After the Festival by

After the Festival

Read After the Festival

The others have all gone. Only Fingon and Fingolfin remain behind, with a handful of followers, to tidy up—for they mean to leave Eithel Ivrin just as they found it, as far as is possible. And now they are almost done. Tomorrow, they will finish taking down their own tents and make their way back to Hithlum.

His father’s deep satisfaction with how the Feast of Reuniting went is palpable. Fingon’s awareness of his father’s contentment bears him up. He thinks he is relieved and happy himself, too, underneath and will be able to fully feel it just as soon as he has had a bit of a rest. For now, he only really senses the last of the tension slowly draining away. Responsible to the last, he methodically checks over the spaces they have cleared one more time, as dusk deepens and stars begins to come out over the waters of Ivrin.

A delicate moth flutters past. Suddenly a weight lifts, Fingon cannot tell how, and on that impulse, in that quiet empty spot, he begins to turn. The dancing is all over now and the groundswell of shared music that the Elves assembled at Ivrin were moving through in the days just past has ebbed and fallen silent, but an echo of remembered rhythm seems to rise up as if out of the earth under his feet. And then he is dancing, by himself under the stars in Ivrin, as obliviously as he has not danced since before the Darkening of Valinor, head back, braids flying upwards into the sky. Out of the corner of his eye, he catches a glimpse of bright Carnil's reddish beams above.

How long he has been dancing like this, absorbed and quite carried away, he could not say. But eventually he comes to a standstill and, all at once, with returning selfsconsciousness, he realizes Fingolfin has come looking for him and found him so. Has his father been standing back there unnoticed, watching him, for some time?

But Fingolfin is smiling at him with great warmth and merely says: ‘Let’s go home.’

And, for once, using that word for Hithlum—however much Fingon has loved Hithlum from the start—does not sound even the slightest bit questionable.

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Chapter End Notes

This short piece connects up with a number of other stories related to the Festival of Reuniting in Himring 'verse, perhaps in particular these two:

On the bonnie banks of Ivrin

"At Ivrin" (in: Such Great Deeds)