Where Memory Walks by StarSpray

Neldoreth was both like and unlike the forests of Dior’s childhood and youth. After coming to Doriath to take up his grandfather’s crown, he took every opportunity he could to escape the confines of Menegroth and the eyes of his new court to walk among the ancient, massive beeches. In Ossiriand the land was all a tangle of green, of undergrowth and tree growing together and competing, too, for sunshine and rain.

There was undergrowth in Neldoreth, too, of course. Blackberry brambles were laden with fruit in the summer, with dark berries that stained Dior’s fingertips purple and burst on his tongue with tart sweetness. There were glades of hemlock umbels and niphredil where he knew without being told that his mother had once danced. He found dark hollows among gnarled roots, ringed with ferns, where he imagined that Daeron had sat with his pipes, playing music that sometimes still echoed through the forest on moonless nights when the stars were bright. Such echoes never failed to bring a tear to his eye—music for the breaking of the heart, indeed.

He walked the forests to know his new realm, new home, but also to know better his mother, left behind in Ossiriand. These were the forest glades of her childhood, where she had learned to walk and run and dance. To know too his grandparents, who he had never met. Thingol's grave stood near the entrance to Menegroth, covered in soft white niphredil all the year round, like fragrant snow. Melian was gone, to wherever the broken-hearted Ainur went. But parts of them remained, too. The trees whispered of Thingol’s echoing laughter and of Melian’s songs. The stones remembered how they had danced together beneath the stars.

The woods of Doriath welcomed him as Thingol’s heir, as much as the people did. But as Dior walked beneath the towering beeches of Neldoreth he could not help but feel very small, in the shadow of their memory.

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