Moments by StarSpray

Mandos was quiet. The whispers of the spirits there was like a soft breeze through summer leaves. The tapestries of Vairë glowed on the walls, vibrant splashes of color, but Maedhros stayed away.

Mandos was full, and yet it felt empty. It was not hard either to keep apart or to seek company, though it was a strange sort of company when the spirits of the dead came together. His father came seeking him, and his brothers, but Maedhros slipped away from them all. His father’s spirit burned white-hot even still; it felt too much like the Silmarils.

Then Finwë came, and that was easier. He was not whole either; he asked nothing of Maedhros, and offered only quiet company in return. His presence was not a flame like Fëanor’s, but warm, comforting, a reminder of a childhood that Maedhros had forgotten belonged to him.

Slowly, they both healed.

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After so many long years, centuries, millennia, Maglor knew the ways of the sea better than he had known anything else in his life. He sang with the rushing tides and listened to the crash of the waves upon stone and the whisper of them over soft sand. He could tell fishermen where to toss their nets and when to stay shore even if the sky did not herald a storm.

When the music changed, then, it surprised him. When Ossë and Uinen both rose out of the foam to give him a message.

It is time to come home.

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Huan moved slowly through the woods of Lórien, sniffing at the flowers and pausing to drink from the clear streams. Birds sang high above in the beech trees, and Elves and Maiar sang too, soothing lullabies and songs of healing and rest and good dreams. Irmo passed by in a cloud of butterflies; Estë slept the high noon away somewhere in the shade. There was no hurry.

Finally, Huan came to a meadow near the far edge of Lórien, where those released from Mandos awoke. He lay down beside the figure there, silver hair spread across the long green grass, face young and fair and relaxed in sleep. All around were flowers of all hues and kinds, red poppies and purple hyacinths; yellow-eyed daisies and sweet-smelling violets. The sun rose to noon and sank lazily westward, and as twilight began to fall over the meadow like a soft purple blanket, Celegorm stirred. Huan watched him take a deep breath, watched his eyes open to see the first evening stars overhead. For a long while he lay there in silence, just watching the sky.

Then he sighed and turned his head—and his gaze fell on Huan, who leaned forward to lick at his face, and nuzzle into his neck. “Huan?” he whispered, eyes going wide. Then he rolled over to throw his arms around Huan’s neck, burying his face in Huan’s thick fur as he wept. Huan rested his head on Celegorm’s shoulder and huffed a contented sigh.

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Caranthir went wandering often alone. In this new, second life of his, he wished to do things differently. Tirion was left behind, and the lovely cultivated gardens and the neatly tilled fields, in favor of the wild meadows and the tangled woods. There, he would find a quiet place—a mossy log, or the broad branches of a tree, or just a shady hollow among tall fragrant ferns—just to sit. To watch. To breathe.

He watched flowers unfurl their petals one by one in the misty morning, and counted the veins in their leaves, and he learned all the ways of the smallest woodland creatures as they went about their busy little lives. He dug his fingers and toes into the loam and breathed deeply the smells of earth and water and of green living things. There was nothing to make, nothing for him to do, except to be.

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Before he got up the courage to seek her out, she came to him. Curufin turned from his workbench to find his wife in the doorway. She wore unadorned grey skirts and a veil over her shining dark hair; in her grief, she had turned to Nienna.

In his, he had turned inward. He was trying to be better, but it was true what was said of old habits.

It was also true that his wife still wore her golden wedding band. She stepped forward and took his hand. “You will need to make yourself a new one,” she said.

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Ambarussa had always been wild things, chasing after one another into the grass and returning home barefoot and muddied, wild red hair all a-tangle with twigs and leaves. They were loud and brash and unapologetic—always laughing, always singing, finishing each other’s words and sentences and speaking to one another in half-syllables and secret smiles. Not even Tyelkormo could keep up with them once they grew up.

Nerdanel sketched and sculpted all of her children, but she had to make the twins from memory, for they could never sit still long enough for even the roughest sketch. When she complained they laughed and kissed her and promised to bring her a basket full of her favorite blackberries instead. When she finally managed to render them in stone it was a strange thing, all movement except for the exuberant smiles upon their faces and the hands clasped tightly together.

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When Fëanáro left her father’s house, Nerdanel did not expect to hear from him. He would be busy with new studies and new experiments, and she knew him well enough by then to know that he was not a great letter-writer, and it was not for lack of letters to answer. His father wrote often, but she almost never saw Fëanáro send a reply.

She was shocked, then, when she was inundated with letters, little notes and long missives, sometimes several of them at once. Of course she wrote back, though she did not have Fëanáro’s quick hand, and she was busy with her own works and studies. He always asked about them, and at times anticipated some material or tool she might need to finish something, like the mother-of-pearl he sent when she told him of a commission from Olwë’s court for a statue of Uinen.

It was when he came back for an unexpected visit that she asked him why. He looked shy and even embarrassed; Nerdanel was delighted by the blush that reached the tips of his ears. “I missed you.”

Nerdanel thought a moment, then leaned in to kiss him. “Then visit more!”

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