replied mildly.  “When I was younger, I felt that way too, sometimes.”  He had an oddly far-off look in his eyes.

This ought, probably, to have comforted Chalcedony, but somehow it made her mouth taste odd again.  It was good, she told herself fiercely, that it wasn’t queer of her to feel that way.  It was a good thing.  It was a normal way for a young man to feel, clearly!  When she looked at him, she saw that Uncle Sam’s forehead was creased a little, in a slight frown.  

He didn’t say anything else, and she didn’t know what to say.  “That’s good,” she said, finally, with forced cheer.

She would learn to be normal with time.  And that was what she wanted.

The mushrooms were growing well.  She had been keeping a very careful eye on them.  One or two shelves had even appeared at the pond, though the summer was turning slowly towards autumn now.  The days were growing shorter and colder, and the bushes were putting out clumps of pretty berries.  The wind was chilly, Ma had started making her famous cider, and the fire in the kitchen was stoked more days than not.  Chalcedony often had to use her kerosene lamp to keep the basement heated, and as it had a tendency to give her headaches, the hours she could keep were shortening.  This gave her the queer, haunting feeling that winter would be the end of everything.

For some reason, Celebrimbor and Annamir were still staying somewhere in the Shire—where, Chalcedony wasn’t certain.  She thought they might sleep outside, since she couldn’t think of anywhere else that would be large enough for them. It was getting colder, though, so they would have to move on soon, surely.

If she could only find something out about Nimruzimir, perhaps she could hold onto the happiness she had found over the summer.  She might not be able to bury herself in growing things in the cellar for some months, but she would be able to bury herself in the library, reading about the place he had come from.  If only she knew enough about where that was.

Today, she had holed herself up in the library again.  The weather was particularly unfortunate: wind lashed heavy cold rain against the  shutters, eaves, and windows, and the Sun hid its face entire.  She couldn’t focus, and she didn’t even really know where to begin, because somehow—whether it was because of the way that Nimruzimir thought about things or because she didn’t understand him well enough or because there was simply so much time and space in the way between them, muddling things—she still had no real clues as to where or when he must be living.

She knew he had come from an island, somewhere.  She knew that he had lived, once, in a great empire, and had left for some reason—she got the sense that perhaps a terrible disaster had befallen it, but somehow he and Lilóteo had escaped.  But those seemed to be the only things that she knew.  And she had no idea how to begin to search with them, so she wandered restlessly up and down Da’s library while the rain pounded against the glass, pulling out a book here and there and looking at it desultorily.  

Finally, she flung herself into the particularly squashy armchair in front of the window, pulled the necklace out from beneath her shirt and started twisting it lightly between her fingers, staring restlessly out at the dark day, which was only growing darker.  A crack-boom of sudden thunder made her jump, but it made no difference to the rain, which only lashed down harder than ever.  Drops of rain frothed as they spattered and ran down the window, and because of the darkness outside and the light inside, Chalcedony could see her own brown eyes reflected faint and pallid in the glass. 

Beyond that, all she can see is darkness.

Nimruzimir raised his torch; the light seemed pitifully faint against the heaviness of the darkness. There was a little sunlight, filtering down from somewhere above, but the paucity of openings and the distance and materials through which the light had to travel left it greyish, faint, and dim.

“What is all this?” Lilóteo asked in a hushed voice, and Nimruzimir startled.  He had almost forgot that his lover had accompanied him here.

“It is...the first layer, I suppose.”  It had been a long time since he had been here.  “Long ago, there was another city, and Lond Daer was constructed on its bones.  I have not gone so far down—I was quite young when I found this place—but I believe there is at least one more again beneath this.  It is even darker there.”

“Gods below,” Lilóteo breathed, taking a step forward.  “I knew that Númenor itself was old, but I always thought of the hinterland cities as newer.  Foolish of me, I suppose.

Nimruzimir chuckled dryly.  “Very foolish,” he agreed.  “You of all people ought to know that many folk lived within Arda before Númenor was even a whisper in the mind of Tar-Minyatur.”

“Yes,” Lilóteo agreed, a sharp edge running through his voice.  “Yes, but I of all people convinced myself not to think of it.”

Turning to him, Nimruzimir looked him up and down.  He had the sense that he had trodden upon a sore point, and that the appropriate measures to take were those of comfort.  Hesitantly, he laid a hand on Lilóteo’s forearm.  He did not know what to say.  That he understood the impulse to blend in, to hide one’s origins beneath a different face, a different skin?  But he was not of the Drúedain, as Lilóteo was, and he had barely known his mother’s people.  

He cleared his throat and instead said, “I played down here as a child.  I thought it would seem smaller now that I am grown, but it does not.  If anything, it feels bigger.”

“I’m surprised your parents said nothing about such a thing.”

“Well.  I do not th-think they knew, in r-retrospect.”  He was quite sure that seeking physical comfort was appropriate, and he shifted closer to Lilóteo’s side, curling against his shoulder.  Lilóteo’s arm tightened around him, and he kissed Nimruzimir’s cheek briefly, his beard scratching across it.

“What are we looking for this time?”

“I do not know, exactly.” He squeezed Lilóteo’s hand, then moved further into the darkness.  “I wanted to know if it would be the s-s-same.  I wanted to—”  He shrugged, groping for words and finding none.  Instead, he moved forward, into the dim grey streets.  His footsteps sounded loud and hollow.

He remembered, almost as if it had been a dream, the gentle slope of the cobbled street, and the strange ruinous foundations of buildings from long ago.  He remembered the great imposing building at the end of the street, with its blank black windows, like the eyes of a dead beast staring at nothing.  

As a child, with little experience other than his mother’s small bone altars, he had not realized that it was likely a house of worship, and the thought sent a shiver down his spine.  (Somewhere, he hears the whispering of the White Lady, the susurration of her voice as it croons in a language he does not understand.  Her attention is not on him.)

Nimruzimir stopped and shuddered, hand groping in the pocket of his heavy coat for the flask of tonic.  He had it unstoppered and nearly at his lips when a hand caught his wrist.

“Hey, hey,” Lilóteo said.  “You had your dose already.”

“I thought I heard s-s-s-something, I n-n-need it.”

“You do not,” Lilóteo replied sharply.  “No, Nimruzimir, I’m not going to order you around about most things, but this is your health, and I’m your physician.”

“The r-royal physician of a d-dead kingdom?” Nimruzimir snarled, grasping for the tonic.  The sound of his voice rose and echoed, dom, dom, dom—before it had died away, he could already feel shame swelling beneath his breast.

Lilóteo did not flinch, though the barb had been calculated to hurt.  After a moment, he rolled his shoulder—the one whose muscles had healed a little too short after the torment he had suffered at Tar-Mairon’s hands—and glared.  “And also your fucking physician,” he growled, the liquid notes of his childhood accent—beautiful but foreign to Nimruzimir’s ears as always—bleeding into his tone.  “And you risk doing yourself a great harm if you take more of this than you need.  You know that.  You’re no fool.”

Nimruzimir ground his teeth, not quite letting go.  “Y-You d-don’t understand, you don’t know what it’s l-l-l-like to hear even her whispers.”  He swallowed thickly.  “I w-would rather be insensate.  I would rather be—”

“Don’t,” Lilóteo cut him off.  “Don’t say that, Nimruzimir, don’t fucking say that.”

A terrible shudder wracked Nimruzimir from head to toe.  He let Lilóteo tug the bottle out of his hands, close it up, and slip it back into his coat pocket—a staggering gesture of trust, after what had just transpired.  Then, to his surprise, Lilóteo pulled him into a sudden rough embrace,  one hand on his waist, the other cradling his head.

He almost pulled away, thinking Lilóteo was trying to comfort him and doing a poor job of it.  Then he felt the tremor running through the hand on his head, and he remembered all that Lilóteo had lost as well.  He took a deep breath, then turned up his mouth and kissed Lilóteo, biting hard at his lower lip.  Lilóteo swore loudly into his mouth, big fingers digging into the bones of his spine.  The heat of him and the taste of blood did what nothing else would have, and Nimruzimir heard the voice of the Lady trail off into nothing more than the sound of a sorrowful wind whistling somewhere overhead.

“I am sorry,” he said stiffly, pulling back after a moment.  “I will not say that again.”

Those dark brows drew sharply together, but Lilóteo nodded.  “Do you want to leave and come back another day?” he asked.

Something tugged in Nimruzimir’s chest.  “No,” he said.  “I will go in there and prove to myself that it is empty, and then we will go.”

He feared, a little, that Lilóteo might argue, but he did not.  He only nodded tightly and said, “Let’s go, then.”

Nimruzimir approached without pausing, refusing to flinch.  He gritted his teeth as they passed up the wide flat stone steps and came to a pair of dark wooden double doors, inlaid with some sort of milky white crystal.  He had heard of such things, reading in ancient tomes, and he wondered if perhaps they would take on a light of their own beneath the Moon, but this was not the time to try and find that out.

The doors were stuck.  Nimruzimir tugged futilely at them, barely getting them to move at all.

“I’ve got it,” Lilóteo told him, putting a hand over his and straining.  They groaned, ancient hinges protesting at the forcible motion, but Lilóteo set his heels into the ground and pulled again.  The right-hand door made a screeching noise and stuttered forward perhaps a foot and a half, which was not very much, but would certainly be sufficient for entry.

“That was quite impressive,” Nimruzimir said, leaning forward to peek around it.

“Thank you,” said Lilóteo, and then he began to cough, dry and rasping.  Nimruzimir remembered in an instant of the old weakness of the lungs he sometimes alluded to, noticed the smell of musty damp in the air, and immediately panicked.  What did one do under this circumstance?  He was no physician.  He slapped Lilóteo heavily on the back several times, until his lover shoved at him and shook his head, then leaned sideways against the stone and glared, his breathing slowly settling.

“There’s no need to attack my poor back, man,” he grumbled.  “What has it ever done to you?”

“I was, I was trying—your lungs.  Do you need to go back before we go in?”

Shrug.  “I’ll keep.  I’ve had far worse attacks.  I just overdid it a little with the door.”

“And right after being so concerned for my health,” Nimruzimir said primly.

He got a gruff chuckle for that.  “Physician, heal thyself,” Lilóteo said wryly.  “All right, all right, I’m sorry.  Come on, the sooner we go in, the sooner we can go out again.”

The ceiling—such of it as remained after the centuries had taken their toll—was hundreds of feet above their head.  Nimruzimir had never really thought before about how far down they must have coming, wending their way down the great spiral of cellar stairs.  Fluted columns rose up to it like the ribs of a carcass, and he shivered.  A crumpled swathe of black cloth lay down nearly the length of the aisle; when Nimruzimir bent and reached out to the very edge of it, it dissolved into dust as his fingers touched it.  Fear prickled along the back of his neck again, but he forced himself to ignore it.

Smashed colored glass lay across dark wooden benches.  It was not so different from what he knew of the Black Temple, though there was no trace here of the violence in which that place had been steeped.  He felt some kind of pressure building against his ear drums as he paced along the aisle, trying to avoid touching the ancient cloth.

At the end of the aisle was a stone altar, waist-height for Nimruzimir and a little below waist-height for Lilóteo.  Shreds of cloth and a few yellow-green tassels lay around its base, and a heavy crack had riven it in two about a third of the way from one end.  Just to the side of the crack, something glittered in the light of Nimruzimir’s torch.

It was a mirror, he realized, stooping closer to inspect it, a silver hand mirror with a lily wrought around its base.  As he looked into it, he caught sight of a flash of movement and froze.

Behind the darkened glass, peering out from behind a series of brown smudges, a pair of brown eyes caught his, and a small round mouth formed a startled O shape.  The torch fell from Nimruzimir’s hand and rolled across the floor.

“Who—” he said hoarsely, ignoring Lilóteo’s startled oath. Darkness crawls up the side of the vision, and the flatness of the mirror is the curve of a brown bead, the yellow light of the torch the bright golden setting holding it in place.

Chalcedony yelped and dropped the necklace, sitting back in her chair, her heart pounding.  Had he seen her?  He couldn’t have seen her.  No, she told herself, he couldn’t possibly have seen her.  He must have seen something else.

“Lond Daer,” she whispered, her mouth forming the queer syllables in a way she seemed to know was inexpert.  “Númenor.”

Her mind was racing; her hands trembling.  She had heard both names, she thought, though with her thoughts suddenly galloping about like this, she was not sure where.  Surely she had seen the word Númenor inscribed on one of the books, and as for Lond Daer—wait!  She might start with Da’s atlas.  As a child, she had loved the atlas, had loved curling up in her father’s lap while his fingers traced path after path and his laughing voice told her story after story of the War of the Ring.  And she knew where the atlas was.  It had a place of honor on the bottom shelf nearest the door.

She managed not to trip over her trousers in her eagerness, hands still caught and twisting in the necklace, and soon had fetched the tome and brought it back, settling down in the chair and smoothing it out across her knees.  Then she began to read.

It took her longer than it should have, really, because it was exactly where it made sense for it to have been—up the North-South road and down the Greyflood, the reverse of the journey Da had described for the necklace.  It made sense, but somehow this was obscurely disappointing, because it didn’t really tell her anything.  For all she knew, she might have remembered that was where Lond Daer was, from poring over the atlas herself.  It wasn’t, she told herself hastily, that she didn’t believe in the things she was seeing, it was only—

It was only that the rain was so heavy, and the mushrooms grew so slowly, and perhaps none of it would make a difference.  It was only that she felt so queerly trapped within her own skin.  It was only, she told herself—firmly—that she was growing up, and it was difficult, but it would be easier when she got there.  Hadn’t her uncle Sam made that clear?

So Lond Daer wasn’t much of a find.  What about Númenor?  She put the atlas away carefully.  The name of Númenor certainly sounded familiar.  This took a little more hunting, but she found after a little while The Tale of Númenor, which was a children’s book she had not seen in some years.  As soon as she opened it, she remembered what it was about—Númenor was the island of the Big Folk that had sunk beneath the ocean.  After a moment of panic, she ran back through the memories and found that Lilóteo and Nimruzimir had fled from the island, so they had not sunk into the ocean.  That did give her a clue—she would just have to start looking for stories or histories about what happened after the end of Númenor.

At first, she tried to be organized.  She made a pile of books she thought might be useful on the right side of the armchair and books that needed to be put away again on the left.  The left grew discouragingly faster than the right; most of the books she could find about Númenor seemed to end when the island sank.  After the second time the left-hand pile fell over when there were only two books in the right-hand one, she stopped trying to be so organized and just started searching for anything.

Those two books turned out to be the only ones that she could find that said anything about Númenor after its fall at all, though, and they seemed to mostly replicate the same information.  One of them was a thick history printed on thin, yellowing paper, with a note inside the front cover proclaiming it to have been a present some years ago from Belladonna to “her dear Mirabella, because I know you have a head for such things.”  

This particular one was quite difficult to read, not just because it was thick and more dryly written even than the sorts of things she had to study at her lessons, but also because Mirabella appeared to have scribbled all sorts of little notes across all the pages, and they were clearly not the sort of note that had been intended to be comprehensible to another reader after the fact.

After trying for too long to make her way through the section on “post-Númenorean colonial diaspora”—which she really wished she could understand better, because it sounded quite interesting, and also as if it might have some information she was looking for—she found that the second book seemed to be Mirabella’s attempt to rewrite the first book in a slightly more storybook fashion.

This did help, and she got on rather better with this than the first—it also helped much more than the scribbly little notes with understanding what the first was talking about—but she soon found that the only names that really seemed to appear were Elendil, Aquandil, Isildur, and Glorfindel.  Everyone else seemed to be discussed in rather broader sorts of terms.

So that was it.  Nothing else.  She’d been through all the information she had, and the Buckland library was one of the best in the Shire.  It was possible that there was more information somewhere, perhaps down in the vast libraries of Gondor, where Elanor might go soon enough, for she was to be a lady-in-waiting to Queen Arwen herself.  

But Chalcedony would never go there—Boromir could not go there.  Boromir’s place was here.  And suddenly, whether it was the blackness of the storm outside or the heavy stillness of the air within or the things that Sam had said the other day or the feeling that had been building, for days now, that she was trapped within her own skin and that she was rapidly approaching the end of everything—suddenly, she was weeping, throwing her mother’s apron up in front of her face and howling with some feeling that wasn’t quite fear and wasn’t quite anger, either.

She scrabbled at the necklace, tightening her grip, trying to find an anchor somewhere that she could hold on to—and she must have tugged too hard, because the tension against her neck was there one moment and gone the next, as the necklace snapped, and the beads catapulted out of her hands, landing on the floor in a muddle of sudden rattling noises.

“Oh no,” whispered Chalcedony.  “Oh, no, no, no.”

She was down on her hands and knees before she could think, trying to gather up the beads, but they had rolled every which way, scattered as soon as they hit the ground.  It wasn’t an omen, she tried to tell herself, it didn’t mean anything, but she was breathing hard and her vision was blurring—drops of moisture hit the ground near the backs of her hands.

She felt sick.  She felt trapped.  She had to get away somewhere—anywhere—she found her feet moving before her thoughts had even quite caught up.  She wasn’t running, exactly, but she was moving quickly, even with the apron still up and half-covering her face.

Still sobbing, she made it to the cellar and slammed the door behind her, moving down the stairs in darkness.  She was surefooted and knew the steps as well as she knew her times table, but she was shivering when she reached the bottom; it was too close to winter to be anything like comfortable down here.

She stumbled over, hand along the wall, to light the little kerosene heater that was set against the far wall.  The flame sputtered a little, then caught, glowing a comfortable orange-red.  Sniffing and shivering, Chalcedony curled up next to it, then turned it up, trying to heat herself as quickly as she could.  She would need to watch it, of course…you weren’t supposed to let it burn too high for too long…but she was so very tired from all the crying.

She could just shut her eyes for an instant—just an—

The flame of the little kerosene heater burned too high.  The cellar was warm enough, but it was not well-ventilated, and the too-ravenous fire began to devour the breathable air almost immediately.  Chalcedony still had two brown beads clutched in one sleeping hand, and she shivered and clutched them tighter.

Within those little beads lay wrapped a queer power—fairy-sight, the hobbits called it; foresight, the Elves.  A young Dunlendish mother, looking into her (as she thought) daughter’s eyes long ago in Lond Daer, called it the White Lady’s Gift.  Lilóteo, when he called it anything, called it a nuisance.

Whatever it was, the beads themselves were soaked in it, passed from the hands of one skilled prophet to another, connected by the hyphae of destiny and shared understanding; two outsiders, two unfitted puzzle pieces, staring into a society that didn’t quite suit.  The strands of sight burned like fire in the darkness of space and time, and perhaps it was only that, or perhaps it was Chalcedony’s own despair soaking the threads, as she whimpered and coughed, or perhaps it was simply His presence in the little fungi and the poisonous air, but somewhere beyond the Doors of Night, a great dark malice raised its head and looked towards the connecting strands.

Annamir, dozing in Celebrimbor’s lap in an inn just down the road from Brandybuck Hall, raised his head.  He felt that terrible gaze, and for an instant, it made him freeze and hiss, raise his hackles like the cat he was and perhaps would ever be, made all things but cat flee from his burning soul.  His claws went into Celebrimbor’s knees, and the Elf woke with a shout.  “Annamírë, what—”

The sound of Celebrimbor’s voice in pain brought back a little of the mind that inhabited the cat’s body, but he was still fuzzy and far away.  The only thing he knew was that the girl was in danger, somehow, the girl who did those careful experiments with the mushrooms, who hid herself behind the body of a young male for no reason that Annamir could determine.  She could shine through if she chose.

She was in danger.  The mushroom girl was in danger.

He did not stop to try to communicate with Celebrimbor; he did not really have enough rational thought left for that.  Instead, he leapt from his husband’s lap and shot like a streak towards the door.  It was shut, and as a cat, he ought not have been able to open it, but some blind half-remembered instinct knew how to work metal, and the hinges and bolt suffered a sudden catastrophic sublimation.  The subsequent explosion blew the door clean outward and let him through. 

Fortunately, a traveler was entering the inn, so he was not forced to destroy the outer door as well.  He slipped between their feet, leaving behind a startled oath, and ran full-tilt down the path towards Brandybuck Hall.

As he ran, he felt his way down the tendrils that burned and warped, stealthy as a cat, trying to avoid the terrible gaze that swept down them.  The mushroom girl twitched and gasped.  At the other side of the web, he found another mind that felt faintly familiar.  Mumbled, half-remembered words from another life whispered in his ear, Not by the hand of man shall you fall!

The web touched him in many places.  Thunder rumbled and lightning rattled across the sky here and there and across the knotted mycelium.  Flames beneath the ocean boiled uneasily.  A boy ran from the girl his father wanted him to be.  Too young; no help to be found there.  A man watched an island and her queen fall to the dark.  No—no, any touch of the cat’s would be rebuffed there, and rightly so.  There—an older man, hair shot with grey, whose meticulous work and inexorable care more than his innate talents were beginning to heal a land poisoned by a dying empire.

That man had seen a girl sleeping, once; had seen a pair of startled brown eyes reflected in an ancient broken mirror.  Annamir tried, urgently, to project a cry for help along that thread, a tiny quiver in the web that might go undetected by the deadly malice whose naked gaze had not yet spied him.

The sky above boils with a deadly storm; the earth beneath Nimruzimir’s feet rumbles, but the air is very clear.  He is climbing, his feet following a winding, tortuous path upward, by the side of which the grey and wiry grass surrounds shards of sparkling black glass.

The Meneltarma is just a memory, now, but something inside him tells him insistently that he must reach the top.  Twining hyphae urge him onwards and upwards, and a ripple of mycelium beneath the earth puts out a series of questing fruiting bodies that show him the path like a series of breadcrumbs, their frilled caps glowing with an unearthly, phantasmic light.  The earth seems to breathe and writhe beneath his feet.

At the very top of the ancient volcano, the storm swirls about a quiescent center, a round patch of black sky with stars scattered across it.  When he looks down and around, he can see the bright lights of the Empire shining brighter than any star, but he knows they will wink out in the blink of the gods’ eyes.

He has seen the stars before, never here on the brightly-lit island, but in the old forests of his home, with his mother beside him to show him how to find his way.  They are not faded and distant as the Númenoreans seem to think, but close companions, jewels spilled across the rim of the sky by the generous hand of the Lord in Black.

Beyond even the stars lurks a heavy presence, an ambush predator lying in wait.  For an instant something writhing beneath the earth calls its attention; for an instant that formless gaze finds the tiny sensors that sense it in turn, and it is not just Nimruzimir who is hooked into that rich network of information—brown eyes.  Brown eyes he saw once, years ago, in an ancient city become an ancient tomb.

The girl cries out, soft and afraid. 

“No,” Nimruzimir says. He is not and has never been a brave man, but before that ancient terrible nightmare, that blind idiot appetite that poisons and perverts even from beyond the bounds of the night sky—he does not flinch, not when a child needs to be protected.  The child who might have been his own little sister, in another world, another life.

He knows he will fail, because no human could prevail here, but he does not see a choice.  

“Let me help,” says a burning whisper, and a hand is slipped into his.  Fire blazes at his shoulder, and he half-turns to see a not-quite-stranger, garbed in white robes with the flames of his hair bleeding into fiery wings beating behind him.  He cannot think why this other seems familiar, but that face like a porcelain gold-limned mask with the upper left-hand corner smashed out turns to his.

“Bad luck,” says the creature of fire.  “But he is far away beyond the bounds of the world, and you have put yourself between them.  I will get her out, and he will not have her body or her soul.  Wake, prophet of the sunset land.  You have done well.”

As Nimruzimir blinks his way back to consciousness, he hears the echo of a voice whisper, “And tell your lover that I am sorry for how his shoulder pains him.”

Chapter End Notes

NEVER leave a kerosene lamp or heater unattended inside and quite possibly don’t use them indoors at all; they very much can kill you.

“Hyphae” are like roots for fungi; “mycelium” is the underground network created by many entwining hyphae, and the mushroom part is also referred to as a “fruiting body”

Nimruzimir and Annamir have a little shared history, some of which is alluded to in “Steampunk Númenor,” some of which remains unfortunately unpublished. I’ll have to get on that.

“Númenor” (also referred to as Westernesse in LOTR) means “sunset land/land of the sunset”

For more information on propagation of information/signals/sensing in fungi, here’s an interesting paper: Bahn, Y.-S., Xue, C., Idnurm, A., Rutherford, J. C., Heitman, J., & Cardenas, M. E. (2007). Sensing the environment: lessons from fungi. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 5(1), 57–69. doi:10.1038/nrmicro1578

Chalcedony’s head felt light and painful at the same time.  She groaned and coughed and blinked.  Something rough brushed over her cheek, and a familiar voice said, Prrrrrp.

“He’s awake,” Celebrimbor’s voice said quietly.  “Boromir, how are you feeling?”

“Son, can you hear me?” That was Da’s voice.  Ma’s voice joined in with a little wordless hiccuping sob.

“M’not,” Chalcedony mumbled without thinking, then blinked again.  She was lying in her bed, with a fresh, sweet scent wafting up into her nostrils.  Prying open her eyes, she found that Annamir was curled up beside her—he had just licked her face—and a little green plant had its leaves dangling near her face.

She gasped.  Her lungs seized with a sudden, sharp pain, and she coughed, sitting up in an attempt to get more air.

“Calm,” Celebrimbor said.  “Breathe slowly.  You’re all right, little one.”  Annamir twined around her, purring, and her breathing eased a little.  She took one great shuddering breath, and then another.

“What happened?” she asked.  The last thing she remembered was the storm in the library—the necklace breaking—beads going everywhere—

“You went to sleep near the kerosene heater,” Celebrimbor said steadily.  “It was burning too high to begin with, and it’s not a safe thing to sleep near inside, in any case.  Annamir found you and carried you out of the cellar.”

But how could he have known, Chalcedony thought blurrily.  An image rose up out of the queer dim muddle of her memories, of a short man in an oil-cloth coat standing in front of her while beyond him boiled a terrible darkness.

Nimruzimir.

“My necklace,” Chalcedony whispered.

It was Ma who stepped forward to take her hand.  “I gathered up all the beads,” she said.  “I—I needed something to do while Celebrimbor was taking care of you.”

“You did?” Chalcedony swallowed against a painful throat.  “I—thank you, Ma.”

“I knew it was important to you.”

“Don’t you mind?” Chalcedony wrenched out.  “It’s—it’s a girl’s necklace.”  Though, of course, it wasn’t, since Nimruzimir wasn’t a girl, but, she, but Chalcedony—Boromir—

“It’s just a necklace,” Ma said softly.

“I promise I’ll get over it,” Chalcedony said desperately, wondering why she was saying all of this, but the awful feeling of being trapped in a too-tight sweater still seemed to be on her and she could not quite keep the words from spilling out.

Looking into a mirror should not be painful, Nimruzimir’s dry voice informed her.  Annamir’s equally dry nose butted the back of her neck. 

“Of course you’ll get over it,” Da said cheerfully.  “You’ll be feeling better in no time.”

Before the screaming misery could build up at that, Ma’s clear voice cut through the too-thick air of the room.  “Merry,” she said. “I don’t think that’s what he’s talking about.”  She seated herself on the side of the bed and patted Chalcedony’s hand.  “Love,” she said softly.  “Won’t you tell us what’s wrong?”

“I, I, I—”

Nimruzimir had left.  He had had to leave because there was no way to be the person he was with his father.  She wasn’t strong like Nimruzimir.  She wanted her parents.

Annamir’s nose nuzzled into her palm, and she felt his mouth open.  Two round, wet objects dropped into her grasp.

The mirror rises before her eyes, and there is Nimruzimir peering through it, his face very drawn and sallow.  His gaze meets hers, and his shoulders slump.  “Little one,” he says, his voice tight and high.  “I was afraid—”

“You can see me?”

A slight twist of the mouth—Nimruzimir’s attempt at a tight smile.  “I am afraid after last night, I was concerned enough to cut down the dosage of my tonic for a day or two—with my physician’s permission, of course.  The tonic that keeps me from seeing beyond my own life.”

“Last night?” Chalcedony quavered.

“Something t-terrible was happening, Chalcedony.  Y-You n-needed someone, so I—”

“How do you know my name?”

“Ah, w-well, y-you see—once alerted, I am afraid I was—p-protective.  And the c-connection n-need not go only one way.”

He had looked through her eyes.  Chalcedony felt her breath growing short and shaky.  “So you know why I—”  She sniffed, feeling tears welling up.

“L-little one, y-you and I—we are alike in some ways, but not, I think, in every way.  For me, it was Lilóteo who first let me unfold.  My father could not have done so.  But it d-does not have to be that way.”

“What are you saying?”

“I am saying that I believe you should tell your parents.”

“I can’t!”

Ma patted her wrist. 

“You can, honestly, Boromir,” Da said, giving her a crooked grin—and that was too much.  She burst into tears.

“I don’t want that to be my name!” she wept.

There was a long pause.  Da spoke first, sounding confused and a little hurt, “But Boromir—I’ve told you so often why you’re called tha—”

“Meriadoc Brandybuck,” Ma cut in.  “Out.”

“Wh—”

“Out.”

Chalcedony squeezed her eyes shut, sniffing and sobbing.  She heard the sound of Da’s footsteps, and the door opening and closing.  Annamir purred and butted at her.  She felt the bed depress as Ma sat down on it.  “Now, darling, won’t you tell me why you don’t like the name?” she asked, sounding soothing.  “I know you love all those old stories Da tells, so it’s not about that, if it’s not about Boromir, it must be about you.  I don’t want you to be unhappy, and neither will your father, once he’s stopped to think.  What should we be calling you?”

“Ch-Ch-Ch-Chalcedony.”  She hadn’t meant to say that.  “I don’t want to leave, though, I don’t want—”

“Leave? Why would you have to leave?  Because you want to be called by a girl’s name?”

“I—I—I want to be a girl.”  There.  There it was.  The awful heavy weight on her chest—she’d finally spat it up like the poison her mushrooms were trying to eat.  “But—but I know I’ll get over it, Uncle Sam said so, and I don’t want to leave, I want to live with you and Da, and I know it’s just something silly that I’ll get over—”

“Oh, hush.”  Ma didn’t sound chiding.  She patted Chalcedony’s shoulder.  “Yes, people do change as they grow up, Chalcedony, and if you grow up and don’t want to be a girl anymore, then you may deal with that then.  But if this is what you want now, then why not?”

Shocked, Chalcedony breathed heavily and looked up.  Ma was giving her a little smile and squeezing her hand.  She didn’t seem to be at all upset about what her child had just confessed.

“But aren’t you angry or—or upset or—aren’t you disappointed?”

“No,” Ma said firmly.  “Not a bit of it.  If you want us to call you Chalcedony, then we shall.  If you want to dress as a girl, you shall.  If you want to be a girl in any way, you shall.  And if anyone is the least bit rude to you, then I will make certain the neighborhood cuts them dead.”

“But Da—”

“Your father did not understand what you meant.  He is going to apologize.”  Ma’s jaw was set very stubbornly.  “We love you, Chalcedony, do you understand?  Your happiness is the most important thing to us.”

Chalcedony blinked and hiccuped and found that she was stroking Annamir.  “Yes, Ma,” she said quietly.

“I always thought I might have a daughter named Chalcedony,” Ma continued, sounding satisfied, which made Chalcedony cough and choke.

“What? Why?”

“Where do you think you got your fairy-sight from, silly?”

To this, Chalcedony found that she had no answer.

Chapter End Notes

There was a really interesting persistent idea for a while that plants could be used as air purifiers (see eg https://housefresh.com/house-plant-air-purifiers/)

Unfortunately, it turns out not to be true ( https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/indoor-plants-clean-air-best-none-them/584509/ ) but Celebrimbor is an Elf and allowed to work some magic.

The hyphae of destiny thrum with joy. They spread their tendrils through the rich earth of so many possibilities, weaving a thin but durable mycelium that allows the fruiting of those that lead to their own existence, their own joy. One cheerful little mushroom looks like a bright orange-red egg emerging from a churning white veil.

“I love you, Chalcedony,” Da said, and hugged her.  “Forgive me for being a proper Took about all this?”

She giggled.  “Uncle Pippin wouldn’t like to hear you say that.”

“I know.” He ruffled her hair.  “Now you have blackmail material if you need it.”

A cluster of pale yellow-tan caps rising from a thick, branched white stalk.

Nearly all of Nimruzimir’s hair was white, and these days his trembling muscles required a little assistance from an intricately carven cane to get around.  Lilóteo could not walk at all, but he made up for this by moving himself around quite adeptly in a wheeled contraption some of their friends had constructed.  

Nimruzimir still sometimes found it in himself to wonder at the way they were welcomed in the Lond Daer marketplace.  Boann—tiny and these days all covered in wrinkles—called out greetings in Dunlendish while her five grand-daughters ran about to make certain Nimruzimir and Lilóteo got their weeks’ supply of fish dinners and monthly load of agar. 

“Is the traveling merchant you s-spoke of here yet?” Nimruzimir asked Boann, his Dunlendish fluent but forever tinged with a hint of an Adunaic accent.

She nodded, making a swift hand gesture.  “Let Fedelm take you, she likes making bargains and she’ll see you’re well paid for your goods.”

“Oh, well,” Nimruzimir said softly, sliding his hand into his pocket and drawing out the necklace.  “It is more important that he travels far than that h-he pays us well.  Besides, it is only gold and g-glass.”

“You’re still not to part with it for less than it’s worth,” Boann told him firmly and shooed the two of them off in the company of her oldest grand-daughter.

The traveling merchant turned out to be a fair-haired young man with an honest sort of face, which he lived up to by being quite willing to listen to Fedelm’s points about the craftsmanship of the necklace and offering a remarkably good price for it.  This embarrassed Nimruzimir.

“It is only gold and g-glass,” he protested again.

“Hush your protesting, man, it’s beautiful,” Lilóteo said, shaking his elbow.

“It is beautiful,” the merchant agreed.  “Is there a reason you’re willing to part with it?”

Nimruzimir shrugged sharply, his hand trembling as he held out the necklace.  “It is to be a p-present,” he explained.  “A gift to a y-young woman who will l-like it very much.”

“You want me to take it to someone?” the merchant asked, sounding confused.

“Oh no.”  Nimruzimir held up the necklace.  “Where is the b-box, dear?”

Lilóteo produced the box with the white flower, with the necklace’s original silver case settled inside.  It was tarnished now and all the paint had flaked off, a far cry from the exquisite thing it had been when it had passed from his father’s hands into his.  But it was still an illustration of the love his father had borne him, even if he had never understood.  Nimruzimir exhaled shakily and tucked the necklace into its case, then tucked the case into the box and held it out to the merchant.

“Here,” he said softly.  “You are going up the Greyflood? It will make its w-way to where it is intended to g-go.”

“Yes, I should think so.”  The merchant took it, a strange expression coming over his face.  “You’re the prophet they spoke of—the prophet of Lond Daer.”

Nimruzimir cleared his throat, felt, for an instant, the prickle of the Lady’s stare before he shook it off.  He shrugged.

“I’m honored,” the merchant said quietly, but to Nimruzimir’s relief, he said nothing more.

I am sending it to you, little sister.  Wait for it in the future, won’t you?

Brown eyes crinkle in a smile.  I’m waiting, big brother.

A mushroom sprouting from the side of a tree, wrinkled in queer waves like a misshapen horse’s hoof, black with a red band at its base like a slowly-cooling ember.

“It won’t be difficult to thread it again,” Celebrimbor had explained.  “Is there any other ornamentation you would like to add?  To make it your own?”

Chalcedony still felt rather shy of him, especially now that Annamir had saved her life, but he was so calm and quiet and still to be around that she found she could talk to him anyway.  “Something growing, maybe?” she had suggested hesitantly.  “Like the leaves, but—but more?  To show that I’m still growing, too?”

He had nodded solemnly and said that he would come up with a few designs.  Now, she had been summoned to one of the Brandybuck blacksmiths, to find Celebrimbor sitting outside, puffing on a pipe with a stack of papers in his lap.  Annamir was curled up at his feet as usual.  Elanor and Frodo had come along because they were visiting again, and both of them had been interesting in learning more about smithing.

They had both been a little awkward about Chalcedony’s new name and all that accompanied it, but they were trying their best.  Elanor had done Chalcedony’s hair for her in a pretty little plaited crown of flowers, and Frodo had shyly said he would certainly invite her to dance at the next festival, before going red and running away to hide in the kitchen.

“Here are some ideas—I had Diamond sketch them for me.”  Aunt Diamond, who came from a long line of smiths and had forcefully declared that she would give this up over her dead body when she married Uncle Pippin—not that anyone had really expected him to ask her to—was a particularly tall hobbit whose curly hair bounced as she waved at the tweens when they entered.

“Most of these would be made of gold,” Celebrimbor continued quietly, as she started to sort through the papers he had handed her.  “To match the leaves.”

“This one,” Chalcedony said slowly.  “Here—I think this is the best one.”

“Then come with me, and we’ll show you how to make it.”

A wide red-brimmed cap dotted with white, its hyphae entwining with the roots of a great tree.  

“Hold still,” Lilóteo told him.  “It’s not going to hurt that much, but it’ll be a pain if you move around.”

Nimruzimir started to nod, then stopped in some confusion.  “Y-Yes.  I understand.”

His lover smiled at him, bending down to kiss him briefly, those thick fingers brushing gently across his too-clean jaw.  “Thanks for agreeing to this,” he said gruffly.

Perhaps wisely, Nimruzimir did not respond, “Thank you for offering,” much as he might want to.  Lilóteo’s Druédain heritage sat uneasily on him, and Nimruzimir knew he already carried one scar for a friend who had betrayed him.  It was not Nimruzimir’s own legacy, but he understood it, nonetheless: that deep-seated urge to carve a mark upon one’s flesh to echo the mark that had been made upon one’s soul. Not logical, perhaps, but compelling.

The sharp scent of disinfectant suffused the air.  Lilóteo raised the needle, gleaming, to the light.  He bent over, humming quietly to himself, a tune that had become a hymn to the Black Temple but had not originated there.  Nimruzimir held his breath, then hissed as the needle pierced the lobe of his ear.

“Hold still,” Lilóteo warned him again.  “Give me a minute.  Almost got it…”

“Ow,” Nimruzimir protested.

“Nearly—ah, there we go.”  There was a distinct click, and he pulled away.  “Perfect.”  He held up a small mirror, in which Nimruzimir could see now hanging from his ear one of the two beads they had taken from the necklace.  The brown-purple glass lay nestled in its bed of gold—in this form, it no longer whispered woman but Lilóteo’s.

He found that he could no longer keep from smiling.  “Let me do yours n-now, p-please.”

Lilóteo kissed him again.

A cluster of frilled oyster mushrooms making pretty skirts around all the trees.  Estella Bolger yawned and leaned back against the mossy surface of the nearest tree.  It was a lazy summer day, the air heavy with pollen and with moisture.  Fatty and the rest of the boys were all fishing in the pond, but Estella found the day too soporific to even pretend to be doing something.  Every so often, she dropped her hands into a basket of strawberries, teased one out, and popped it into her mouth.

Birds chirruped softly, and the wind rustled the leaves of the trees gently above her.  A squirrel chattered to a jaybird, and a roly-poly made its trundling way across the moss near her head.  This little place was bursting with life of every kind.

Those mushrooms at head height looked delicious.  If she plucked a few, she could fry them up later with the fish, and then the boys couldn’t complain that she hadn’t done her part to provide for dinner.  Yawning again, she stretched up; her fingers brushed their frilled undersides.

A queer grey light seemed to descend across the landscape.  In its passage, the life withered and died.  The birds fled; the flowers wilted; the trees dried up.  Even the mushrooms retreated, pulling back from the little pond as if it were diseased.  A harsh silver sheen glittered beneath the water.

As Estella watched, snow covered the dead pond and melted away, again and again, faster and faster.  The seasons spun on, the light of the Sun harsh and blinding, the light of the moon faint and corpse-like.  Estella’s breath caught, her forehead cold with fearful sweat.

Then a thread of green caught her eye in the awful grey depths of the sterile pond, blooming out through the water like ink or like blood.  Tiny spores sucked at the quicksilver poison, while the snow fell and melted, fell and melted.  Pale tan oyster mushrooms marched back into place along the fallen trees.  Wiry grey-green grass pushed away the dead grey-brown.  A sapling sprouted from the rotten sludge that was all that remained of the great tree she was leaning against, and a one-eyed cat stalked along the bank in close pursuit of a little yellow bird.

Let me show you your daughter, the mushrooms whispered.  

Chapter End Notes

Estella Bolger married Merry Brandybuck after the Lord of the Rings and they allegedly had at least one son, but things in after-histories are often recorded incorrectly or incompletely.

All of the descriptions of mushrooms in this section are of real different types. In order: Amanita jacksonii, psilocybe zapotecorum, fomitopsis pinicola, amanita muscaria, pleurotus ostreatus