LOTR: Children of Refusal

[Afkter02]

Born of the Quendi (1)

[Cuiviénen. The Years of the Trees. Night]​

Three boys sat on the log outside the hut and pretended they weren't listening.

Elwë had clasped his hands around one knee, the posture of an eldest son who suspects composure is expected of him. Olwë worked at a splinter of bark with his thumbnail, careful and methodical. The youngest, Tirion, had turned his ear frankly toward the doorway and was not bothering to hide it.

"Is it always this slow?" Tirion whispered.

"Yes," said Elwë, who had been very small the last time and remembered none of it.

"You don't know that."

"Father said."

Olwë did not look up. "Quiet, mother can hear you."

They managed perhaps a count of ten before Tirion said, smaller, "What if something goes wrong?"

"Nothing will go wrong."

"But what if —"

"Tirion."

From inside the hut came a sound that was not quite a cry, then one that almost was, and at last the thin indignant wail of something brand new to the world.

All three of them were on their feet before they knew they had stood.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Inside the hut]​

For him, there was pressure before there was anything else.

It came from everywhere, and it did not ask.

Light came next, through what he would later understand to be eyelids, a blinding white wash he had no defense against.

Cold came first.

A shock of it, brutal and immediate, flooding skin that had known nothing but warmth.

Then came the breath.

Something in his chest seized, pulled, and air forced its way into lungs that had never opened. Tissue tore from tissue. Folds that had lain quiet since before memory ripped apart and filled, and the pain of it was beyond anything, past naming, past bearing.

His own voice tore out of him without permission.

Hands caught him.

He was wiped and wrapped. He was lifted, and the lifting set off a spinning in him that had no anchor. Above him, at an impossible distance that was probably not impossible at all, a voice spoke.

The screaming thinned, not because he had chosen to stop but because the voice had reached inside him somehow and loosened the knot.

He tried to open his eyes.

The light punished him and he closed them again.

He tried to understand where he was and got nowhere. Thoughts would not form; they were not yet made of words, and the reaching in him had nothing to take hold of.

Underneath it, very quiet, there was something else: a low hum beneath what he was beginning to register as skin, steady as a heartbeat and yet not a heartbeat, not warmth and not cold, just a current that seemed to have always been there.

The voice above him said something again.

Warmth settled against his cheek, and much later he understood that what he had felt was skin.

I have been born, he thought, with a clarity that did not belong in a body that young.

And under it, colder: born where?

—•——•——•——•——•——•—​

Enelyë held him against her chest with the last of what the birth had left her.

Her hair, which on a still night was the silver of the lake below the window, lay dark with sweat against her temples. Her arms trembled under the small weight in the blanket, but she did not let go. Her eyes were wet and very clear, grey as starlight on deep water, and she watched the child the way a person watches something they have won.

Enel sat beside her without moving, the way a man sits when he is afraid that moving will disturb something he cannot yet name.

"Beloved," she said. "Come closer."

He shifted nearer. One of his hands found the place between her shoulders; the other stayed half-raised, as though it were waiting on permission from something other than his wife.

"Look at him."

Enel looked.

The breath went out of him.

"His eyes," he said after a long moment. "They hold stars."

"The Light in him is strong. I can feel it." She adjusted the blanket, "He will not be small, this one."

Enel lowered his raised hand at last and touched his fingertips to the child's forehead.

The infant had been crying in short uneven bursts since the world had forced itself on him. At the touch of his father's hand the sound thinned and stopped. The baby stared up instead, with eyes too focused and too present to belong to something only minutes old.

"He will be great," Enel said quietly. "I know it the way I know my own hand."

"I know it too." Enelyë's smile was tired and proud at once. "Bring his brothers. Let them see him."

Enel rose reluctantly. He pressed his mouth to her temple before he went.

He came back with the boys.

Elwë led, shoulders set, silver hair gathered back for the occasion. Olwë followed, quieter, his face careful. Tirion trailed at their father's hip and was doing his best to look taller than he was.

"Your brother," Enel said.

Elwë stepped forward first. He bent over the bundle with the gravity of someone twice his age.

"His eyes are like ours," he said.

"His hair, too." Olwë reached out and touched a single strand of silver, fine as spun mist. "Look at the color."

"He was loud," Tirion announced, which was plainly the most important fact of the evening. "I heard him from outside."

Enel's mouth fought a smile and lost. He set his hand briefly on Tirion's head. "Loud is good. Loud means lungs."

"What will we call him, beloved?" Enelyë's voice was soft, and somehow the room got quieter around it.

Enel did not answer at once.

He turned to the window.

Beyond it the lake lay enormous and still. The far shore was only a darker line against the sky. The water was so quiet that the stars had printed themselves on its surface as faithfully as on the night above: stars overhead and stars below, and somewhere in the space between them the question of what to call his fourth son.

He closed his eyes.

And the water, which had been so still a moment before, began to move.

A breath of wind slipped through the window and grew as it came. It crossed the room and pulled at their hair and at the edges of the blanket.

Over the rising whisper of the lake, Enel spoke a single word.

"Selas."

The wind fell away. The water went smooth.

"Selas," he said again, turning back to the room. Something quiet and astonished had moved into his face. "Son of Enel and Enelyë. Of the Nelyar. Fourth of my house."

"It is a good name." Enelyë was weeping without trying to stop it, and smiling through the weeping. "It suits him."

"Come." Enel gathered his older sons with a glance. "Your mother has given enough tonight. Let her rest."

The boys filed out. Tirion was the last, and he stopped in the doorway and looked back with his small brow drawn together, as if he had noticed something he could not yet name.

Enel lingered. He looked at his wife with their new child against her heart, and at the lake beyond the window, which was calm again. He let the breath out of his chest slowly.

Something moved when I named him, he thought. The lake heard it.

He smiled, and followed his sons out of the room.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Selas POV]​

So.

I had been born.

Squeezed through a space that should not have accommodated any living thing, dumped into a room full of giants, and left to figure out the rest with no instructions, a body I did not recognize, and reflexes I had never signed up for.

It took me a long time to accept what had happened. Longer than I like to admit.

Time here did not behave. The day did not arrive in the morning. The evening did not arrive in the evening. There were no mornings or evenings to speak of.

There was no sun.

Nothing golden crossed any sky. Nothing did the work of marking the hours the way the hours had always been marked in the world I remembered. And yet the world still breathed in and out. The stars did the pacing instead, brightening in slow cycles and dimming again, and the Quendi around me slept and woke to that rhythm as naturally as breathing.

It had always been there, for them.

For me it took months to stop looking at the horizon for a sunrise that was never coming.

But we had day and night, after a fashion, though it was a strange sort. The stars would brighten for a time, then dim. That was our day and our night.

So I lay there. I was fed, which was humiliating. I was carried, which was also humiliating. I stared at the woven roof of the dwelling and tried to reassemble what I knew.

The answer was not the kind of answer you recover from in an afternoon.

I had been reincarnated into a world I recognized, as a member of a species I did not belong to.

Quend, that was the word they used for themselves — the Speakers.

The first to be spoken to by the One who had made the world. I was one of them now, whether I liked it or not.

More precisely, Nelyar. The Third host. Also Lindar among ourselves, the Singers, because we had come to music before we had come to speech. I didn't find that hard to believe. Every lullaby my mother sang, every low melody that drifted across the settlement at the end of a long day, went straight into the bones.

Further along the road than I could see from here, we would be called Teleri — the Last. That was the name the Valar would eventually hang on us for being slow to follow them west.

My own name, for now, was Selas.

Fourth son of Enel. And Enel was not a minor figure. Enel was one of the Unbegotten, one of the original seventy-four Nelyar who had opened their eyes under starlight at the edge of the lake called Cuiviénen, on the first morning the Quendi ever had.

Which put me, by the only calendar that mattered, very early indeed.

The Years of the Trees: before the Sun, before the Moon, before the Great Journey had even begun, before anything that might reasonably be called history had happened.

Before everything fell apart.

I should have panicked.

And I did. A low constant dread running underneath everything, like a tone too deep to name but impossible to stop hearing. I knew what was coming, in broad strokes at least, enough to understand that the peace I had been born into was not a destination but a waiting room.

Alongside the fear, though, was something harder and clearer and useful.

I already knew the shape of the decision that would split the Quendi in half. Eldar and Avari. Those who would follow the summons west to safety, and those who would refuse it and stay.

I already knew which side of that line I intended to stand on.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Cuiviénen. Early years. The waking hours]​

Infants are useless.

This is not an original observation. Anyone who has ever handled one has reached the same conclusion. But there is a particular flavor of uselessness you discover only when you are the one trapped inside the infant.

My thoughts were the thoughts of an adult. My body disagreed in every respect. My fingers curled at random. My legs kicked without asking permission. My neck, for an embarrassing length of time, behaved as though someone had installed it with one of the bolts missing.

Only the brain worked, and the brain was running at full throttle inside a vessel that could not yet be trusted to roll over.

It was awful.

What I could do, though, was watch.

The hut we lived in was a single room. A firepit at the center, stone-lined. Pallets along the walls, stuffed with dried grass and wrapped in hide. Pegs driven into the poles to hang tools from: stone-tipped spears, carved wooden cups, strips of hide in various stages of becoming useful. Bunches of herbs drying over the hearth. It smelled of smoke and leather and something green and faintly sweet from above the fire.

Primitive, from any angle. And yet the spear shafts were flawlessly straight, the kind of straight that ought to require a machinist with good tools and better patience. The cups were even on every side, round in a way stone tools should not have been able to produce. The hide strips were of the same thickness along their entire length.

It was not the technology; it was the hands themselves. Elven hands, doing what elven hands did even at the very beginning, without help and without any idea that what they were doing was miraculous.

Through the open doorway I sometimes caught a view of the village, if you could call it that. It was a scatter of huts under enormous trees, dropped wherever someone had felt like dropping one. No streets, no grid, no walls, not the faintest suggestion that anyone had ever thought there ought to be walls.

People drifted between the huts the way you might drift between trees in a forest. They sang sometimes, for no particular reason.

They stopped to look at things, and they stopped to look at nothing in particular, and it was beautiful, and it was as defenseless as a meadow full of deer.

And beyond the huts, always, always visible, the lake.

Cuiviénen. The Water of Awakening.

The place every living elf had opened their eyes beside, the very first time they had opened their eyes at all.

{Image: Cuiviénen under starlight}​

It was enormous. The far side existed only as theory. On still nights the water held the sky so exactly that you lost track of which was which, with stars above and stars below and the shoreline a mere suggestion between them.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—​

Once I could sit up without falling over, I started taking the world apart in my head.

The Quendi weren't one people; they were three, and the three were different answers to the question of what it meant to be an elf, answers already visible to a child who was trying hard to look as though he wasn't paying attention.

The First were the Minyar. Fourteen of them had woken beside the lake at the beginning, the smallest of the three kindreds. They had grown since, of course. A couple of generations' worth of children now ran between their huts. All of them gold-haired: honey, wheat, a few heads pale enough to glint almost white in the starlight. They had fair skin and quiet bearing, and they were beautiful, every one of them, in a way that made you forget for a moment what you had been about to say.

They were also the most trusting people I had ever met, and that worried me.

Someday the rest of us would call them Vanyar — the Fair.

Next came the Tattyar, the Second. Fifty-six of them at the start, and they too had multiplied. They stood apart from the Minyar in almost every way: taller, heavier through the shoulders, built for work in a way the Minyar simply weren't. Their men ran close to two meters. Their women were only a little shorter, and no one who met them twice made the mistake of thinking they were soft. Their hair ran dark mostly: black most often, some brown, a few heads the color of wood ash or banked coals.

Where the Minyar drifted, the Tattyar made. There was always a knife in someone's hand, and always a piece of leather or wood or stone getting shaped into something else.

Someday they would be the Noldor — the Wise.

And last came the Nelyar, the Third — my own people. Seventy-four of us at the beginning, more than either of the other two combined, and thanks to that head start we were still the largest kindred by some distance. We had also been the slowest to wake. Last to open our eyes, last to speak, last to get up and walk around and join the conversation.

We looked somewhat like the Tattyar: tall and strong, if not quite as broad in the frame, a little quicker through the trees, a little more at ease in the water. Our hair ran mostly to silver, pale as moonlight caught on a thread, though a fair number of us came out dark. My own father's line was silver.

Someday we would be called Teleri — the Last.

Three kindreds. The count at the beginning had been a hundred and forty-four; a generation or two on, it was perhaps three times that. All of them living together in this one place, around this one lake.

For now.

Because the Sundering was coming, and when it did it was going to carve through every kindred in a different way. The Minyar would leave to the last elf. The Tattyar would split cleanly down the middle. My own people, the Nelyar, would tear themselves apart worst of all: families against families, friends against friends, a grief none of them yet suspected.

I intended to make sure as many of the right ones stayed as I could manage.

Assuming I was right about any of this.

That was the quiet worry, the one I didn't let surface often. I was operating on the strength of books I had read in another body, in another life: fiction, myths, stories and secondhand knowledge about a world where nothing I was now experiencing was supposed to be real.

I could be wrong about all of it: about the timing, about the shape of what was coming, about whether any of the levers I was reaching for even existed.

All I could do was prepare for the version of the future I remembered, and pray the rest was close enough to recognize when it arrived.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Some months later. The waking hours]​

"He doesn't sit still."

My mother's voice. She was just inside the hut, not quite out of earshot on purpose. I was on the grass in front of it, cross-legged, in the middle of a careful experiment involving my own wrist and my own ability to bend it without watching.

"He is curious, Enelyë," my father said. "Children are curious."

"Not like this one." A pause. "Watch him."

I felt their attention land on me at the same moment. Both of them in the doorway, wearing matching expressions somewhere between amusement and mild alarm.

I looked up and waved.

My mother made a startled sound that turned into a laugh halfway out. My father's mouth twitched and lost its composure.

"See?" she said. "What elfling waves?"

"Ours, it would seem." Enel folded his arms, though the crinkles at the corners of his eyes gave him away. "Perhaps the world will not wait on us forever, and he already knows."

"Or perhaps he is simply odd."

"That too."

They went back inside.

I returned to the experiment, which was the matter of my own balance and which parts of my body were willing to cooperate with it.

Standing was the next conquest. It sounded simple. Every toddler on Earth managed it without particular fanfare. But this body was not the body my instincts remembered.

I got my feet under me and made it halfway up before my knees gave and the grass caught me. The next try brought me three-quarters of the way before I tipped sideways. The one after that was closer, and the one after that closer still, and I was almost —

"You're doing that wrong."

I twisted to look behind me, too fast, overbalanced, and ended up sitting hard on the ground.

Standing over me was a small person with gold hair.

She would have come up to about my shoulder if I had been standing, which I wasn't. Her hair spilled past her shoulders in loose waves and caught the starlight the way only Minyar hair seemed to know how. Her eyes were a ridiculous dark blue, the blue of the lake at its deepest, where the starlight couldn't reach.

She tilted her head and studied me as though I were something she had found under a leaf.

"You're a strange one," she announced.

I blinked up at her.

"The other children sit. They watch the stars. You just keep falling over." She crouched to bring her face closer to my level. "Why?"

Because I am trying to stand, I thought, and because being this small for this long is a specific kind of torture you would not understand.

I shrugged.

She frowned. "You don't say much, either."

I shrugged again, because what else was I going to do.

"Hmm." She walked around me in a slow circle. I had the uncomfortable impression of being catalogued. Then, without warning, she grabbed me under the arm and pulled.

My legs came up with me, surprised into cooperation. Her grip was far stronger than a child her size had any right to have. She was also, I noticed, adjusting her pull as I rose, shifting her own weight, steadying me, keeping me from pitching forward. Like she had done this before.

"There." She let go once I had my feet under me. She stepped back, crossed her arms, and considered her work. "Better."

I wobbled. But I stayed upright.

"You're welcome." The severity broke into a bright sudden smile. "I'm Ilvëa. Who are you?"

"Selas." The word came out rough. I had hardly used my mouth for speech yet, and I hadn't particularly wanted to.

"Selas." She rolled the sounds around as though she were weighing them. "Nelyar, aren't you? I'm Minyar. We woke up before anyone. That makes us special."

So tribal pride started early, wonderful.

"Can you walk yet?" she asked.

"Working on it."

"Good. When you can, we'll play." She spun, her hair went with her in a pale gold flare. "I'm coming back tomorrow."

And then she was gone, running back across the settlement toward the Minyar huts at a speed I would have given a great deal to match.

Vanyar, I thought, watching her go. That would be the name her kindred wore someday: the Fair.

I stood there swaying gently and wondered what had just happened to me.

{Image: Young Ilvëa of the Minyar, older version}

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[End of Chapter 1]​

---

GLOSSARY​

For those who wish to go deeper into the world and its vocabulary. This entry covers terms from Tolkien's legendarium that appear in this chapter. Reading it is entirely optional — the story is written to stand on its own — but it may add a little texture to the journey.

PEOPLES & KINDREDS​

Quendi — The elven word for "those who speak with voices." What the Elves call themselves. All Elves are Quendi; they later divide into many different groups.

Nelyar — "The Third." The third and largest group of Elves to awaken at Cuiviénen (74 of the original 144). They called themselves Lindar ("Singers") internally, and were later named Teleri ("The Last") during the Great Journey.

Lindar — "The Singers." The Nelyar's name for themselves, from learning music and song before formal speech. Selas's people.

Minyar — "The First." The smallest group of Elves, first to awaken (14 original souls). Later called Vanyar ("The Fair Ones") for their golden hair and beauty.

Tattyar — "The Second." The second group to awaken (56 originals). Later called Noldor ("The Wise") for their craft and lore.

Eldar — "People of the Stars." The name for those Elves who accepted the summons of the Valar and began the Great Journey to Aman. Separated from the Avari at the Sundering.

Avari — "The Unwilling" or "The Refusers." Elves who refused the summons of the Valar and remained in Middle-earth. Our protagonist will lead a group of these.

PLACES​

Arda — The name of the entire world in Tolkien's mythology.

Cuiviénen — "Water of Awakening." The lake in eastern Middle-earth where the first Elves opened their eyes under starlight. The birthplace of all Elven-kind.

CONCEPTS​

Years of the Trees — The age before the Sun and Moon, when the world was lit only by stars and the Two Trees of Valinor. Each Year of the Trees was roughly ten mortal years long.

The Sundering — The division of the Elven peoples into Eldar (those who accepted the Valar's call) and Avari (those who refused). A pivotal moment in Elven history.

The Four-Child Limit — A biological constraint on elven reproduction. Traditionally, no family can have more than four children. Selas suspects this is connected to the Light energy required for pregnancy — and that learning to contain Light might overcome it.

 

[Afkter02]

Holding the Light (2)

[Cuiviénen. Early childhood. The waking hours]​

"Race you to the oak."

Novë was already moving when he said it, which, in Novë's definition of a fair start, counted as a warning.

I went after him.

Novë was one of mine. Nelyar, silver-haired, whip-lean, with a laugh he pulled out at the slightest provocation. We had drifted into each other's orbit without anyone arranging it. He had the same restless streak I did, except his came from nothing worse than being happy and not knowing where to put it.

A few strides behind us, Archean was running the way he did everything else: economically, without wasted motion.

The three of us tore across the settlement, past a pair of bewildered adults, past a few birds that decided to relocate on short notice, and reached the oak at the edge of the trees in a knot of shoulders and elbows.

I beat Novë to it by half a body length, mostly because he hit a root.

"Cheater." He went down in the grass, grinning up at me. "I demand a rematch."

"I didn't touch you."

"You exist in my general vicinity. That's provocation."

Archean arrived a few seconds later, barely breathing. "You're both idiots."

"You still came."

"Someone has to carry you home when you break something."

The three of us collapsed under the oak, ribs heaving.

For a minute I let myself just be there. The branches sighed overhead. Starlight came down through the leaves in small scattered coins. The grass was cool.

It lasted about thirty seconds.

Then my head was off again, as it always was. Off to the future, to plans stacked on plans, to everything I could not control.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Selas POV]​

Walking had become running. Running had become climbing. Climbing had become swimming in the shallows while my mother watched from the bank, torn between laughing and dragging me out by the back of the neck.

I could not stop moving.

To hold still was to feel something pressing in from behind. Every other elf around me seemed perfectly content to sit for hours, for days, and do absolutely nothing about it.

They watched the sky. They listened to whatever wind was in the trees. They sang thin wandering songs that trailed into silence and then started again.

I understood some of it.

The stars here were not decoration. They had weight and presence, a quiet pull that settled into your bones the longer you stayed still beneath them, and if you let yourself sink into it, the world seemed to sink with you, breathing in time with your breathing.

I felt it too. It made me want to claw the walls.

Because I also knew what was out there, past the starlight and the songs, and every hour my people spent dreaming into the horizon was an hour they weren't spending preparing for what was going to come crashing through it.

So I moved instead. I ran until my body forgot how to argue. I climbed higher than was strictly safe. I stayed underwater long enough that my chest burned, and then I stayed a little longer.

The body, to its credit, kept up.

I could sprint for hours without my lungs admitting they had noticed. Trees that would have been impossible for a human child were nothing. My breath-hold underwater stretched until I lost count of the seconds.

The other elflings took notice. Some of them gave me a wide berth. A few, mostly Nelyar like me, started falling in beside, shyly at first and then not shyly at all.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Months later]​

The group kept growing.

Novë and Archean first. Then Eol, a Tattyar boy with dark hair and hands that never held still.

Then a girl named Mireth, who showed up one day without announcing herself and kept showing up after that.

Mireth didn't run fastest. She didn't throw farthest. What Mireth did was notice. When somebody scraped a knee during a game, Mireth was there before the knee had finished registering the pain: crouched, examining, her face so focused you forgot she was a child. A healer was already living in her somewhere, long before she knew what the word meant.

Then a girl named Celestia, who went everywhere at a run. She was the sort of child who would climb a tree not to see the view but to find out how high she could get before the branches gave up on her, and who would then jump out of it rather than climb down, because climbing down was boring. She wrestled the boys and usually won.

And Ilvëa, of course.

Ilvëa had fastened herself to our group on day one and refused to be pried loose. She was there for everything: races, climbs, the endless contests I invented and tried to pass off as fun. She lost most of them and didn't seem to care. She was not there to win. She was there to be there.

She had her own thing, though. While the rest of us ran, Ilvëa would peel off and crouch in the dirt at the treeline, coaxing seedlings out of seeds she had saved. She built small circles of stones around the new green shoots and murmured to them in a voice too low for anyone else to hear.

"Why do you do that?" I asked her once. She was patting soil around a new sprout as though it were made of glass.

"Because they're alive," she said, in the tone you'd use to explain that water is wet. "They grow if you help them."

A child's hobby. A strange one, even by elven standards.

I filed it under interesting and did not think about it for a long time.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—​

The games themselves started innocently.

Races. Seeing who could throw a rock farthest or hit a target most often or climb a tree highest without losing a grip. Kid stuff, exactly what it looked like.

Except I was nudging it, quietly, in a particular direction.

A foot race became a relay. A throwing contest became target practice from various distances. Climbing a tree became climbing a tree within a given count. Tag shifted until, if you weren't paying close attention, it looked very much like stalk-and-evade.

Nothing alarming. Nothing to raise an eyebrow at the adults' fire. Just games that happened to build coordination, endurance, and the habit of acting as a group.

I ran them with the others. I suffered through the same invented rules and pushed myself as hard as I asked anyone else to push. I was a child, and nobody follows a child's orders. But they would follow one into the next stupid dare if he was the first up the tree and the last out of the lake.

"Again. Faster this time."

Novë groaned from where he had just finished a sprint, but he got up and did it again. Archean counted aloud to keep the pacing, and Ilvëa waited at the midpoint with a wooden token ready to hand off.

A little further out, other elflings were throwing and climbing and swimming. The numbers crept up week by week. One extra child. Two. Three.

"Why do we keep doing this?" Eol asked one evening, sprawled by the fire and rubbing a bruise on his shin. He had tripped during a run and gone down hard.

"Because it's fun."

"Is it?" He examined the bruise with genuine offense. "My leg disagrees."

"Your legs are getting stronger. You fall less often than you used to."

He couldn't argue with that.

Mireth settled down beside him, pulled a small pouch from her belt, and crushed a leaf between her fingers. She pressed the paste against his shin. He hissed.

"Hold still," she said. "It brings the swelling down."

"Where did you learn that?"

"My mother." A pause. "And I tried it on myself first. Several times."

Eol gave her a flat look. She returned it without blinking.

I hid a smile by turning my face toward the fire.

Something was forming here. I could feel it. A handful of elflings running together, hurting themselves together, and mending each other after, none of them understanding what it was they were practicing for.

If I was right.

If anything I thought I knew still applied.

That was the fear I didn't say out loud, because saying it would have undone everything. What if none of what I was bracing for ever arrived? What if the future I was preparing against turned into something else entirely, something I wouldn't see coming because I had been staring in the wrong direction all along?

What if I was just a confused soul in somebody else's body, playing war with children and calling it strategy?

I could not afford that doubt. So I shoved it down the way I shoved down so many other things, and I called for another run.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Years later. The waking hours]​

To the others, the games were games.

They were not games.

The circle was close to twenty by now. Mostly Nelyar, a scatter of Tattyar who had drifted over out of curiosity or boredom or both, and one stubborn Minyar girl who had absolutely no intention of being excluded from anything. They were faster than they had been, stronger, smarter about moving together. Every season, a little more.

And the settlement around us had changed by exactly nothing.

That was the thing I could not get used to, no matter how long I lived here. The Quendi did not develop. Not really. Not in any way that would matter when matter arrived.

Hunting was done today the way it had been done the first time anyone thought to do it. Houses were built the same way, from the same materials, by the same process. The food, the songs, the paths between the huts were all the same as they had been, and all of it would be the same a hundred years from now, and none of that was because the Quendi couldn't do better.

They could do far, far better. Their minds were astonishing. Elven memory held whole libraries perfectly. I had watched a Tattyar woman correct a song she had heard once, months before, down to the exact syllable.

They just didn't care about better.

Why make a spear that killed deer more efficiently? The current spear killed deer.

Why build a wall? Nothing was coming.

Why plan for next year? Next year would also be beautiful.

It was paradise. And paradise doesn't make people ambitious. It makes them soft.

Sometimes I would catch myself watching them, these graceful, immortal, astonishing people drifting through their days like leaves on a pond, and something close to grief would settle in me. They were the most extraordinary beings I had ever known, living in the most extraordinary place I had ever seen, and they were content to do absolutely nothing about any of it.

Maybe that had been the point. Maybe Eru had made them this way on purpose. At peace. Complete in themselves. Demanding nothing from a world that was demanding nothing of them.

Fine.

But the world would start demanding. Sooner than they thought.

And when that day came, being at peace was not going to keep anyone alive.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—​

"Selas."

I turned. Ilvëa was standing next to me, gold hair catching the light the way it always did, her eyes on my face uncomfortably sharp.

"What are you actually doing?" she asked.

"Playing."

"No you're not." She crossed her arms. "You're teaching us something. You have been for a long time. I want to know why."

I looked at her for a second, then at the children still running through the drill.

She had caught on. Nobody else had, nobody had come this close, and that should not have surprised me. She had always been sharper than anyone gave her credit for, including me.

"Because the world won't be this quiet forever," I said at last. "And I'd rather be ready than sorry about it."

"Ready for what?"

"Everything."

She frowned. She was not satisfied with that answer, and I could see her deciding whether to push.

She didn't. She nodded, slowly, and walked back toward the others.

I watched her go, then turned back to the group.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Same period. Dusk]

[Olwë POV]​

There was something about his youngest brother that had never been right.

Olwë had known it for years, since Selas had been a baby with eyes too steady for a baby's face. He had never said a word about it to anyone, because nobody would have believed him, and also because he was not the kind of elf who rushed to speak.

What he did was watch. That was what Father always said about him. Olwë sees what the rest of us miss.

From a branch in a low tree at the edge of the clearing, Olwë watched his brother run drills with the circle of children. They were running and jumping and flinging stones at targets gouged into bark.

The other elflings followed Selas's directions as though following them were the only sensible thing to do. Even the little Minyar girl, Ilvëa, who normally floated through the day in her own dreamy cloud, moved with a sharp-edged focus when Selas was explaining something.

"Still at it?"

Olwë glanced down. Tirion stood at the base of the tree, arms folded.

"When is he not?"

"Fair." Olwë swung himself onto a neighboring branch with easy grace. "What do you think it is?"

"I don't know."

"Guess."

Olwë watched a moment longer before answering. "It looks like training."

"For what?"

That was the question.

Down below, Selas was demonstrating a throw. A small shift of the hips, a snap of the arm, a stone flying dead into the marked bark. He did it twice, slowly, so the others could see each step. Then he had them try, and he walked between them adjusting grips and stances with a patience that felt older than he was.

"He never throws a stone badly," Olwë said. "Have you noticed? Whatever he picks up, he picks up as though he already knew how to use it."

Tirion was quiet a while.

"He might just be gifted."

"He might."

Olwë didn't believe it.

Gifted explained skill. It didn't explain the way Selas sometimes looked toward the horizon as if he were measuring a distance nobody else could see. And it didn't explain the words Olwë had heard him mutter in his sleep, thin fragments of sound that didn't match any language Olwë knew, and Olwë had heard everyone.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Later that evening]

[Selas POV]​

When whatever passed for twilight settled over Cuiviénen, I slipped out.

I went where I always went. A little cove on the far side of the lake, tucked behind a stand of boulders. Too far from the settlement for anyone to wander past by accident. No paths. No reason for anyone else to be there, which was the whole appeal.

I sat down on a flat stone, crossed my legs, and closed my eyes.

The Light was there. It was always there. Under the skin, humming, bleeding outward from every elf the way warmth bleeds off a banked fire.

And it was, in my opinion, an enormous waste.

If Light was what I suspected it was, an energy, a power, something that could be used, then letting it pour out into the air around you every second of every day was like leaving every valve in a house open and wondering why the water bill was ruinous. Worse than waste. Stupid.

I had been thinking about it for a long time.

Months by now. Quiet hours spent sitting still while nobody was watching, trying to feel my way around the inside of my own Light, mapping it, learning how it moved. The stillness that made me want to chew through walls in every other context was actually useful for this. Out here I had nothing but time, patience, and a brain that refused to go to sleep when told.

Eventually I had started trying to pull the Light inward. To keep it, instead of let it drain.

It didn't want to be kept.

The Light wanted to radiate; that was what Light did. Pulling it in was like cupping water in my hands and trying not to let any drip out. Possible, but only if I thought about nothing else.

Breathe in… I pictured the Light as a liquid, moving through channels I couldn't see.

Breathe out… I pictured those channels narrowing, closing, sealing the Light behind them.

In.

Out.

In.

Sweat at my temples. A tremor in my hands. But slowly, very slowly, over the first hour of trying, the soft glow around my skin began to dim. It faded, and then it was gone.

In the dark I smiled.

There you are.

I held it for ten seconds before my focus slipped, and the Light burst out of me all at once, flaring across the water. Ten seconds was not nothing.

Again.

And again.

Each time I kept it a little longer. Each time I felt it gather inside me like water pooling behind a wall.

Hours went by. The stars drifted overhead. The lake whispered against the stones. The boulders warmed slightly where I leaned against them.

When I finally opened my eyes, the sky had changed. Whatever this world used for dawn was beginning, a slow paling of the dark, stars thinning out.

And I felt different. I was stronger, and there was something more inside me that I couldn't put a word to.

I stood up and stretched, and I noticed something odd as the stored Light finally slipped my grip and spilled outward. It was brighter than before. Not just the same Light coming back out. More of it, as though holding it compressed had done something to it. Made it denser.

I started back toward the settlement with my head already running the next experiment. If Light could be stored, could it be shaped? Pointed? Used for something?

And if keeping it inside made it stronger, what else did keeping it inside change?

—•——•——•——•——•——•—​

I sat by the lake and watched the stars write themselves across the surface.

Behind me the settlement was drifting into sleep. The fires were low and the songs were thinning. Somewhere a long way off, a baby was crying faintly.

I pulled my Light inward without thinking about it. The motion was automatic now, as natural as breathing. I felt it compress. I felt it settle.

I was noticeably stronger than I had been a year ago. The gains were small month over month, but year over year they were not.

I had been thinking, lately, about the four-child rule.

Every elf family capped at four children. No more. Not a law, not a guideline, just what was. Everyone took it for granted because everyone had always taken it for granted.

But why.

If Light was life, if it was the energy a body ran on, then a child growing inside a mother had to be drinking from that supply. Whatever made an elfling an elfling, it wasn't coming from nowhere.

And if the mother was bleeding Light into the air around her every second of her life, the way every elf did, then by the time she had carried and nursed four children…

Maybe there simply wasn't enough left.

But if Light could be held.

Then maybe. Then maybe a lot of things.

I didn't know. I didn't know whether any of this would work. I didn't know whether any of my plans, any of my scheming in the long hours when the rest of the settlement was sleeping or singing, would add up to anything at all.

Most of what I was working from was memory of books. Stories. Written by people who had never seen a lake respond to a father's prayer, never watched a child's Light brighten the air in a hut, never considered that any of it might be real.

I was guessing. Stacking maybes on probablys and calling the result a plan.

If the Avari happened. If I could steer them. If the Sundering unfolded along the lines the story said it would.

If. If. If.

The stars said nothing. They never did.

But I smiled anyway.

Because uncertainty was still better than surrender, and a flawed plan was still better than no plan. And I had, for the first time in either of my lives, time.

A great deal of time.

Enough, maybe, to get the rest of it right.

{Image: Selas — eyes like captured stars.}

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[End of Chapter 1.2]​

---

GLOSSARY​

For those who wish to go deeper into the world and its vocabulary. This entry covers terms from Tolkien's legendarium that appear in this chapter. Reading it is entirely optional — the story is written to stand on its own — but it may add a little texture to the journey.

PEOPLES & KINDREDS​

Quendi — The elven word for "those who speak with voices." What the Elves call themselves. All Elves are Quendi; they later divide into many different groups.

Nelyar — "The Third." The third and largest group of Elves to awaken at Cuiviénen (74 of the original 144). They called themselves Lindar ("Singers") internally, and were later named Teleri ("The Last") during the Great Journey.

Lindar — "The Singers." The Nelyar's name for themselves, from learning music and song before formal speech. Selas's people.

Minyar — "The First." The smallest group of Elves, first to awaken (14 original souls). Later called Vanyar ("The Fair Ones") for their golden hair and beauty.

Tattyar — "The Second." The second group to awaken (56 originals). Later called Noldor ("The Wise") for their craft and lore.

Eldar — "People of the Stars." The name for those Elves who accepted the summons of the Valar and began the Great Journey to Aman. Separated from the Avari at the Sundering.

Avari — "The Unwilling" or "The Refusers." Elves who refused the summons of the Valar and remained in Middle-earth. Our protagonist will lead a group of these.

DIVINE BEINGS​

Eru Ilúvatar — "The One, Father of All." The supreme creator who made all things through his divine music. Elves are his firstborn children.

Ainur — "The Holy Ones." Angelic beings Eru created before the world existed. They sang the world into being at his direction. Divided into Valar and Maiar.

Valar — "The Powers." The greatest of the Ainur, who entered the world to shape and govern it. There are fourteen chief Valar, including Oromë the Hunter.

Oromë — Vala of the hunt, of forests, and of wild beasts. First of the Valar to find the Elves at Cuiviénen. He will serve as herald and guide for the Great Journey to Aman.

PLACES​

Arda — The name of the entire world in Tolkien's mythology.

Cuiviénen — "Water of Awakening." The lake in eastern Middle-earth where the first Elves opened their eyes under starlight. The birthplace of all Elven-kind.

Endor — "Middle-earth." The great continent where mortal peoples dwell, east of the Great Sea.

Aman — "The Blessed Realm." The continent far to the west, where the Valar dwell, separated from Middle-earth by the Great Sea.

Valinor — "Land of the Valar." The Valar's realm within Aman, lit by the Two Trees.

CONCEPTS​

Years of the Trees — The age before the Sun and Moon, when the world was lit only by stars and the Two Trees of Valinor. Each Year of the Trees was roughly ten mortal years long.

The Sundering — The division of the Elven peoples into Eldar (those who accepted the Valar's call) and Avari (those who refused). A pivotal moment in Elven history.

The Four-Child Limit — A biological constraint on elven reproduction. Traditionally, no family can have more than four children. Selas suspects this is connected to the Light energy required for pregnancy — and that learning to contain Light might overcome it.

 

[Afkter02]

The Hunter at the Water (3)

[Cuiviénen. Year 1101 of the Trees. Spring]

[Selas POV]​

Four Years of the Trees.

In mortal reckoning, that is forty. In elven reckoning, it is the space between one long exhale and the next.

Four years of watching the children I ran with grow into young men and women who were, without knowing it, the first generation of a people who would need to fight.

Some of them had already done the thing every elf eventually does. Novë had found his Miriël, a Lindar girl whose voice could pull grown anyone to tears, which I say without exaggeration, having once seen my own father put down a piece of work to listen.

Archean was courting Silwen. There had been no announcement of intent on either side. There did not need to be. Everyone who watched Archean for more than five minutes understood that Archean had chosen, and that was the end of it.

And me?

I carved bows. I stacked knowledge like a man expecting a siege. I kept my mouth shut about ninety percent of what I knew and worked the other ten into anything and anyone who would take it.

Because I knew what was coming.

I just hadn't known it would arrive that morning.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—​

The horn broke the morning open.

No elven throat had ever blown such a note, and no instrument any of us had ever made could have produced it. The sound had weight. You felt it in the bones of your chest, in the soft places behind your eyes, in whatever you carried under the skin that I had, by then, come to think of as Light.

The bow I was shaping slipped out of my hands and thumped against the grass.

The horn sounded again, nearer this time.

"Selas!" Eol crashed out of the trees at a dead run, soot still dark on his forearms from the cookfire he'd apparently left mid-task. "The lake, you need to come, there's —"

"I know." I was already moving.

We ran side by side. By the time we reached the last stretch of forest before the shore, we were running inside a river of elves: Minyar drifting out of the golden huts on the western side, Tattyar pouring out of their workshops, Nelyar shouldering past each other with the hurried grace that only my own kindred possessed. Everyone headed the same way. Everyone pulled.

The crowd thinned at the shore, and then it parted.

And I saw him.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Moments earlier]

[Oromë POV]​

He crested the last ridge above the water and reined in.

Below him, in the soft, unfathomable grey of star-blessed shore, were figures. Tall and slender, silver-haired and gold-haired and dark, moving between small huts. Children ran through grass. Someone was singing, without words, and the song was not a prayer to any power Oromë knew. It was a song for its own sake.

He sat on his mount for a long moment and simply looked.

Children of the Father.

His eyes, which were not like the eyes of any creature that had ever walked the world, filled with something that had no name in any speech he had yet learned. It was not pity, or joy, or triumph, but something else, quieter, nearer to love than the Valar usually allowed themselves.

Do you know what you are? he thought, watching them. Do you know what waits for you?

They could not. They had been awake so short. They kept no watch. They had posted no sentries. A great predator could have come down this slope and been among them before the first of them thought to ask what it wanted.

And the Shadow was already moving in the north.

He had seen its signs, fresh ones. The Hunter did not report what he did not know, but he knew this: Melkor had felt these children stir as he himself had, and Melkor had come east sooner and less kindly than the Valar had reckoned.

Already there were hollow places in the woods of the far north where something had been taken and twisted. Already there were things wandering the edges of the world that had not been there the last time he had ridden this way: shapes at the tree-lines that were almost familiar and almost not, crouched around their fires in the way a person crouches but with something wrong in the line of the back, something in the silhouette that did not match anything written in the First Music.

What Melkor did in the deep places he did slowly, working one living thing against another and noting, what came out of the join. Oromë did not yet know what would come of those joins. He could guess, and he did not want to be right.

He could not leave the Quendi here, not with what was coming.

And yet, looking down again at the shore, at the children running across it, at the singing woman with her hair loose and her feet bare on the grass her own people had first stood on, he understood that the taking away would not be simple.

These were not a folk who would leave their cradle easily. He could feel it rising off the settlement like warmth off a stone, the old, sweet, rooted thing that every awakened creature feels for the first ground beneath its feet.

This was where their eyes had first opened. The water below was the same water that had first touched their lips. No elf on that shore would walk away from such a place on the word of a stranger standing above them on a ridge. Not all of them would come. Perhaps not most.

Persuasion would not be won by a single speech from a height, nor by fear, nor even by truth if truth was all he had to offer. The Quendi would need to be shown.

He had a plan.

He blew the Valaróma.

And on the shore below, every one of the Quendi looked up.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Selas POV]​

He stood at the water's edge as if he had always been standing there, and the lake itself had arranged itself to frame him.

Taller than any elf I had ever seen by a full head and shoulders, dressed in something the color of spring woods at dusk, a soft layering of greens and dim silvers, all of it moving slightly as though a wind were blowing through it that did not reach us.

Beside him stood what I could only call a horse for the sake of having a word. The creature's coat caught and held light the way water holds a reflection. Its eyes were intelligent in a way that I did not want to look at for very long.

Oromë, Vala of the hunt, of forests, of beasts and wild places. One of the fourteen Powers of Arda, come in person to a small shore at the eastern edge of the world because what was gathered here was worth his personal attention.

{Image: Oromë arrives at Cuiviénen}​

He looked at us, and I felt it in my teeth.

The Light pouring off him was immense. It washed across the crowd in long, warm pulses, and I watched, and felt, every elf around me lean imperceptibly forward, as if their bodies had decided, without consulting their minds, that they wanted to be closer to whatever this was.

Something crawled up the back of my neck.

The Light itself was not hostile. It was not even unpleasant. It was the opposite of unpleasant: warm and welcoming, with a current underneath it that whispered, in a voice that was not words, it is good to be here, it is good to listen, it is good.

Which was exactly the problem.

I had no way of knowing whether I was reading a deliberate pressure into what was only the natural radiance of a god, or whether I was reading it exactly right. Both were possible. Both meant the same thing as far as I was concerned.

I shut my Light in.

The motion was habit by now. A breath in, a tightening of some inner valve, and the pale warmth that wanted to drain out of me stopped draining and stayed.

And the pull on me slackened.

It wasn't gone entirely. You could not stand in a field with the sun directly overhead and pretend there was no sun. But the soft insistence in my mind, the gentle steering, let go.

I could think again.

Around me, nobody else could. My mother's lips were parted. My father's face had softened into the open wonder of a child watching stars. Elwë, who was ordinarily the most self-possessed person I knew, looked as if he were dreaming with his eyes open.
And he was not alone in it. Every elf on that shore wore the same shining, unarmored simplicity.

Standing among them with my Light shuttered, I saw for the first time how little defense these people had against anything at all. Not against a god's radiance, certainly, but not against much of anything else either. Their ears caught beauty without caution. They had no word for liar in their daily speech, because dishonesty had not yet become useful enough to name.

If Oromë had come down that slope with an army behind him instead of a promise, we would have been gathered on this shore just the same, smiling up at him, waiting to be told what to do.

"Children of Ilúvatar!" Oromë's voice came across the water, and it was the same sound as the horn translated into syllables. "Long have I hunted these eastern lands. At last I have found you, the Firstborn, awakened beneath stars that have never seen day!"

A ripple of indrawn breath moved through the crowd. Someone near me actually sobbed, not from sadness, but from the sheer overwhelm of being seen by something so large.

"I bring word from Aman the Blessed, where the Valar dwell in light beyond your imagining. We have made a home ready for you there, a realm of beauty and peace, where darkness cannot touch you, where you may grow in wisdom under our care."

Under our care.

Even through the crowd's glazed reverence, I heard those two words. They did not fit with the rest. The rest was a poem; those two were a cage.

I did not know if I was the only one hearing it. I suspected I was.

"I ask only that you send emissaries," Oromë continued, and his hands opened like someone offering bread. "Three, one from each kindred. Let them come to Valinor. Let them see it with their own eyes. Let them return to you with word of what awaits."

The silence that followed was the silence of a held breath.

Then Ingwë of the Minyar stepped out of the crowd, tall and gold and untroubled as a clear sky. "I will go."

Finwë of the Tattyar came next, steady-eyed, his hand at the belt where he habitually kept a small carving knife he had not remembered to leave behind. "I also."

And then:

"I will go as well."

My mouth opened before I knew it had.

No.

Elwë. My oldest brother, stepping forward with that unforced assurance of his, the one that had made every younger Nelyar imitate his walk without knowing they were doing it.

My father's face shone. My mother pressed both hands against her mouth.

My own face, I felt, did nothing at all.

It is happening, I thought. Exactly the way the books said it would. The three chosen, and my brother among them.

Oromë raised his hand. Light flared outward like sunlight from the opening of a door.

And then the three of them were gone.

The Vala turned his impossible mount. "I will return when they have seen. Then you will choose."

{Image: The Three Emissaries — Ingwë, Finwë, Elwë}​

He and the horse were gone between one breath and the next. The shore was empty. The horn, the shining mount, the three emissaries, and the being who had called them, all of it gone.

The crowd stood staring at the water for a long, frozen moment.

Then it broke open into noise.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[That evening. The hidden cove]​

Tirion found me where I always went when I didn't want to be found.

The flat stone above the deep water, the one place on the whole lake where the rocks came together in a way that blocked sightlines from every direction but the water itself. I had been sitting there for hours. The half-shaped bow was across my knees.

"You didn't stay for the fires," Tirion said, easing himself down beside me.

"No."

"Mother noticed."

"I'll apologize."

The settlement was still in full uproar behind us. You could not hear individual voices from this far out, but you could hear the general sound of it, the low roar of a community that had just been told something it did not yet understand.

A Vala came. Our brother was chosen. We might all be going to paradise.

"You're not happy," Tirion said. Not a question.

"No."

"Father's happy."

I looked at the stars in the water. "It doesn't mean he's right to be."

Tirion was quiet for a while. Of all four of us, he was the only one who did not need to be filling a silence.

"You don't trust them," he said finally.

"I don't trust anyone who shows up offering paradise with conditions."

"Is that what he did?"

I turned my head enough to look at my brother. "Did you hear him? The last line. Grow in wisdom under our care."

"That sounded kind."

"It sounded like a hand on a leash."

Tirion frowned. He was thinking. I could almost hear him doing it. "You might be reading things that aren't there, Selas."

"I know I might." I pulled my knees up against my chest, something I would have been embarrassed to be caught doing in daylight. "That's the worst part. I could be wrong. And if I'm wrong, I'm going to spend my very long life watching everyone I love sail off to somewhere they were going to be happy, standing here alone, because I couldn't make myself believe a stranger's promise."

"So why not believe him?"

"Why now?"

Tirion blinked.

"Why now?" I repeated. "We've been awake a long time. We've been here a long time. Why does a Vala show up today, out of nowhere, and say now, now, come with me, it is not safe here anymore? What changed? What does he know that we don't?"

My brother had no answer.

I turned back to the water.

"Something is coming," I said. "Something they're afraid of. They want us out of its way before it gets here. And if I'm right about that, even a little, then the price of getting away from it is whatever they want to charge, and I don't know yet what that is, and neither do you, and neither does Elwë."

"Elwë is going to see it himself."

"And when he comes back and tells us it is wonderful, he will be telling us the truth as he knows it. That is what frightens me."

Tirion sat with that for a long time.

"You're going to refuse," he said eventually. Not a question.

I didn't answer, which was an answer.

"Even if Mother —"

"Yes."

"Even if —"

"Yes."

He looked at his hands, then at the lake, then at me again, and his face was doing something I didn't have a name for, a kind of look that was neither disappointment nor admiration but sat quietly in the place between them.

"You'll stand alone if you do that."

"I know."

"I don't want you to stand alone."

That I had not expected.

I turned to look at him properly. He looked very young in that moment, and very serious, and more like our mother than he usually did.

"Tirion —"

"I'm not saying I'll stay." He said it quickly, "I can't say that. Not yet. I don't know what I'd choose. But you…" His mouth worked. "You shouldn't have to stand alone. It isn't right."

I reached out and put my hand on the back of his neck, the way Father did when one of us had said something that mattered.

"Whatever you choose," I said, "I won't hold it against you."

He closed his eyes and nodded once.

We sat there for a while longer. Neither of us said anything else. After a time he got up and went back toward the fires, and I stayed on the rock, and the stars did what stars do, which is to keep burning whether or not anyone is watching.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[End of Chapter 3]​

---

Glossary

Peoples and Kindreds​

Quendi — "Those who speak with voices." The name the newly awakened elves use for themselves in these early days, before any sundering.

Firstborn — Ilúvatar's name for the Quendi; the first of his Children to awaken in Arda. Oromë addresses them by this title.

Minyar — The First Kindred. Golden-haired, noble, dwelling in the western huts of the settlement.

Tattyar — The Second Kindred. Craftsmen and makers, with their workshops at the settlement's heart.

Nelyar — The Third Kindred. Selas's own people, carrying what Selas calls "the hurried grace that only my own kindred possessed."

Lindar — "The Singers." The name the Nelyar use among themselves, for those whose voices carry across water.

Powers and Beings​

Valar — The fourteen great Powers who shaped Arda in its beginning; servants of Ilúvatar.

Oromë — The Hunter. The Vala of forests, beasts, and wild places. The first of the Valar to find the Quendi at Cuiviénen. Rides an impossible horse whose eyes one does not look at for long.

Melkor — The fallen Vala. Not seen by the Quendi and not named aloud on the shore. Already moving in the far north, and already, Oromë suspects, working one living thing against another to see what comes of the join.

Ilúvatar (Eru) — The One. The creator of Arda and of all the Children.

Places​

Cuiviénen — The Waters of Awakening. The eastern lake where the Quendi first opened their eyes. Home ground, cradle.

Aman (also Valinor) — The Blessed Realm across the sea, home of the Valar.

Arda — The world.

Concepts​

Years of the Trees — The unit of time before the Sun and Moon, when Arda is lit by the Two Trees of Valinor and the stars. One such year is roughly ten mortal years. "Four Years of the Trees" is about forty in human reckoning'

Two Trees — Telperion of silver and Laurelin of gold; the twin sources of light in Aman.

Light — The inner radiance every elf carries, natural and usually unnoticed, flowing out of a Quendë.

Valaróma — The horn of Oromë.

First Music — The song by which Arda was made, sung before time by Ilúvatar and the Ainur. Its silhouettes are written and known.

 

[Afkter02]

The Long Waiting (4)

[Cuiviénen. Years 1101 through 1105 of the Trees]​

The emissaries did not come back.

Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months. Months turned into years, long slow Years of the Trees that stretched and stretched and stretched.

And in the stretching, the settlement changed.

Not visibly. Not in the way a human town might change under the same strain. No one packed. No one fought. The Quendi were not built for that kind of rupture. But underneath the surface calm, a hairline crack ran through every conversation, every shared meal, every long-familiar glance.

The question had been asked. The question could not be unasked. Would you go, if they said yes?

Everyone was living around the question. Some days you barely saw it. Some days you saw nothing else.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Year 1102. The training clearing. Afternoon]

[Selas POV]​

The games had grown up with us.

Now we played what I was calling, only in my own head, capture the pole. Two teams, ten to a side. A wooden post driven into the ground at each end of a clearing. Touch the enemy's post, you win. No weapons and biting. Past that, almost anything went.

Almost anything turned out to cover a remarkable amount of ground.

"LEFT!" Novë's voice ripped across the grass. "Their left, two on their left!"

He sprinted to intercept, caught the nearer Tattyar around the waist, and brought him down in a tangle of elbows, grass, and a long creative string of curses. The second Tattyar cut inside the tackle and ran straight into Celestia, who put a shoulder into his chest so cleanly that he was on his back before he had finished deciding to be surprised.

"Down!" I shouted from our end. "Stay down, Heletor, you're out."

The fallen Tattyar groaned, staring up at the stars he was now quite close to. "Since when is she allowed to hit like that?"

"Since always," Celestia said, offering him her hand up. Almost friendly.

On the far side of the clearing, Eol was leading a flanking group through the treeline, low and quiet, using hand signs I had taught them weeks ago and which they had since improved on.

Archean held the enemy's pole with three defenders. Reading the field.

Mireth was not playing.

Mireth never played.

She sat at the tree-line with a pile of clean cloth strips, a small wooden bowl, and an assortment of crushed leaves she had been refining with embarrassing speed. Her expression was that of a tired physician who had already mentally triaged everyone in the field and was waiting patiently for the inevitable.

Novë's tackled opponent was going to be her first patient. The one Celestia had hit would be her third. We were already running four games ahead of our injury rate.

"Your games are getting worse," she had told me at the end of the previous week's session. She had been wrapping a split lip on a young Lindar who had caught an elbow. "People are getting hurt."

"People are getting stronger."

"Maybe, but for what purpose?"

She had looked up from her bandaging just long enough to give me the look she reserved for very stupid things people said to her, then she had gone back to work, because arguing with me was not how Mireth spent her energy.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[That evening. Walking back]​

Eol fell into step beside me as we made our slow way back toward the settlement. He was favoring his left leg, though if I mentioned it he would deny he was favoring anything.

"You're pushing them hard, Selas."

"Not hard enough."

"Parents have started talking about it. Saying you're making their children aggressive. Those are the words now."

I laughed, a short dry sound. "They see us throw stones at targets and they call it aggressive — fine."

Eol walked a few more steps in silence. Then, carefully, the way he carefully approached a new piece of metal on the forge:

"What if they're right?"

"About the games?"

"About Aman."

I stopped walking.

He stopped too. We stood facing each other on the dim path, and Eol's dark eyes held something I had not seen in them before, something closer to hunger than to doubt. Eol was too decisive for doubt.

"Would you go?" I said. "If it comes to it?"

He did not answer immediately. When he did, it was not the answer I expected.

"The forge is here," he said. "My work. Everything I've built. Everything I know."

"Yes."

"But." He rubbed the back of his neck. "If Aman is really what they'll say, if it is what I think it might be, then there are things there that I…" He broke off, tried again. "There are crafts. Masters who could teach me in a season what would take me a century to stumble across alone."

His hands lifted, palms up, as if weighing something.

"You understand?"

I did.

Whatever I thought about the Valar and their summons, I could not pretend not to understand this. Eol was a craftsman. Finding him was pulling him apart, the rooted thing that loved this place and the hungry thing that wanted to learn.

"You want to go," I said quietly.

He looked at me. He did not drop his eyes. He did not pretend.

"I don't know what I want," he said. "I know what I have. And I know I haven't heard the offer yet."

I let out a breath.

"Fair enough."

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Year 1103. The lakeshore. Night]​

"What do you actually think, Selas?"

Novë's voice cut clean through the comfortable murmur of our evening circle.

We had drifted down to the water after the day's work, ostensibly to cool off, but everyone had known from the start that the swimming was an excuse.

The question had been coming for weeks. I had watched it building in Novë's face.

I set down the bow I had been smoothing, the same long yew-style thing I had been trying to make for three years now with steadily improving but still insufficient results, and looked around the fire.

Novë and Olwë were carving small boats out of pine. Tirion was feeding the fire. Eol was sharpening stone arrowheads while Archean bound them to shafts with the patience of a man who has found the right thing to be doing and does not need anyone to tell him so.

Mireth was sorting herbs into a row of small pouches, each one marked by a pattern of knots that only she understood.

Every one of them had gone very still.

My brothers had leaned in.

"All right," I said. "I'll tell you what I actually think."

I folded my hands around my knees.

"I think it isn't random. Something happened. Something made the Valar decide, right now, after all this time, that we need to be relocated."

"Protected," Archean said quietly. Not a correction, a prompt.

"Relocated," I said again. "Protected is a kinder word for it. But they mean the same thing, when what follows is and you will come with us."

"Do they, though?" Novë set down his carving. "Protection isn't the same as imprisonment."

"It is when you don't get to write the terms."

"But we do get to write the terms." Archean, still patient, still methodical. "That is what the emissaries are for. We hear what Aman offers. Then we decide."

"After they have been there for years." I leaned forward. "Surrounded by Valar. Breathing air no elf has ever breathed. And you think they will come back to us as the same three men who left? Able to tell us honestly about a place, when all they've known for years is how wonderful it is?"

Silence.

I watched it land on different faces in different ways. Novë looked troubled, Archean was thinking hard, and Eol's jaw had set in the way it did when something had struck home and he was not ready to admit it.

"That isn't fair," Olwë said, very quietly, from where he was tending the fire. He had not looked up. "You're saying they'll be changed."

"I'm saying they'll be convinced. And people who are completely convinced are not good witnesses."

"What if the danger is real, though?" Archean again, steady. "What Oromë said. The shadow in the north. What if it is real, and we sit here arguing about fair witnesses until it walks in?"

"Then we fight it."

"With what?" Celestia's voice from beyond the firelight. She was honing a knife, and she had not lifted her eyes from the blade. "Stone spears. Target practice. A capture-the-pole game we invented last summer. Against whatever is large enough to make a Vala come in person to warn us."

I did not have an answer for that. She knew I didn't. She was not being cruel. She was just not being kind about the truth.

"We get stronger," I said. "We learn and prepare."

"For what?" Novë pressed. "You keep saying prepare, Selas, and you never say for what. It's always some threat, some someday, some darkness. What if there is no darkness? What if Aman really is just better?"

"Then those who go will be happy there." I looked him in the eye. "And I will have been wrong. I can live with having been wrong, Novë. I would rather be wrong and free than right and someone's pet."

"Nobody is talking about pets."

"Aren't they?" I stood up, because I could not sit still through this anymore. I paced two steps, turned, and quoted Oromë word-for-word, the way elven memory allowed me to. "A realm of beauty and peace, where darkness cannot touch you, where you may grow in wisdom under our care."

"Hear it. Just hear where the stress falls. Under our care. Not alongside. Not with. Under."

"You're reading too much into one word."

That was Ilvëa. She had been quiet until now, sitting with her knees drawn up and her gold hair loose over her shoulders. Her ocean-blue eyes held the firelight in a way I was trying very hard not to notice.

"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe it is the only honest word in the whole speech."

The fire cracked. I sat back down.

"I was born here," I said, more quietly now. "This is my home. This is where my people opened their eyes for the first time. I am not going to walk away from it because a stranger told me I should be afraid."

"Even if the fear is real?" Archean.

"Especially then. You don't leave your home at the first sound of something coming. You stand in the doorway and you look it in the face."

"That's brave," Mireth said, without looking up from her herbs.

"It is also how people die."

I opened my mouth and closed it again.

Mireth did not speak in these circles often.

"Some things are worth dying for," I managed.

She lifted her head then. Her eyes were dark and steady and entirely without malice. "I agree, Selas. I only want to be sure we are choosing the right ones."

I did not have an answer to that either.

The fire burned down a little while we all sat with it.

Nobody agreed with me completely. Nobody disagreed completely. And that was more honest than a circle of nodding heads would have been, and I would have to learn to live with it.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Year 1104. Somewhere between spring and summer]

[Ilvëa POV]​

She had started following him to the cove.

The first visit had been chance, or so she had let herself believe. The second had been curiosity. By the third, Ilvëa had stopped lying to herself about it, which was something she considered a personal accomplishment.

He would slip away from the settlement in the deep hours when the fires burned low.

Always the same direction. Always alone. Always, she had discovered once she had worked up the nerve to edge close enough to the boulders to see, doing the same strange thing: sitting on his flat stone above the deep water, eyes closed, his soft Light slowly dimming until it was gone, swallowed inward as if he had taken a long quiet breath and kept it.

It had taken her weeks of watching before she understood what she was seeing. Even then she did not quite believe it. It was not that elves could not do this, because she did not know what elves could and could not do. It was that nobody did. Light was Light.

Selas had taught himself to stop it from flowing.

She had known for weeks, and she had not known what to do with knowing, and finally tonight she had stopped pretending she was going anywhere else and walked down the shore to the cove.

He was there, of course, sitting cross-legged on the stone, silver hair pulled back, no glow around him at all. The cove was very dark without his Light in it. She realized she had come to rely, without noticing, on the soft halo of his presence across a room.

He opened his eyes before she had announced herself.

"Ilvëa." His voice was tired but not unkind. She had half-expected anger, and there was none of it.

"I've been watching you," she said, because she had already decided on the walk over that she was going to say it immediately and get it done.

"I know."

"For weeks."

"I know."

She crossed her arms, partly to steady herself. "How long?"

"Since the second time you came down here." The corner of his mouth moved a little, not quite a smile. "You are not as quiet as you think you are."

She took a breath. "Selas, I —"

"Come sit."

"I was going to —"

"Come sit, Ilvëa. If you're going to know, you should know it properly."

She sat.

He did not speak for a moment. When he did, his voice was low and very careful, the voice of someone turning over a small fragile thing in his hands.

"I am going to teach you," he said. "Because if I don't, you are going to keep spying on me until you hurt yourself trying to work it out. And because I would rather one more person know than nobody. And because I trust you."

Her breath caught.

She had prepared herself for anger. She had imagined, at worst, that he might ask her to go away. She had not prepared for this.

"Why?" she said.

"Why what?"

"Why do you trust me?"

He looked at her for a long moment in the starlight, and Ilvëa understood abruptly that she was being looked at in a way that nobody had ever looked at her before, not with admiration, not with the soft bland affection that all the adults in her life turned on her, but with something that was wholly for her, and wholly serious.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Some months later]​

She had learned.

Now she could keep her Light in for as long as she chose.

Now she carried a secret, and the secret was his, and the secret was hers too.

Now she sat with him sometimes without speaking, on the rock, and sometimes they talked, and sometimes she just watched the way he watched the water.

"Do you know what you're doing, Selas?" she asked one night.

He did not look at her. "Not entirely."

She wound a lock of gold hair around her finger, unwound it, wound it again.

"My parents are going to go."

The words came out before she had decided to speak them.

"I can feel it in them," she said. "The way they hold each other in the mornings. The way my mother looks at the trees and then looks away again, as if she has already decided not to get too attached. They haven't said anything out loud. But they're going to."

"I know."

"You knew before I did."

"I guessed. I didn't know."

She turned her face toward him. Her eyes were bright with something she would not yet let fall.

"And you will stay."

"Yes."

"Even if I —"

"Yes."

The silence between them was a taut thing, a rope pulled tight between two anchors that could not be loosed from either end.

"I don't know what to do, Selas."

He did not answer her for a long time.

When he did, he did not offer her a way out. He did not tell her she could make her parents change their minds. He did not tell her she could choose him over them and everything would be fine.

He said, very quietly: "Whatever you choose, I won't hold it against you. I mean that."

And she had believed him, and that had been almost worse than if he had tried to argue her into staying.

Because if he had argued, she could have resented him.

Instead, she had to sit with the knowledge that the choice was hers, and that he was going to respect whatever she did with it, and that her parents were going to go, and that when they did, the thing between them, whatever it was, this thing that did not yet have a name, was going to break against her own obedience.

She pressed her palms flat against the stone.

I am not brave, she thought. I am not brave enough for him.

The water lapped at the rocks. The stars, as always, had no opinion.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[End of Chapter 4]​

---

Glossary

Peoples and Kindreds​

Quendi — "those who speak with voices." The name the awakened elves use for themselves in these early days, before any sundering.

Minyar — the First Kindred. In ages yet to come they will be known by other names.

Tattyar — the Second Kindred. Craftsmen and makers.

Nelyar — the Third Kindred. Selas's own people.

Lindar — the singers among the Nelyar; known for voices that carry across water.

Powers and Beings​

Vala (plural Valar) — the great Powers who shaped Arda in its beginning; servants of Ilúvatar.

Oromë — the Hunter. The Vala who first found the Quendi at Cuiviénen and summoned the three emissaries to Aman.

Melkor — the fallen Vala. His shadow is reported stirring in the far north, though the Quendi of Cuiviénen have not yet felt it with their own senses.

Ilúvatar — the One. The creator of Arda and of all the Children.

Places​

Cuiviénen — the Waters of Awakening. The eastern lake where the elves first opened their eyes beneath the stars.

Aman — the Blessed Realm across the sea, home of the Valar. Also called Valinor.

Arda — the world.

Concepts​

Years of the Trees — the unit of time used in the age before the Sun and Moon, when Arda is lit only by the Two Trees of Valinor and the stars. One Year of the Trees is roughly ten mortal years.

Two Trees — Telperion of silver and Laurelin of gold; the twin sources of light in Aman.

Light — the inner radiance every elf carries, natural and usually unnoticed, flowing out of a Quendë the way warmth flows out of a banked fire. Selas has taught himself to hold it in. He is, until this chapter, the only one who can.

The Shadow in the North — the unnamed threat Oromë gestured toward in his address on the shore. No Quendë of Cuiviénen has seen it; most are not sure it exists.

 

[Afkter02]

The Acorn and the Oath (6)

[Cuiviénen. Year 1105 of the Trees. The third dawn after the Sundering]

[Selas POV]​

Three days since the break.

Three days of sorting, packing, arguing, of families discovering that an Eldar cousin had taken a pot that wasn't his, or that a pair of snowshoes had vanished, or that a child's favorite carved bird had somehow ended up in the wrong traveling bundle. Most of it was accidental. Some of it wasn't. All of it had to be sorted out before the column marched.

We sorted it out, quietly, mostly without raised voices.

By the time the third dawn came, the Eldar were ready. Bundles tied, goodbyes said. Oromë had let word pass through the settlement that he would return with the rising of the silver hour.

I did not want to be at the settlement when he came.

I took the half-finished bow that had been the companion of the past four years, slung a quiver across my back, and walked into the forest. Not far, just far enough that I could hear the settlement and not be inside it, just far enough to pretend, for a little while, that I was only hunting.

I nocked an arrow, drew, held, released.

The arrow took a knot in a beech at one hundred paces. Dead center.

I drew again.

"Selas."

The voice came from behind me, and I knew it before I turned.

Ilvëa stood at the edge of the treeline, gold hair lit by what little starlight the canopy allowed through.

"You should be with your family," I said. I was aiming for neutral and missed. "The column moves at the silver hour."

"I know." She came a few steps closer. Her eyes were red. "That's why I came. Before I can't."

She opened her hands.

An acorn sat in her palms, large and perfect, smooth and unscarred, the cap still attached. And, I had to look twice to be sure, it was glowing very softly. Gold and green, a small light that had no business existing inside a seed.

"You've been practising," I said quietly.

"On plants. Seeds, mostly." She was talking quickly, "I wanted to give you something. Something that would last. I went to the oldest oak in the forest, the one by the north stream, you know it, and I took one of its fallen acorns, and I…"

She stopped. Started again.

"I put my Light into it. As much as I could hold."

She held it out.

I took it from her.

It was warm. Not the faint warmth of something recently touched, but a living warmth, a small patient pulse against my palm like a second heartbeat placed in my hand.

"Ilvëa."

"Plant it somewhere." She was not crying yet, but she was going to. "Plant it wherever the Avari end up making their home. And when it grows…"

She broke off.

"I don't know what it will grow into," she said, very low. "I tried to… I don't know what I did, really. I only know I put me into it. So whatever comes up out of the ground, it won't just be an oak." Her eyes lifted to mine, fierce and wet. "It will be a little bit of me. Still alive. Still with you."

I looked at the seed in my palm for a very long time.

Then I set the bow against a tree. Took out the first knife I had ever made, the little stone blade I had cut my own hair with three nights ago, the one I had fed Light into until it held a faint silver sheen. I had meant to keep it. I changed my mind.

I held it out to her.

"This is yours."

Her eyes went wide. "Selas, I can't —"

"You can and should." My voice came out rougher than I meant. "I made it myself. I put my Light in it, the way you put yours in the acorn. It won't break and will keep an edge. It will serve you honestly."

Her fingers closed around the handle.

"For protection on the road," I said. "For whatever else you need."

"Selas —"

"Please. Take it."

She did.

We stood there, each of us holding a piece of the other. The woods were very quiet. Somewhere far off a bird I did not know the name of sang three notes and stopped.

Ilvëa drew a breath that shook only a little. Then she lifted her chin and looked straight into my face, straight, not sideways, not down at her own hands, and when she spoke, her voice had stopped shaking at all.

"Keep my gift," she said. "For you and for Avari. Keep me in your keeping, Selas."

"Always."

The word was out of me before I had permission to say it.

She closed the distance between us in a single unhesitating step and kissed me.

It was brief. It was not skilled; neither of us had done this before, and it showed. Her mouth tasted of salt because she was crying after all. It lasted perhaps two heartbeats.

For those two heartbeats, time forgot to move. Then it remembered, and moved very fast, and my own heart moved with it.

She pulled back.

Her ears had gone bright red. Her face was probably the same, beneath the gold hair.

"Goodbye."

"Ilvëa —"

"I can't —"

She turned and ran.

I stood in the woods with an acorn in one hand and the ghost of a kiss on my mouth, and watched her small gold shape disappear back toward the settlement, and did not move for a long time.

I thought, very briefly, about going after her.

But then I closed my hand around the acorn and felt its slow warm pulse against my palm.

No.

The Sundering had happened. Sides had been chosen. I had said goodbye to my family. I had said goodbye to her twice, now. And I had said, in front of my own people and in front of a Vala, I choose freedom.

There was no road back from that. There was only forward.

I closed my eyes, took a long breath, opened them again.

"I'll keep it safe," I said to the silent forest. "I swear it."

The forest said nothing.

But the acorn in my hand warmed, just a little, as though it had heard.

{Image: Ilvëa's acorn}

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Later that morning. The shore]​

The horn sounded.

I walked back to the gathering place with the bow across my back and the acorn tucked safely in the pouch at my belt, and the ghost of a kiss still on my mouth.

Oromë had returned, his luminous mount standing tall at the head of the waiting column. The Vala himself looked at nothing in particular and saw everything.

The Minyar went first, all of them, every gold-haired soul in the settlement, led by Ingwë walking at the head of his people.

Then the Tattyar, half of them, Finwë at their head.

Then, last of all, the Lindar.

My people. Or what had been my people. What was still my people, only some of them were walking west now instead of staying.

The ones still wavering had ended up at the very back of the Lindar column. You could tell them apart from the others at a glance: they walked more slowly, they looked back more often, they did not quite fit the rhythm of the march.

Novë was among them.

He caught my eye as he passed, silver hair pulled back, lean and tired, and raised one hand. Just lifted it, palm out. A farewell the way you would salute a friend across a room.

I returned it. My throat had gone so tight I could not have spoken if I had wanted to.

Archean walked further back, his father Lenwë at his shoulder, his mother and two of his sisters close behind. Archean did not look at me at all. He was looking straight ahead at the road, the way he did everything, eyes where they needed to be. I understood. I had the same instinct.

And then, at the very back of the Minyar section, which had already gone past the rise where I stood:

Ilvëa.

She was walking at the tail of her kindred, almost dragging, and she kept turning her head. Every few paces. Every few breaths.

She was crying.

I could see her crying from where I stood. Silent tears, her face wet with them, her gold hair catching starlight in a way that made the whole image look composed, as though some cruel painter had set her up to be exactly that beautiful at exactly that distance.

I lifted my hand.

Just held it there, no wave and no gesture, just: I see you.

Her hand came up to her chest. Closed over the place where the stone knife now hung beneath her tunic, tied by a leather thong.

She mouthed something I could not hear.

Then the road bent. The column moved around a stand of birch. She was gone.

I stood there with my hand still half-lifted until I noticed I was doing it, and lowered it.

I did not move until the dust the column had lifted had settled again.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Same day. The shore]​

The Avari had watched from the side of the road.

Some were weeping. Some looked relieved. Most of them simply looked lost, the way people look when they've just made an enormous decision and are now being asked to live inside the consequences of it with no road map and no second chances.

I let them have the silence. Let the last of the column fade into the treeline. Let the weight of what we had just done settle onto every shoulder that had chosen to be here.

When the road was finally empty, I walked to where they were gathered, and I climbed up onto a low stone so everyone could see me, and I turned to face my people.

"We stayed."

The simplest thing I could say.

Every eye lifted to mine.

"We are Avari now. The name is theirs, the Vala named us. The Refusers. Fine. Let the word be what they gave us. But the thing is ours. We are the ones who chose not to go. We are the ones who are still standing on the shore where we were born."

I took a breath.

"We refused the path of service to the Valar. We chose our own path instead. And from this morning on, our future belongs to us. Our children's future belongs to us. Every choice about how we live, what we build, who we become — ours. Not the Valar's. Not any other power's. Ours."

Something moved through the crowd. Not a shout, not yet, but something smaller and more important than a shout: a slow straightening of spines, a slow lifting of heads.

"But first." I held up a hand before the mood could slip into anything bigger than it was ready for. "First, we need to decide how we live. And who leads."

Silence.

Then a Lindar stepped forward.

I recognised him — Thoron. The very first. The grim-faced man who had walked out of the crowd three days ago with two children in his arms and a third at his leg and had stood behind me in the terrible silence and made the Avari a people of more than one.

"Selas," he said. His voice was plain and not loud, and it did not need to be. "Selas of the Lindar. Fourth son of Enel the first-Awakened. First to refuse. The only child of the three progenitors who stayed." He looked around, taking in the faces of the families who had gathered behind him. "You should lead us."

"Agreed," someone called.

"Yes," came from several places at once.

"Let Selas be Chief —"

Not everyone. I counted the silences carefully even as the voices built. There were people thinking. There were people unsure. That was all right. That was how it should be.

But the voices were enough. More than enough.

I held up both hands for quiet.

"Then I accept." My voice steadied as I said it. "I will do my best by you. I will not always be right. When I am not, I expect to be told. Deal?"

A ragged laugh ran through the crowd, surprised out of them.

"Deal," Thoron said, gravely, and several others echoed him.

Well, I thought. This is happening.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Same day. Afternoon]​

I made them hold the meeting right there on the shore.

No point waiting. The Eldar's dust had barely settled. Whatever shape the Avari were going to take, they would take it faster if we started shaping it before anyone had time to become afraid of the size of the task.

I laid it out in order.

"First: inventory. We need to know what we have. Every pot, every stone tool, every bundle of grain, every scrap of hide. You," I pointed to three of the Lindar elders who looked organised, "you take that. I want a full count by the next silver hour."

Nods.

"Second: food. We cannot live on gathering and hunting alone. Not at this size, not into the future." I gestured at the lake behind me. "Cuiviénen is right there. We are going to learn to fish properly. And we are going to learn to farm. Not just to harvest what grows, but to plant, to tend, to select seeds for the next year, to turn the forest's edge into gardens that answer to us. Caldor," one of the carpenters looked up sharply. "You have an eye for what land can be made useful. Take four helpers. Start mapping the flatland by the south stream."

Caldor nodded, already thinking.

"Third: tools and weapons. Stone has taken us this far. It is not going to take us much further." I found Eol in the crowd. He already knew what was coming; his dark eyes had narrowed before I opened my mouth. "Eol. The forge is yours."

"I've been heating stones in a pit for three months already, Selas."

"Good. Turn the pit into a forge. Find an apprentice. Find five. Start with copper if that's what we've got. I'll get you whatever you need."

He nodded, jaw set.

"Fourth: the settlement itself." I turned a slow circle to take in the sprawl of huts scattered at random among the trees. "We are going to rebuild this. Properly. Tight, organised, defensible. With a wall around it."

That one got a murmur.

"A wall," someone said. Not in challenge, just tasting the word.

"A wall," I repeated. "Oromë warned of a darkness in the north. You can believe him or not, I have my own thoughts about that, but a wall is never wasted. Beasts, strangers, bad weather. A wall answers all of them."

"That will take months."

"It will. We start today."

"Fifth: we split the work. Smiths. Hunters. Farmers. Weavers. Builders. Fishermen. Healers. Teachers for the children, and every child, from now on, learns not only what their family does but what the Avari as a whole do. Not all of us can be everything. But every child should know where every trade lives, so they can choose."

Nods, slower now. People were starting to feel the scope of it.

"And sixth." I took a breath. "We need our own tongue."

A startled pause.

"We speak what we have always spoken," I said, "and that is beautiful. But the Eldar speak it too. They are taking it with them over the Great Sea. If we stay with the same language, in fifty Years of the Trees we will be speaking differently anyway. I would rather choose what we become than drift into it."

"Avarin," Thoron said quietly. "The Avari tongue."

"Avarin," I agreed. "The Avari tongue."

"Can it be done?" A woman's voice from the back.

"It has to be," I said. "So yes."

—•——•——•——•——•——•—​

I let them absorb all of that. Let the murmurs rise and fall. Let the shape of what I had just asked of them sit in the air for a breath or two.

Then I bent down and picked up a thin stick from the path.

Every eye followed my hand.

"One more thing before we start."

I held up the stick.

"Imagine this is one of us. Just one. Any of us, alone."

I waved the stick in a small arc so they could see it.

"Alone, one of us looks like this."

I snapped the stick between my hands.

The crack was sharp and very loud in the hush.

Several people flinched.

I held up the two pieces, then dropped them into the grass.

"That is what happens when one of us stands alone," I said. "Fine. Now look at this."

I bent again and gathered a handful of sticks, maybe twenty, and wrapped my fingers around the bundle.

"And this is all of us. Together."

I braced.

The bundle did not break. Not even a little. Twenty thin sticks that any of them could have snapped singly, now completely beyond my strength, because I could not get a single one of them to bend without all the others refusing alongside it.

"I cannot break it." I held the bundle up. "Will one of you try?"

A young Tattyar stepped out, grinning. He had shoulders like a carver, which he was. He took the bundle from me, set his feet, and gave it everything he had.

Nothing.

He tried twice, face reddening. The crowd was starting to laugh, the nervous laugh of people who are seeing something they didn't expect.

He handed it back, sheepish.

"Anyone else?"

An older Lindar came up. Then another Tattyar, bigger than the first.

None of them broke it.

By the third failure the crowd was no longer laughing. They were watching the bundle.

I took it back.

"Alone," I said quietly, "we break. Together, we do not."

I let my eyes move across the faces, slowly. I wanted every one of them to feel themselves seen in that moment.

"Whatever else you forget from today, whatever rules I make, whatever orders I give, whatever mistakes I'm going to make before we get where we are going, remember this."

I lifted the bundle one more time.

"This. This is the Avari."

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[End of Chapter 6]​

---

Glossary

Places​

Cuiviénen — The Waters of Awakening. The lake in the east of Middle-earth where the Quendi first opened their eyes.

Arda — The world.

Aman — The Blessed Realm in the uttermost west, across the Great Sea. Dwelling of the Valar. Also called Valinor.

The Great Sea — The ocean dividing Middle-earth from Aman.

Avarin — The tongue of the Avari. A branch of elven speech that diverges from that of the Eldar after the Sundering.

Time and Light​

Years of the Trees — The unit of time in the age before the Sun and Moon, when Arda was lit by the Two Trees of Valinor and the stars. One Year of the Trees is roughly ten mortal years.

Silver Hour — The hour of Telperion's dominant light in Aman. Used here as a general marker of time, corresponding roughly to the beginning of a new day.

Two Trees — Telperion of silver and Laurelin of gold. The twin light-giving trees of Aman before the raising of the Sun and Moon.

Telperion — The Silver Tree.

Laurelin — The Golden Tree.

Concepts​

The Sundering — The dividing of the Quendi into Eldar and Avari at Cuiviénen.

The Great Journey — The westward migration of the Eldar from Cuiviénen to Aman.

The Shadow — The malice and works of Melkor, felt in the eastern and northern wastes of Middle-earth.

Chief — Title of the leader of the Avari, accepted by acclamation among the Quendi who remained at Cuiviénen.

 

[Afkter02]

Forge, Field, and the Slow Harvest (7)

[Year 1106 of the Trees. The forge pit]

[Eol POV]​

The pit was too hot.

Which was, of course, the point.

Eol wiped sweat out of his eyebrows with the back of a forearm already slick with more sweat, and peered into the cherry-red heart of the fire. Charcoal, banked high, fed by a pair of goat-hide bellows the carpenters had put together for him from a design he'd sketched in the dirt.

In the darkness of a world that had never known a sun, the forge glowed like a captured star. It was the brightest thing in the settlement, by a considerable margin. Children crept up to the edge of his work-yard just to stare at it. He had to shoo them back twice a night.

Inside the glow, a fist-sized lump of ore sat on its charcoal bed. It had been copper-coloured when he'd put it in. Now it was something brighter, wetter, threatening to become something other than rock.

"Tavor." His voice came out harsh from the heat. "Mould."

The young Lindar at his elbow lifted the stone mould, Eol's own design, two pieces of soapstone carved to clamp together with the shape of an arrowhead cut into the join. Simple and rough, but it would do.

"Is it ready?" Tavor whispered.

"Watch."

Eol reached in with the tongs. The ore had slumped. Little beads of bright metal were sweating out of the darker stone around them.

He pulled it clear.

A single bright drop fell off the tongs and hit the ground, sizzled, set grass smoking.

Enough.

"Now."

He tipped the crucible.

The metal ran. Not much metal, but enough to fill the mould with a small, terrible, beautiful hiss, and a thread of steam rose up between them.

They waited.

Tavor was not breathing. Neither was Eol.

A very long minute later, or thirty seconds, the heat did things to his sense of time, Eol pried the mould apart.

Inside lay a lump of bright metal, still hot, roughly the shape of an arrowhead. Misshapen and pocked and full of flaws. If you squinted, it was an arrowhead. If you were being honest, it was something that wanted to grow up to be an arrowhead and hadn't quite made it.

They stared at it.

"We did it," Tavor whispered.

So.

Eol took the lump out of the mould with the tongs, set it on the anvil-rock, and tapped the flattest surface with a stone hammer. It rang.

It was metal.

He had made metal, in a pit, with his own hands, without any help from any god.

He turned his face away from Tavor for a second longer than he needed to, and said, when he trusted himself, "It is terrible."

"Master —"

"Don't master me. I have one arrowhead, Tavor." He held the lump up to the light. "It is terrible. And it is ours. Write it down. Which ore. How long in the fire. How much charcoal. How long before we opened the mould. Every step."

"We don't have, I mean, we can't really —"

"Scratch it on bark. Memorise it. I don't care." Eol set the arrowhead aside with reverence he would not admit aloud. "Now another. Better this time."

Tavor scurried.

Eol stood for one more moment looking at the little misshapen lump.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Year 1106. The training clearing. Morning]

[Celestia POV]​

Five of them were on the ground.

Which was four more than Celestia had expected, to be honest. She had thought at least one would stay up through the third set. She had been mildly optimistic.

"I can't anymore," one of them gasped. A Lindar boy she'd known since he was small enough to ride on his mother's hip.

"Then lie there," she said brightly. "And rest."

A groan of collective misery.

"How is this supposed to make us stronger?" another one managed from the grass. "It just hurts."

Celestia rolled her shoulders back and looked down at them. She was not breathing hard. She had done the same set three times through, before they had even arrived this morning, not out of cruelty but out of honesty. Nothing she asked of them was anything she wouldn't do herself. That was the one rule she had taken from Selas and kept without question.

"It will make you stronger," she said pleasantly, "because pain is the body telling itself to get better at what it's doing. It is a small and stupid language, but it is the only one your arms and legs speak, and if you do not listen to it, you will stay exactly as small and stupid as you currently are."

"That is not supposed to be encouragement."

"It is observation."

She looked past the bodies on the ground.

At the treeline, a small group of young women were picking wildflowers. Or, more accurately, a small group of young women were pretending to pick wildflowers while watching the drill.

Celestia had arranged this herself, two days ago, over three cups of something herbal and a long quiet conversation. Four of the Lindar girls, two of the Tattyar. Each of them had a particular boy on the ground in front of them. Each of them had been asked, casually, if they would care to take a walk along the northern path at the silver hour.

It had worked better than she had hoped.

The boys in the dirt had noticed the girls within about thirty seconds. She had counted.

"Well," Celestia said loudly, stretching her arms over her head. "Since we are done for the morning, I suppose we should go and talk to our audience. They'll be curious. You know how they are. They'll want to know what you managed."

The boy on the ground, Aerion, that was his name, lifted his head about three inches. "Audience?"

"Mm." She did not look at the treeline. "I'm sure they came for the view of the lake."

He turned his head, following her gaze, and his whole body went rigid.

The Lindar girl at the treeline had very long silver hair and an absent, uninterested look carefully pasted over a face that was in fact watching Aerion with close attention.

"Up," Celestia said to Aerion quietly. "Now."

He scrambled.

The boy beside him groaned, and then saw where Aerion was looking, and found enough energy in his limbs to get onto one knee.

The third got all the way up.

The fourth leveraged himself off the fifth's shoulder and stood.

The fifth, being more principled, remained on the ground and declared he would die with dignity. Celestia stepped over him.

"Another set," she announced.

Groans, but they did it.

They did it better than they had done any of the earlier sets. Their forms were sloppier with exhaustion, but they were moving. They were trying. Because six pairs of eyes were watching from the treeline, and the first law of young men across every known species was that they would sooner break their own backs than be seen lying down by a girl they were hoping to impress.

Celestia watched her trainees push through a set they had ten minutes ago told her they could not possibly complete, and let a small satisfied smile move across her face.

There we are.

If we wanted the young men of the Avari strong, the fastest road was to make strong men desired. The girls would do the rest. They would not even know they were doing it. They were already doing it, in fact. She had seen two of them at the treeline straighten their shoulders when Aerion got up off the ground.

She could work with that.

The whole culture of the Avari was being forged right now, she thought, and most of it was being forged by men with hammers and men giving speeches, and almost none of those men seemed to notice that what the women decided was beautiful was going to shape what the men decided to be.

So Celestia was quietly deciding what the women would decide was beautiful.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Year 1107. The council fire. Evening]

[Selas POV]​

I called them together not for orders, this time, but for teaching.

It was the first time I had tried to stand up before the whole settlement and hand them something I had been keeping mostly to myself.

I had a lot to hand them. I had practised the words on the rocks at the far shore of the lake more times than I could count. Tonight I was going to see how they landed.

"Everybody here," I said, "knows that no family has more than four children."

Nods.

"I am not sure that is the law of the world," I said. "I think it is a consequence of something. And I think we can change the consequence."

Silence.

"Our Light," I said. "The Light that is in us, that makes us glow in the dark, that makes newborns shine like candles in their mothers' arms, that keeps us warm in cold and steady in hunger. That Light is not nothing. It is not decoration. I think it is what we are, at least, part of what we are. Energy of some kind. Eru breathed it into us when he woke us, and it is in us for as long as we live."

I had their full attention now.

"And we bleed it."

I let that sit.

"All day. Every day. Out of our skins, into the air, into the ground, into the world. We shine, and we pay for shining. Every one of us, every moment, all the time."

I turned toward Mireth, who was seated at the front of the gathering with her usual small bag of herbs on her knee. She knew what I was going to ask. We had talked about this for weeks.

She nodded slightly.

"Now," I said, turning back to the crowd. "Here is my thought. A child, in the womb, has to come from somewhere. The Light of that child must be drawn from somewhere. And the somewhere it is drawn from is —"

"The mother," someone said from the crowd. A woman's voice.

"The mother," I agreed. "Yes. The child takes from the mother's own Light. That is what is in the child. That is how a baby is bright when it is born, and does not have to learn to shine."

More careful nods.

"So consider." I moved to pace, because I could not hold still any longer. "A mother who has borne four children has already given four children's worth of her Light to the next generation. And in between, all her life, she has been bleeding Light into the air around her."

I turned back.

"By the time she has given four children, there isn't enough left, not to make a fifth, not enough to keep her safely alive through one more pregnancy. So her body stops. That is the limit. Not a decree, not a rule, just arithmetic."

I saw the idea land on different faces in different ways. Some shocked. Some already running ahead of me and arriving at the conclusion before I said it.

"But."

The word came out hard.

"But — what if we learned to stop bleeding?"

Silence.

"Watch this," I said.

And I did, in front of them, what I had practised at the cove by myself for so many years.

I pulled my Light inward.

In the starlit dark, I faded to a shadow among shadows.

I held it.

I held it for a full count of sixty, longer than was comfortable, because I wanted them to be certain that I had not simply stepped into a shadow.

Then I let it go.

The Light rushed back out of me all at once, brighter than before.

Gasps again, and a murmuring that was not quite uproar but was climbing toward it.

"It is not easy," I said quickly, before the murmur could rise any higher. "It takes practice. Months, for most. Maybe years. I could only hold for ten heartbeats the first time I ever managed it at all. But everyone can learn."

I looked at Mireth.

She stood.

She walked into the center of the ring, turned, and faced the crowd.

Then she pulled her Light inward. More slowly than I had. Less completely. But the crowd could see it happening, the soft glow around her dimming, drawing down into something contained and private.

The gathering went absolutely silent.

"I am not as far along as Selas," Mireth said calmly. "Not nearly. But I have been working at it for months. And the change is real."

She held the compression for a long moment, letting them look. Then she crossed to the nearest training post, a thick beam of seasoned oak sunk into the ground for sword practice, and struck it with the heel of her palm.

The post shuddered. A crack ran up its length from the point of impact.

Mireth was not a warrior. She was a healer of average build who had never trained for combat in her life. Every person in that clearing knew it.

She turned back to the crowd.

"Light retention does not only preserve what we have," she said. "It changes us. The body grows denser. Faster and stronger. The reserves that once bled away into the air now feed muscle and bone and sinew from the inside. Over months, over years, the difference compounds."

She released her Light, and her familiar soft glow came back. The crack in the oak post remained.

"But that is not why I asked to speak."

Her voice shifted. Softer now.

"If mothers learn this," she said, "there may be enough Light left for a fifth child. Or a sixth. I do not promise. I hope. We will learn together. Any mother who wants to try will have my hands with her when she does."

I stepped forward again when it had ebbed enough that I could be heard.

"And there is more," I said.

Some of them groaned, good-humouredly, because they had had enough new ideas for one night. I let them have the laugh, because the next thing was going to be harder.

"One more thing. This one is harder to hear than the last one, and I am going to say it anyway."

I waited.

"In the forest, you have all seen it. A strong tree bears large fruit. A weak tree bears small. A fast stag sires fast calves. A small bird lays small eggs. That is not a rule I have invented. That is something every hunter and every gatherer among us has known their whole life."

"It is also true of us."

A long pause.

"The children of strong, clear-minded, capable parents tend to be strong, clear-minded, and capable. The children of the weary and the neglectful tend to struggle. That is the way bodies pass themselves on. Not a curse and not a blessing, only the way we are made."

"Selas —" one of the elders began.

"Let me finish. I am not saying anyone here should not have children. I am not saying anyone here is less than anyone else. I am saying, we are building something. We are building the first generation of the Avari. We have one chance to do this well."

I spread my hands.

"So train. All of you. Become strong. Become skilled. Become steady of mind and clear of eye. Not because I am telling you to. Because the children you will have in a hundred years will be the children of the people you become. The better you are, the better they start. That is all. That is the whole of it."

A murmur went through the crowd. Different from the earlier ones. This one had weight.

I watched it move.

Couples glanced at each other. Watched, and looked away, and watched again. I saw one Lindar woman, who had been standing loosely against her husband, straighten a little and study him, not coolly, not critically, but as though she were seeing him as the father of her not-yet-born grandchildren, and deciding, very privately, that she was pleased. I saw him notice her noticing, and, equally privately, stand a little straighter.

It was happening on faces all over the clearing.

I had said a hard thing. I had said it plainly. And the Avari, to their credit, were not flinching from it. They were doing the math themselves.

So.

Let it be plain, then. Let it be work that everyone did together. Let strength, from this moment on, not just be useful.

Let it be beautiful.

Let it be desired.

The Avari could become a people who did this on purpose. I would not have to force it. They would do it because they wanted to, and because the ones they loved wanted them to.

That was the foundation.

Everything else was going to be built on top of it.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Year 1108. The Elders' circle. Evening]

[Maethor POV]​

Maethor had been awake at the first awakening.

He did not often say this out loud. You didn't need to, when it was true. The other elders knew it. The young ones could feel it when he walked past. He was not proud of it, particularly. He had simply opened his eyes with a great many others on a shore where nothing yet had names, and he had been there ever since, and so had the lake.

He loved the lake.

He loved the slow-moving stars above it, and the songs that rose without plan in the evenings from the huts nearer the water, and the quality of silence that came to the shore in the long hours when no one was singing.

He loved his wife, whom he had met before he had met any word for her. He loved his three daughters, and the many granddaughters and grandsons they had given him, and he loved the trees on the southern slope where he liked to walk.

He had refused the Journey because he could not bear to leave any of that.

He had thought, when the boy refused, that the boy had understood the same thing.

Maethor was no longer sure.

The boy.

He still thought of Selas that way. It was not unkind. Selas was a boy, to Maethor.

A boy who could command a room. Maethor acknowledged it without grudge. When Selas spoke, people listened.

When Selas worked, other people began working beside him. It was a true gift, and the Avari had been right to choose him, and Maethor would not be the elder who stood against that choice.

But.

But tonight the circle of elders had gathered, as they did each month now in the timber-beamed hall Selas had required them to build before any other public building, and the talk around the fire had gone again to the same place it always went, and Maethor had listened, and Maethor now had things to say.

"The decision to stay was the right one," one of the younger elders was saying, whose name was Faeldir.

"Who argues with that?" said another. "Look what we have."

"Look what we have," Faeldir agreed. "Walls. Fields. Fire-pits that make metal out of rock."

"I saw."

"Before Selas, none of us had even asked for these things. Now—"

"Now," Maethor said quietly.

Every head around the fire turned toward him.

He did not speak often in these circles. When he spoke, they listened. He had earned that, the long slow way.

"Now we have all those things," he said. "Granted. And they are good things, most of them. But I want to ask all of you a question, and I want you to answer it honestly, which is a thing that is difficult when the boy is very charming and most of our children adore him."

A ripple ran through the circle, uncomfortable. Nobody disagreed.

Maethor folded his hands on his knee.

"We refused the summons of Oromë," he said. "We refused it because we did not trust him. We refused because he came from far away with warnings of dangers and promises of safety, and we said to him — no. That is why we are Avari."

Slow nods.

"Now." Maethor looked around the fire, face by face. "Selas tells us there is a darkness coming. He tells us to train our children with bows and with spears. He tells us that Oromë was right, in that one thing, that something terrible is moving in the north, and that we must be ready for it."

Silence.

"Do you see it?" Maethor asked. "Do you see the shape of what he is saying to us?"

"Selas is not the Vala, Maethor."

"No. He is not. And I am not accusing him of being one. I am asking you to notice that we refused the summons because we did not trust fear, and now we are arming our children against the same fear, at the word of a young man we chose five Years of the Trees ago."

A longer silence.

"Maethor." It was Thoron this time. Thoron, who had been first to stand behind the boy on the morning of the Sundering, and who had not wavered since. His voice was steady. "You are using the boy's own argument against him."

"I am."

"Cleverly."

"I don't mean it cleverly. I mean it honestly. If we are a people who refused to bow to fear, then let us refuse to bow to fear. All of it. Including his."

"And if the darkness is real?"

"Then it will find us, and we will meet it, and we will either live or not. But let us not become what we refused to become. Let us not live crouched over our weapons, staring at the horizon, waiting for a blow that may never come, teaching our children to be soldiers before they are singers."

Another elder, whose name was Talagan and who had a habit of deflecting serious moments with humor, cleared his throat. He was not smiling now.

"Maethor. I hear you. I do. But." He gestured out toward the settlement, and something almost wistful crossed his face. "I look at what we have built in five Years of the Trees. I look at what those children down there know how to do with their hands and with their minds. I look at the copper in their hunting points. And I think, whatever else is true, the boy has been right about more things than any of us would have predicted."

He paused. Glanced at Maethor with a half-shrug that was more honest than apologetic.

"Including some things I laughed at when he first said them."

"Being right about copper," said Maethor, "does not mean being right about war."

Nods moved around the circle, some for him, some for Talagan. The circle was split, as it often was these days.

"I do not want him removed," Maethor said carefully, because he wanted to be sure the room understood what he was and was not saying. "He leads well. He has earned the place he stands in. I am not his enemy."

"What are you, then, old friend?" said Faeldir, not unkindly.

Maethor thought about it for a moment.

"I am the voice that reminds him," he said at last. "That we refused the summons. That we refused it on principle. That a people who will do anything to survive will, sooner or later, become something that is not worth surviving."

He let that sit.

"If I do not say it, who will?"

Nobody answered.

The fire cracked. Somewhere in the settlement, a child was laughing. The lake, as always, was quiet.

Thoron nodded slowly, not in agreement but in acknowledgment.

"Say it, then," he said. "And keep saying it. And we will weigh it, each of us, every time you do. That is all that can be asked."

"That is all I ask," said Maethor.

The circle moved on to the next matter.

But the thing he had said stayed in the air over the fire for the rest of the evening, the way smoke stays in the rafters of a hall after the fire is low.

Selas was not there to hear it.

Maethor suspected that someone, later, would tell him.

That was all right. It was meant for him.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[End of Chapter 7]​

---

Glossary

Time​

Years of the Trees — The unit of time in the age before the Sun and Moon, when Arda is lit by the Two Trees of Valinor and the stars. One such year is roughly ten mortal years.

Silver Hour — The hour when Telperion's silver light is dominant in Aman. Used among the Avari as a time-marker for the beginning of a working day.

 

[Afkter02]

Seasons of the Standing (8)

[Year 1108. Deep summer. The healing-house]

[Selas POV]​

Mireth was wrapping a gash on a builder's palm when I came in.

She did not look up. She had a way of knowing who had entered a room without looking, which I had stopped trying to explain to myself.

"If this is about tomorrow's training roster," she said, fingers still working the bandage, "I don't have time."

"It's about Lindariel."

Her fingers paused for half a heartbeat, then continued.

"Is she ready?"

"She think so."

I let out a breath.

Lindariel was the Lindar woman who had come forward first, six months ago, after the council-fire teaching. She had four children already. She and her husband Aeron had talked about it for weeks. She had come to Mireth, and to me, and she had said: I want to try.

She had been holding her Light now for half a year. Not perfectly, but consistently. The body settled into the practice after the mind learned to trust it; that was something I had learned on the far shore as a boy, and Mireth had confirmed it in others.

And 9 months ago, Lindariel had become pregnant.

Mireth tied off the bandage. Patted the builder on the shoulder. Sent him out.

Then she turned and faced me fully, and I saw how tired she was.

"If I lose her," she said, quietly, "or the child, I want you to understand what that costs me."

"I know."

"No, you don't. You think you do. But Selas, I deliver these children. I hold them the first time they breathe. If this one does not breathe, it will be my hands."

"Mireth —"

"I am going to help her anyway." She picked up a fresh length of cloth and began folding it with the same precise movements she did everything with. "I am going to be with her for the whole birth, and I am going to do everything I know to do. I am telling you only so that, whichever way this goes, you know what we are risking."

"I understand."

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[The same night. Lindariel's home]​

I did not go into the room.

I sat outside on the stones of the little porch Aeron had laid himself, and Aeron sat beside me, and neither of us spoke for a long time. From inside came the steady low voice of Mireth guiding another woman through pain, and sometimes the sharper sound of Lindariel herself.

Aeron's hands were shaking.

I put my own over one of them. Left them there.

"She's all right," I said quietly.

"You can't know that."

"No. But Mireth is in there."

Aeron nodded jerkily.

Time went strangely. The stars did their slow wheel. Nothing seemed to happen for hours, and then everything seemed to happen at once. A sharp cry. A long pause. Mireth's voice, pitched a fraction higher. Another pause.

And then a new sound, thin and indignant: the first cry of someone who had just arrived without being asked, and was furious about the cold.

Aeron broke down. Not quietly.

I held on to his shoulder while he shook.

A little while later Mireth appeared in the doorway. Her sleeves were pushed up. There was blood on her forearms. Her eyes met mine, and for a second she just stood there with the door framing her, and I understood before she said anything that it had worked.

"A son," she said.

Aeron was on his feet before the word finished.

I stood more slowly.

"Lindariel?"

"Tired, but whole and fierce. Demanding water and complaining about me." Mireth's mouth made an exhausted wry shape that was nearly a smile. "She is going to be fine."

"And the child?"

"The child is bright. As bright as any of them I have ever held." Her voice cracked a little on the last word, and she covered it quickly by pressing a wrist against her own eye. "He glows like a small star."

I went in.

Lindariel was propped against the pallet with a small wrapped thing at her breast. Her hair was damp, stuck to her face. Her eyes found mine and they were enormous and bright with something that was not just exhaustion.

"Come see him," she said.

Wa came.

The baby was very small and very red and very loud, and around his skin, absolutely unmistakable, was a halo of Light strong enough that I could see it even against Lindariel's own glow. He wasn't diminished. He was what any newborn Avari was, and there were already four other children of this woman asleep in the next room, and this was the fifth.

Something inside my chest let go that I had not realised had been clenched for two years.

"He's beautiful," I said. My voice was hoarser than I meant.

"He is," Lindariel agreed. "He is going to be called Lindion. For the song you taught Aeron before he courted me."

"I didn't teach Aeron any song."

"Oh yes you did." She was smiling.

Then I did not rest. I walked down to the lake, and I stood on the shore, and I looked out at water.

It worked.

It really worked.

Something in my theory had not been wrong. Something in my teaching had not been ruinous. A woman had held her Light, had fed what she saved into a fifth child, and the child had opened his eyes into the world still bright.

And then I turned and walked back to the settlement, because tomorrow was another working day.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Year 1108 onward. Various moments]​

Lindion was the first. He was not the last.

Word ran through the settlement faster than I would have believed possible, which was, in retrospect, naive of me, because elves gossiped, and elves remembered, and a miracle does not need help to travel.

By the end of the year, four more families had come to Mireth. By the end of the second year after that, the number was in the dozens.

The Avari had a next generation that was larger than the old laws allowed. And the old laws, it turned out, had been not laws but inferences from the way things had always been.

The settlement grew with the children. Houses were added. The wall wa had been pushing outward for years stretched further to accommodate new gardens. Eol's forge had doubled in size and then doubled again. Bronze had come, grudgingly; then bronze had stopped being a miracle and started being a routine, and the forge had moved on to quietly obsessing about iron.

Other things grew that I had not asked for.

A pair of Lindar women found a clay bed in the southwest, worked out kiln-firing by themselves in the course of two months, and invented pottery without my having to say a single word about it. I praised them in a council meeting. They did not stop glowing for several days.

A carpenter called Orion took the idea of the potter's turning-plate, watched it for about an hour, and came back the next week with two small wooden discs joined by an axle and a short plank laid across them.

A wheelbarrow.

I looked at it. I looked at him. I said, "What else could you do with this?"

He frowned, then said, slowly, that you could perhaps make it larger. That if it were much larger, and drawn by something, you could move a great deal more than a man could carry.

I told him to try.

By the end of the year, we had three carts.

I did not tell anyone what I thought the carts were really for. But I ordered more built. There was always more stone to move, more timber, more harvest coming in.

Always a reason.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—​

The language grew faster than anything else.

I had seeded it with what I remembered, the structure mostly, the idea of letter-shapes, the concept of writing things down so they did not have to live in someone's head to survive. The Avari did the rest themselves, and did it shockingly fast.

Elven memory was a resource I had not fully appreciated until I tried to use it for something deliberate. A word invented at the council fire in the evening would be known across the whole settlement by the next morning. By the next week it would have three variants, two of which were being quietly corrected by whichever elder spoke the best Primitive Quendian and considered themselves the arbiter of good sense.

We had Avarin. Rough, still. Growing. But ours.

And we began to write it. On bark first. Then on thin hammered leather, which held up better. Eol swore he could beat out a copper leaf so thin we could scratch letters into it; I told him not yet, we had better uses for the copper, and he sulked for a week but agreed.

The Avari were becoming literate.

Not all of them, not yet, but enough.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Year 1110. Late autumn. The unfinished wall]

[Selas POV]​

"You look tired."

Celestia settled beside me on the top of the wall's northern section. The last section, the one Caldor's crews were finishing this season. Below us the forest stretched dim and wide and full of whatever lived in it. Above us the stars turned slowly through their long silver hour.

"I am tired."

"When did you last sleep properly?"

I thought about it. Could not come up with a specific answer. Settled for: "Recently."

"That is not an answer."

"I know."

She let the silence sit.

We had been friends for a long time. Long enough that she could sit beside me without needing me to talk, and long enough that she could wait out my deflections if she wanted to. Tonight she was in a waiting mood.

"You made a Council," she said at last. "So that you could share the weight. And now you do everything yourself and come up here alone to stare at the trees. What is the Council for, Selas?"

"They handle what they handle. I handle what I handle."

"You handle everything."

"Only the things that matter."

"Which is, by your definition, everything."

I did not answer. She was right.

She shifted. Leaned her shoulder lightly against mine, not romantic, the way a friend does, an old friend, a sister-in-arms. I let her.

"You are not going to last like this," she said quietly. "I don't care how right you are about what is coming. If you run yourself into the ground, you will be no good to anyone when it arrives."

"The wall is almost done."

"And?"

"The forge is making bronze. The fields carry us through every harvest now with a surplus. The population is climbing. Orion's carts are making timber-running a morning's work instead of a day's. The Council meets each month and does not need me in the room for most of it." I rubbed my face.

"We built something real, Celestia. I know. I know we did."

"But."

"It isn't enough."

"It won't ever be. Not for you."

"No."

She didn't argue. She just let it sit. The wall was warm under us from the day's work of the crews. Somewhere below, a child laughed, high and piercing.

"You're lonely," Celestia said.

I did not turn my head. "I have friends."

"Not that kind."

I touched the pouch at my belt without meaning to. The acorn was in it, still warm, still pulsing against my palm through the leather.

Every evening, before sleep, I opened the pouch and fed it a thread of my own Light. A small ritual, almost unconscious now after five years of repetition. The acorn drank what I gave it and hummed faintly in response, as if something inside was growing without soil or water, sustained on Light alone and patient.

I had not planted it yet. Nothing had felt like the right ground.

Celestia noticed the gesture. She was Celestia. She noticed everything.

She did not press on it.

"There are women here," she said carefully, "who would —"

"I know."

"You are not going to —"

"I am not."

"Because of her."

"Because I said I would carry what I was carrying." I closed my hand around the pouch more firmly. "And because it is my own choice."

She nodded slowly.

"All right," she said. "Then will you at least breathe? Once in a while? For me, if not for yourself?"

I managed a small and not entirely genuine smile.

"I will try."

"That is a terrible promise, Selas."

"I know."

She laughed at that, a short tired laugh. Then she got to her feet, brushed stone-dust off her leggings, and nodded at the horizon.

"Come down," she said. "There is food. People are asking where you are."

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Year 1110. Winter. The central hearth]​

The celebration was the largest we had ever held.

Nearly two hundred Avari, two hundred, gathered around the great hearth in the middle of the settlement, under stars and against the outline of the wall that was, at last, complete.

We had finished the eastern gate that morning. Caldor had placed the final beam himself, a thing he had waited years to do, and he had wept openly while setting it, which had made half the crew weep with him.

Fires burned high. The air smelled of woodsmoke and roast fish and a new kind of stew that one of the Lindar women had invented using fresh herbs and dried forest-plums and a liberal amount of what everyone was pretending was not fermented berry juice, but which was in fact extremely fermented berry juice.

Someone had invented wine. Of course they had.

Someone had written songs. Actual songs. Verses and refrains, built to be sung by a crowd around a fire.

The old wordless Quendi songs were still there, still beautiful, still rising sometimes when the mood ran deep. But now there were also songs about things, about the Lake, about the Wall, about the first five-child birth.

Children chased each other between the fires, shrieking.

Couples were dancing. The dances were not elegant. Some of the elders were watching with expressions that suggested the dances were not decent, either. That was fine. The elders had the rest of the long night to be dignified in.

And in the middle of it all, I sat in the wooden chair that Thoron had had carved for me without asking. It was not a throne. It was not not a throne either.

Thoron appeared at my elbow with two cups of the berry wine.

He pressed one into my hand.

"Drink."

"I should not —"

"You should." He sat down on the step beside the chair. "You look like you have not had fun since the Sundering. Five years is a long time to go without having fun, Selas."

I drank against my better judgement.

It was good. Sweet and strong, it warmed the back of my throat and left an afterglow that was either the wine itself or my Light responding to it; I did not care which.

"To five years," Thoron said, lifting his cup.

"To five years."

We drank.

"When you stood up that day," he said, watching the fires, "I thought you were mad."

"I was mad."

"Possibly. But you were right, too." He gestured out at the crowd. "Look at them, Selas."

I looked.

I saw Eol near the big fire, a cup in one hand, the other hand working the air as he described something to a circle of apprentices. He was demonstrating a hammer-technique. He did not need to demonstrate it. They had seen it a hundred times. He just wanted an excuse to talk about the forge, and they were letting him.

I saw Celestia on the far side of the hearth, sitting on a log between two of her trainees, each of whom had bruises from the morning's drill and was still mad at her about it, and all three of them were laughing.

I saw Mireth standing by the healing-tent door, where she had apparently been called away from the party by a small boy with a cut hand, and she was crouched down listening to him with the same unhurried serious attention she gave everyone and everything.

I saw a little girl I did not know the name of running in circles with another little girl while a third girl tried to catch them both.

I saw, at the edge of the light, Maethor, standing with his wife's arm threaded through his elbow. He was watching the dance and he was not smiling. But he was not leaving, either. He was simply standing. Maethor, who disagreed with me on nearly every tactical choice I had made for five years running, was here, at the hearth, on the night we finished the wall.

He turned his head slightly and caught my eye across the fire.

He did not smile. He did nod, once, very small.

I returned it.

Whatever we disagreed about, we were both still here. Both still Avari.

I touched the pouch at my belt. The acorn was warm against my fingers.

Thoron followed the small movement. Did not comment on it.

"Happy Five Years, Chief," he said instead.

"Happy Five Years, Thoron."

We drank again.

Beyond the wall, the forest was dark.

Beyond the forest, somewhere very far to the north, a place I had only ever read about was breeding things whose names I did not want to say out loud, on the chance that names here still had weight.

But that was a problem for tomorrow, or for the tomorrow after that, or for the tomorrow ten years from now. Tonight we had finished the wall.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[End of Chapter 8]​

 

[Afkter02]

The Slow Gain (9)

[Selas POV]​

The wall was finished in Year Eight of the Avari and promptly became too small.

Caldor's crews extended it three years later, and the new perimeter was too small by the time it closed. We built a third ring in Year Nineteen, this one set much further out, with allowance for gardens and orchards that were not yet planted and for houses that had not yet been built.

Inside the rings, the settlement tightened.

The crooked clusters of huts we had inherited from before the Sundering had, one by one, been replaced. Real houses went up in their place — framed, roofed, built to weather rain and cold and the slow subsidence of old ground. Some were wood. The newer ones, more and more of them, were stone. That was the real surprise of the second decade.

It started with a nudge.

Early in Year Seven, I had been watching the potters work their kilns and thinking about limestone. There were deposits south of the settlement, pale veins of chalky rock running through the clay beds.

I knew what those deposits could become. But knowing a thing and handing it to someone fully formed are two different acts, and the second one kills something that the first one doesn't.

So I didn't explain. I pointed.

"That white stone you keep clearing out of the clay pits," I said to two Lindar women who ran the southern kilns. "What happens if you heat it the way you heat clay?"

They looked at each other. Then at me. Then at the stone.

"We hadn't tried," the older one said.

"Try," I said. "And when whatever comes out of the kiln cools down, crush it to powder and mix it with water and sand. See what happens."

I left it at that.

Three weeks later they came back up from the pits, very dusty, very excited, and very certain they had found something.

The powder from the heated limestone, mixed with water and sand, had set. Hardened into something closer to rock than to clay, and it was still getting harder.

They brought a sample to me.

"Look at this," the older one said, unwrapping a cloth. Inside lay a fist-sized block, roughly rectangular. Smooth on one face where it had been poured flat against a board. Grainy on the other sides.

I set it down on the table very carefully.

They had done the work. I had pointed at a rock and asked a question. Everything between that question and this block — the kiln temperature, theite ratio, theite mixing, the curing time — that was theirs. Their hands, their instinct, their craft.

"This is a marvel," I said, and I meant it. "I am going to ask you both to train apprentices, to write down every step of what you have done, and to keep a great deal of it coming. We are going to build houses out of this."

They glowed.

I took to calling the powder cement and the hardened blocks stone — no special name.

That was the pattern I had learned to trust. Point at the right rock. Ask the right question. Then get out of the way.

By Year Twelve, half the new houses in the settlement were stone. By Year Twenty, almost all of them were.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Year 1120. Deep summer. The forge complex]

[Eol POV]​

The first bronze sword Eol ever made he snapped across his own knee, testing it.

The second one bent when the young warrior trying it out struck too hard against a stone. The third one held. The fourth was better. The fifth was almost a real weapon. By the sixth he was starting to understand what he was doing.

That was five years ago.

Now he stood at the head of a proper forge — not the pit he had started with, but a complex of six hearths under a long timber shed, with bellows worked by apprentices and quenching troughs large enough to dunk a body in.

Twenty-eight apprentices and journeymen answered to him. Five under-masters handled their own projects when he was not looking over their shoulders.

The Avari had bronze.

The transition had taken Eol fifteen Years of the Trees, and he was still a little shocked at himself for having managed it.

But today he was holding something else.

Not bronze. Not the good amber bronze he had gotten so comfortable with.

Iron.

A lump of iron, about the length of his hand, pulled from the forge that morning and hammered flat in three stages. It was ugly. It was full of slag and dark spots and he was not sure he could make a blade out of it without the blade shattering the first time someone swung it hard.

But the metal itself was iron, and it was not bog-iron spongework either — it was something denser, something that had held an edge during the test-scrape.

A beginning.

"Tavor."

His old apprentice, now a master in his own right, came over. Tavor had a short silver beard. He had been Eol's shadow for so long that he did not have to be told what was in the cloth before Eol unfolded it.

"How much?" Tavor asked.

"This one lump. That's all. The rest of the batch was useless."

"Chief will want to see it."

"Selas can't have it yet," Eol said, and heard his own voice go a little flat. "Tavor, understand me. This is not a weapon. This is an object I can show the Council, so they stop looking at me like I am holding them back. But it is not a sword. It is not even a knife worth carrying. It is one lump of iron in twenty Years of the Trees of work, and I have no idea when the next lump is coming, because the bog beds are almost gone."

"The bog beds?"

"Gone. A season more, maybe two. We have used them hard. I have been telling you this for three years, and you have not been listening."

Tavor had the good grace to look at his own boots.

"I know," Eol said, more gently. "I have been hoping too. I have been opening new pits on every hunch, and every hunch has given me less than the last one. There is no true iron bed within a day's walk of this settlement. I have known that for a long time. I have just not been saying it."

"So this —"

"So this is the last iron this settlement will see. Unless I can find more. Which I cannot."

He wrapped the ugly lump up and put it under his arm.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Same day. Selas's house. Evening]

[Selas POV]​

Eol set the cloth bundle down on the table between us and unfolded it.

"Is it —"

"Iron. Yes." He was not smiling. "One lump."

"How much time do we have?"

"A season of bog iron left. Perhaps two." He met my eyes. "After that, we are back to bronze only, and the tin is not here forever either. There is no mine within reach of this shore, Selas. There never has been. We made do with what we could find on the surface and in the swamps, and we have used that. There is no more hiding it."

I sat down slowly on the bench beside the table.

I had known this. He had told me before, in other words, years ago. I had shelved it.

"You have known this," Eol said. A flat observation. "You have known this for some time. You are not surprised."

"I am not surprised."

"Then say it, please." There was a quiet intensity in his face that I had not seen often. "Say what you have been thinking. To me, if to no one else."

I leaned my forearms on the table.

"We cannot stay here forever, Eol. This place is not going to sustain two thousand Avari for another hundred years. Maybe not for another fifty. The fish thin out. The soil is a little tireder every harvest. The game runs further every season. The ore is gone, and there is nothing else to replace it nearby."

Eol nodded. He looked almost relieved.

"The wagons," he said.

"Yes. The wagons."

"Talanor has thought about it for years. He knows."

"Talanor is too polite to ask me to my face. But yes. He knows."

We sat there together for a minute. Outside, somewhere in the settlement, someone was singing. The song had words now, ours, composed by a young man who had never heard any tongue but Avarin.

"I am not saying we leave tomorrow," I said.

"I am saying the wagons get built. The preparations get made. The stores get laid in. And when the day comes that we must go —"

"We go ready," said Eol.

"Yes."

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Years 1115–1130. Various seasons]​

We settled into rhythms.

During the day we worked — and I mean worked, the way I had been pushing the Avari to work since the Sundering, which to them still felt unseemly, but they did it, because they had become used to me.

Forges. Fields. Fisheries. Workshops. Building. Carpentry. Tanning. Weaving. Healers. Teachers.

In the evenings we rested.

The music was good now. Bards had invented themselves, a full generation of them, and they had proper instruments — reed pipes, hide drums, simple harps carved from single pieces of ashwood and strung with gut. Songs had verses, choruses, repeats.

Whole evenings were built around them. On festival nights, we would have competitions — two bards trading verses back and forth by a fire, the whole settlement voting with their hands on which one had been cleverer.

We had foot races by the lakeshore in the warm months. Swimming contests. Archery matches for teenagers and adults alike — I was firm that everyone, everyone, learned the bow.

The older ones grumbled but did it; the younger ones shot at targets for prizes and loved it.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Year 1128. A winter evening. The council-hearth]

[Selas POV]​

Here is the thing the histories would not say, because I was not going to say it in any hearing where the scribes could record it.

Twenty-five years into the project, I was not satisfied.

I sat in front of the hearth in my own house on a cold night in midwinter, looking at the latest forge-report Eol had handed me, and I let myself feel it for about ten minutes before I put it away.

We had achieved a great deal.

We had achieved far less than we should have.

In twenty-five Years of the Trees, a human civilisation would have remade itself three times over.

I had given them the conceptual shape of cement, of crop rotation, of writing, of proper tools, of a command structure, of a unified language. Each idea, once seeded, should have taken root and multiplied. Each one should have opened doors the Avari themselves then walked through without my pushing.

Some had. Those were not mine anymore. Those were theirs, and they were iterating on them past the point where I could have told them what came next.

But the rest —

The rest moved at elven speed. Which was to say, not at all, some days.

An idea I pushed in Year Three of the Avari would be mulled for a generation before anyone felt moved to act on it. Not because the Avari were stupid.

They were brilliant — sharper than any human community I had ever seen. They simply did not hurry. Eternity was their first assumption. The urgency I carried in my gut was a language they did not speak, and no matter how often I shouted in it, most of them did not learn it.

And the elders — the first-Awakened and the ones who had been adult at the Sundering —

Those, I had not moved at all.

Maethor was still in the Council. He had not softened a day in twenty-five years. When I proposed new drills for the adult bowmen, he abstained. When I pushed for actual spear training past the age of majority, he did not show up to the meeting.

They were not hostile. They were polite and immovable.

And they were right about enough things, in the language of their own experience, that I could not dismiss them.

Maethor's argument had never gone away: we refused the Valar's call because we refused to be ruled by fear. If we now ruled ourselves by fear of the same darkness Oromë had named, we had become what we refused to become. It was a clean argument.

I had never been able to refute it without, eventually, admitting that I was living in terror of something I had only read about in another life, and asking everyone around me to live in that terror with me.

I could not say that out loud. So I could not win the argument.

So the elders did not train.

So about a third of the adult Avari did not train beyond the bow, which they treated as a kind of genteel hobby.

So the only ones who trained seriously were the young. The ones who had grown up playing my games. The ones who did not remember a life before walls and watches. About six hundred of them, maybe eight hundred, if I counted the half-trained ones who turned out for drills sometimes when the mood struck them.

Eight hundred lightly-trained fighters. Out of two thousand people.

Against what was coming.

I put the forge-report away and stared at the fire for a while, and I did not let myself look at the drawer where the ugly lump of iron lay.

Be patient with them, I thought.

Be patient.

I was patient.

And I was not satisfied.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Year 1133. The healing-house. Morning]

[Lómiel POV]​

Lómiel was the best healer the Avari had produced after Mireth, and she was starting to think she was going to spend her entire eternal life setting dislocated shoulders on young men who did not know how to fall.

"Breathe in," she told the latest one.

He breathed in. He bit down on the padded leather bit between his teeth.

Crack.

He made a noise that was not a scream only because his pride would not let it be one. His shoulder went back into its socket with the satisfying dull pop that meant she had done it cleanly.

"Yes, healer."

"I mean it, Narvion. I will tell your mother."

He paled. "Please do not tell my mother."

"Then do not lift a bowstring for five days."

She packed poultice against the shoulder and wrapped the arm tight. Narvion, who had taken his shoulder out during a perfectly pointless wrestling bout with his best friend three hours ago, slunk out of the healing-house with the bearing of a man who knew he was going to be mocked by his peers for a week.

Lómiel washed her hands and sighed.

Mireth was at the bench along the far wall, sorting dried herbs into labelled clay jars, which was what Mireth did when she was waiting for the next thing to go wrong.

"That's the fourth this month," Lómiel said.

"Fifth. Galen last week, the one who fell out of the tree."

"Galen wasn't wrestling. He was being an idiot."

Lómiel leaned against the table, pressing a palm to her lower back. She had been on her feet since dawn. "Honestly, Mireth, if I have to set one more shoulder from boys being boys, I am going to start refusing."

"No you will not."

"I will."

"You absolutely will not."

"Fine."

Mireth continued sorting, serene and unmoved. "The sport is a good thing."

"The sport is going to break someone badly one of these days."

"Someone being broken badly is the whole reason Selas lets them do it." Mireth did not look up. "He wants them to learn how to lose without losing badly. He wants us to be the people who patch them up and send them back, so the next bruise is the lesson and not the last one they ever get."

Lómiel frowned at her.

"You're talking like him again."

"Mm."

"You've been talking like him more."

Mireth finally looked up. "Lómiel. We used to be a people who had never seen a cut that did not come from a thorn. Look at us now. Count the things you can do that our mothers could not do. Count the things I can do." A very small, very dry smile. "Selas is too hasty. Selas is too loud. But Selas is also the reason any of us know what we know."

"All right, all right."

"He should also find a wife."

Mireth shrugged, placid. "He should. He broods."

"He doesn't want a wife."

"He wants something he does not have. That is not the same as not wanting."

"He's still pining after —"

"Yes."

Lómiel let a silence pass. Then she picked at a thread on her sleeve.

"Some of the girls —"

"You know, right?"

"I deliver the children they will have someday. I know everything eventually." Another small smile, there and gone. "He is polite to them. He does not take advantage, and he does not mislead. He is a good man, Lómiel. He will not love a thing he cannot give his whole self to. And he cannot, yet."

"Because of her."

"Because of a great many things. Her only the smallest." Mireth set the last jar on the shelf and wiped her hands. "Stop trying to put a woman under his nose. When he is ready, he will notice someone on his own, and if you try to help, he will thank you by being twice as stubborn."

Lómiel, who had been deliberating for about six seasons on whether to put herself under Selas's nose and had been abandoning the idea and taking it up again all winter, said, "All right," in a slightly thinner voice than she meant to.

Mireth pretended not to notice.

That, Lómiel thought as she went back to her sorting, was typical of Mireth. She would notice everything and judge none of it and, eventually, let you come to your own conclusion, by which point you would feel that she had been very kind, even though what she had actually done was sit there and wait for you to stop being silly.

Mireth was the person Lómiel most wanted to be when she grew up.

She was never going to grow up that much.

She set down her cup and went to fetch the next patient.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[End of Chapter 9]​

 

[Afkter02]

First Blood (10)

[Year 1135 of the Trees. Year 30 of the Avari. Early spring]

[Selas POV]​

The runner reached me at the northern workshops before midday.

I could tell by his face, before he said anything at all.

"Chief —" he got out. He was a young Lindar named Thandor. One of my hunters, which meant he was one of the ones with proper training, and he did not come at a dead run unless there was reason.

"What have you found?"

"Dead things. In the forest. North." He was out of breath. I waited. "Not animals. Hunting party saw them. Cálros tried to go forward — one of them came at him. Swinging a club. Screamed and charged."

My stomach went cold.

"Alive?"

"Cálros put a spear through it before it reached him. He's fine. They all are."

"Where?"

"Half a league north of the Long Path. They brought the body."

I went.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—​

They laid the body inside the north gate because I would not let them bring it further in. It lay on the packed earth, on an old blanket, and it was ugly, and it was unmistakable.

I had read about orcs in a life I tried not to speak of. Nothing I had read had fully prepared me for the fact of one.

Thick body. Short legs. A jaw that went forward more than a jaw ought to. Dirty skin, a grey that might once have been another colour before generations of underground breeding got hold of it. Teeth meant for ripping. No armour. No cloth to speak of — a wrap of hide around the middle, another across one shoulder. The club beside it was a length of wood with a knob at the end, still caked with old dark matter I did not want to examine.

It did not have to have fangs. Its mouth was enough.

A crowd had gathered, the front ranks were silent. The back ranks were murmuring. A child had been sent away by its mother.

I circled the body once, slowly.

"It charged you?"

Cálros stepped forward. A Tattyar, one of my older scouts, a man I had trusted for fifteen years.

"Yes, Chief. We had seen tracks we did not know. Strange tracks. We were moving quietly. Then one came out of the brush maybe twenty paces from us. It saw us. It screamed. Like — like nothing I have ever heard. And then it came at us. Without pause. Without measuring us. Without trying to run or to call. Just came."

"How many did you see?"

"Scent and smoke told us there were more. We did not engage. We withdrew. I would guess —" he closed his eyes briefly, counting against memory. "A hundred. Possibly more. They have a camp. Not far from the north stream."

A hundred.

I did not let the number show on my face. I kept my expression steady. There were a hundred pairs of Avari eyes fixed on me, watching to see how I would look, and how I looked would be the first fact they would take home with them tonight.

So I looked calm.

"These creatures are called orcs," I said, loudly enough for the whole yard to hear. I used the Avarin word I had been waiting thirty years to use, Úrkai. "Oromë warned us. The Valar warned us. The Sundering cost us friends and kin because we refused to follow gods on the promise of this darkness. And now the darkness has come and found us. And this one —"

I nudged the body's arm with the side of my boot.

"This one came out of the trees and charged an elf it had never seen. Without asking. Without knowing anything about us except that we were there, and it wanted us dead."

The murmur that ran through the crowd now was different. Harder.

"They are not going away," I said. "They were bred not to go away. They were bred by something to be exactly this." I looked at the faces. I let them see that I knew what I was saying. "What they are and where they come from is a story for another night. What they do is what we must answer today. And we will answer."

I turned to Cálros.

"Take ten scouts. Find their camp. Count them precisely. And do not be seen."

He went.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Two nights later. The Council hall]​

The scouts came back with a picture I had feared.

Not twenty orcs. Not twenty-five, the way I had half-hoped — the small exploratory band I might have disposed of and pretended the problem was over.

Eighty-three, said Cálros. Possibly ninety. They have at least three fires going at any time. They have no walls, no earthworks, no discipline I could see. Some of them are female. They have children.

"Children?"

"Young. Small versions of themselves."

"Then they breed here."

The Council hall was packed that night. Every clan head. Every senior craftsman. Every member of the Advisory Council. The air was thick.

"Eighty-three in one camp," Thoron said, slowly. "What does that mean?"

"It means one of two things," I said. "It means either that there is a band of orcs loose in the country that has grown to the size of a village, by themselves, and we missed it — which I doubt, because the scouts patrol. Or it means they were put here. Sent. Someone somewhere is pushing small groups down into these lands to probe, and this is the first we have caught at it."

"Someone," said Maethor, from his usual seat along the wall.

"Someone in the north."

He held my gaze a long moment. Then inclined his head, very slightly, and did not press.

"What do you propose?" Thoron asked.

"I propose that we kill them."

A short silence.

"All of them?" someone asked. A Lindar elder whose name was Amnion. "The females and the small ones."

"All of them."

The silence got longer.

"Listen to me," I said, and I kept my voice level, and I did not raise it because I did not need to raise it. "These are not people. I do not say this easily. I say it because I have been thinking about it all day, and I have looked at what was brought back to the north gate, and I have looked at the scouts' description of what was bred in that camp. These are not people. They are made. They were made to harm us, and they were made quickly, and if a patrol of them comes on a gatherer from our western fields tomorrow, that gatherer will not come home, and her daughter will not know why, and her son will grow up hating us for failing to keep his mother safe."

I let the image stand.

"If we let this camp alone, it becomes two camps. Those two become four. In a year there will be enough of them in these forests to make taking the gatherers the easy part. In two years, the walls. In five years —" I glanced at Cálros, whose face was stone. "I do not need to finish the sentence."

"They have done us no harm yet —" Amnion began.

"One of them charged one of my scouts with a club last week. If Cálros had stumbled, he would be dead, and I would be speaking to his wife."

Amnion did not reply.

"We go tomorrow night," I said. "Two hundred of our best. Bows to start. Spears to finish. Encirclement. I will lead."

"You will lead?"

That was Celestia. She had been silent until now.

"Yes."

"You have two thousand people whose lives rest on you."

"Which is why I need to know — personally, not from report — whether the training I have put our people through for thirty years actually produces warriors when the blood starts flowing. If I send them without going, I do not know. I have to know."

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Three nights later. The orc camp]​

We moved on them in the dark before the silver hour.

Three fires. A rough crescent of low shelters made of branch and hide. No sentries worth the name — two shapes walking the perimeter without rhythm or attention, one of them asleep against a tree when we crept past.

We got within forty paces on three sides before the wind shifted.

It shifted toward them. Their noses were better than I had dared hope they would be worse. One of the fire-side ones lifted its head, snuffled, howled — a sound like a large dog trying to speak a language it had not been given — and then the whole camp was awake.

They came out of their shelters. They grabbed clubs and spears, the few they had.

They charged.

"Draw," I said, without raising my voice. Beside me the runner repeated it and the word ran along our line. "Loose."

The first volley took eleven of them in mid-run.

"Again."

Another volley. This time the air was full of arrows, and the fire-lit bodies of the orcs were lit up as targets. Some went down with arrows in them. Some came on with arrows in them, because pain didn't seem to register in them.

"Again."

Another volley. Now they were close. Maybe eight paces.

"Spears."

Our front rank dropped their bows and came forward with bronze on wood.

The first orc reached us. Two spears went through its belly. The third twisted in and snapped under the weight of the thing falling forward. The team behind closed the gap.

It was not elegant. The orcs fought the way dogs fight — furious, unmeasured, unafraid of dying. They just kept coming until they were on the ground.

One got inside a spear-line and hit a young Lindar called Nethrin across the jaw with the bone-cracked head of a club. Nethrin went down. Two other Avari closed on the orc with short blades and finished it before it could lift the club again.

Another got past the second rank and reached me personally. It came in low, screaming, eyes yellow in the firelight.

I put an arrow through its eye at six paces.

It is not a moment I like to think about. It took me years to understand what I felt about first kill, which is to say, I felt almost nothing at the time, and I have felt a great deal since.

The arrow flew true.

The orc went down.

The last of them — perhaps a dozen, perhaps less — realised, all at once, that they were losing. It was the first moment in the fight when anything among them seemed capable of thought. A knot of them broke for the treeline.

"Let them pass," I called, because the encirclement on that side had been thinner, and two of them got through.

My captains did not like it. I did not like it. But three of our warriors going down to chase two orcs into the dark was not a trade I would make.

We finished the rest.

When the last orc fell, the camp was silent. My people were silent.

The camp was full of bodies.

We had fifteen wounded. Most superficial. Nethrin's jaw was broken — the first serious wound.

No Avari was dead.

I stood in the middle of it with my bow in one hand and my breath coming unsteady, and something in my chest that had been held tight for thirty years went a little loose, and I opened my mouth and shouted.

"Avari!"

It was an unshaped sound. A roar. It came out of me without planning.

The warriors around me picked it up. Then the ones beyond. The shout ran through the camp like fire through dry grass, two hundred throats.

We had done it.

We had stood in a line against the dark, and the dark had broken first.

This is the beginning, I thought.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Returning. The long path south]​

We walked the bodies of the enemy into a pile. I set it on fire myself. I did not want to leave them in the forest.

As the fire caught, Cálros came to me with something in his hand.

"Chief."

It was a scrap of fabric. Faded and torn. Once, it had been the colour of a pale leaf, and it had been woven with a small patterned border along its edge — a zig-zag of tiny blue and silver stitches.

My stomach turned.

It was Quendian weave.

And it had ended up, trampled into the dirt, in an orc camp that was not supposed to have known we existed until this week.

"They have been closer than we thought," Cálros said quietly. "For longer."

I folded the scrap up.

"Do not tell the warriors," I said. "Not tonight. Let them have their triumph. Let them ride home as conquerors. I will tell the Council tomorrow."

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[The gate. Late night]​

The return was a festival.

Word ran through the walls ahead of us. By the time we reached the gate, every Avari in the settlement was awake, and every Avari lined the inside of the path. Bards had invented a victory song in the time it had taken us to walk home. It was not a good song. They would fix it in the morning.

Families pulled their fighters from the line and wept over them. Nethrin's mother set about his broken jaw like it was personal insult. Morin's sister beat his shoulder lightly for having gotten hit at all.

I let myself be embraced, and congratulated, and pulled into the press.

I let myself smile.

But I had a folded piece of cloth in my pouch that I had not shown anyone, and I would show it tomorrow, in a much quieter room, and the smiles would stop when I did.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[End of Chapter 10]​

 

[Afkter02]

The Sundering (5)

[Year 1105 of the Trees. Summer]

[Cuiviénen. The gathering ground]

[Elwë POV]​

He had lived in a dream for three years, and now he had come home, and home looked small.

Elwë had not expected that. Of all the things he had steeled himself against on the journey back, the old habits of thought that might reassert themselves, the ordinary human things like his mother's voice and his little brothers and the smell of wet pine after rain, he had not steeled himself against the simple physical fact that Cuiviénen would look small after Valinor.

But it did.

The huts were low. The trees, which he had always thought large, were ordinary. The lake, which had been the whole of the sky in his childhood, was a body of water. A beautiful one. But a body of water.

In Valinor the light itself had been another substance. The mingling of the Two Trees had not merely illuminated a landscape, it had done something to the air.

He stood now beside Ingwë and Finwë at the water's edge, his oldest friends, and felt in both of them the same vertigo he felt in himself. None of them were quite the men who had stepped across to Valinor three years ago.

And his family was looking at him.

His father, Enel, standing proud and shining with anticipation. His mother with both hands pressed over her mouth. Olwë white-faced. Tirion, quiet as always, watching him the way Tirion watched everything.

And Selas.

Selas, last of them, standing a little apart from the family, on a small rise, his silver hair pulled back, his face unreadable.

Selas was looking at him.

And Selas was the only one of them who did not look awed.

Something is wrong with him, thought Elwë, and then he stopped, because he had heard his own thought and did not like the shape of it. Something is wrong with him because he is not dazzled, because he is not smiling, because he has not run forward to hear.

He pushed the thought away. It was his duty now. Valinor was real and good and the offer was real and good, and he had come home to tell his people so, and he was going to do his duty.

Forgive me, Selas, he thought, and stepped forward to speak.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Selas POV]​

Three years.

Three years they had been gone, and then one ordinary afternoon the shore that had been empty was not empty. Four figures stood on the sand, three elves and the tall god on the impossible horse behind them.

The horn sounded again.

Every elf in the settlement was on the shore within minutes. I had moved more slowly than most. I had wanted to see them before I was close enough to hear them.

I positioned myself on the small rise where clan elders traditionally stood, close enough to the speakers that I could be seen, far enough from my family that I could move. Tirion appeared at my left shoulder without being asked. Olwë took my right.

Along the rise, in their proper places, stood our parents.

And Elwë.

My brother.

My brother had changed.

It was not obvious at first glance, which was itself the proof. His hair and his bearing and his height were what they had always been. But there was a stillness to him now that had not been there before he left, the stillness of a man who has been handled, who has been worked on.

He caught my eye across the rise. For a second, less than a second, something in his face flickered, some old familiar thing behind the new composure, looking out through it like someone who has found himself at the wrong window.

Then it was gone, and the new composure was back in its place, and he was stepping forward to speak.

Ingwë spoke first, beautifully. Finwë followed, quieter but sure. They described a land where light was its own weather, where music filled the air the way warmth fills a hut in winter, where the Valar themselves walked in hills that had never known a cold season. They described the Two Trees, Telperion of the silver hour and Laurelin of the gold.

{Image: The Two Trees — Telperion and Laurelin}​

Then Elwë.

My brother's voice was quieter than Ingwë's, but it carried farther. It had always done that. It was why the younger Nelyar imitated the way he walked.

"I have seen our future," he said.

"Peace without end. Growth without ceiling. Knowledge beside which everything we have learned here will seem like children's syllables." He paused. His eyes swept the crowd, and each of them carried that presence now, the slight afterlight of Valinor behind them. "The Valar offer us a home where we will not know fear or want or dark again. They ask only that we trust them."

Around me, the crowd was slackening at the faces, the way water goes slack when it begins to pool.

Oromë, behind and above the three, said nothing. He did not need to. His Light lay over the shore like warm fog.

I pulled my own Light tighter. The warm fog receded from my mind.

I looked around.

Nobody else was doing what I was doing. Nobody else could. The Light of the Vala was resting on every skull on that shore, quiet and enormous and kind, and I could see, actually see, looking from face to face, the softening in each of them.

It was not evil. It was a shepherd with his hand on his flock. The hand was warm. The flock was being shepherded toward something that would, from the shepherd's point of view, save their lives.

It was still a hand on a flock.

I looked at the crowd and did math I did not want to do.

Maybe a third were committed to the Journey. The Minyar, almost to an elf. A good block of Tattyar. Some Lindar, the younger ones, the ones who had never stood at the shore with Oromë's Light in their teeth four years ago and had only heard about it.

Another third were wavering.

And the final third were people I knew. Novë's parents. Archean's father, Lenwë, a good man I had sometimes hunted with. Eol's master, the smith who had let his own children come to my games.

Two Lindar families whose older sons had fought in my capture-the-pole teams for years. They were standing together in a loose knot. Not one of them had moved toward the speakers.

They were afraid. I could see it, not of staying but of being swept away by something they could not name.

This was the moment.

This was the moment, and if I let it pass, it would pass, and the crowd would tip on one of a dozen other moments in the next hour, and I would lose them.

I stepped off the rise.

Down between the leaders and the crowd, into the empty space nobody was supposed to stand in.

I did not look at my father. I did not look at my brother. I could not. If I looked at them, I was not going to be able to do this.

I drew a breath deep enough that my ribs complained, and I said, clearly and without shouting:

"I refuse."

The whole shore stopped.

The three emissaries looked as though someone had slapped them gently. My father's face froze halfway through the smile it had been wearing. My mother's hands came up to her mouth. Elwë's eyes widened, and that old flicker moved behind them again, the thing from the window, looking out at me.

Tirion, on the rise behind me, did not look surprised. He had known.

I raised my voice.

"I REFUSE."

The word hit the crowd the way a stone hits water. The silence that followed was not a hush, it was an event. It was everyone on that shore simultaneously running the same calculation, this is a child of Enel, this is Selas, this is the fourth son, this is, and finding themselves unable to complete it.

Elwë's voice came first, cracking in a way it never cracked. "Brother. Explain yourself."

I met his eyes.

Forgive me, I thought back.

I breathed in.

"I am Selas," I said. "Fourth son of Enel and Enelyë, of the Nelyar."

I let the breath out.

"And I refuse to follow the Vala Oromë to Aman. I refuse to bend my will to the Valar."

A single gasp from the crowd. Then a hundred.

"We are the children of Eru Ilúvatar!" My voice had lifted without my deciding to lift it. "Made by his will, each of us with a mind and with freedom! It is our right to live by our own choices! To walk our own paths on these lands! Not to be taken up and carried to a realm we have never seen, to live by the rulings of powers who did not make us!"

Behind me, without my asking, the lake began to churn. Wind came up off the water and pulled at my hair.

"I was born here," I said, and now I was not raising my voice, I was using it. "This is my home."

The wind pulled harder. Someone in the crowd cried out.

"And I will not leave my home because the Valar have decided. That we should trade our birthright for their safety."

My voice almost broke.

"I will make my own fate. I will defend my own home. I choose freedom."

I bowed to the elders.

"I have spoken."

And I turned and walked.

Several deliberate paces along the shore, toward the settlement. Away from the speakers. Away from my family. Away from the gathered elves.

I stopped.

The wind died. The lake smoothed. And the silence that followed was the silence of a world that has just watched something happen and does not yet know what to do about it.

I could hear my own heart beating. I could hear it in my ears, in my teeth, in the roof of my mouth. I had not known it was possible to hear your own heart that clearly. I lifted my chin, because if I was going to be looked at like this, I was going to be looked at standing up straight.

Come on, I thought. Somebody, anybody. Do not let me stand here alone.

The silence went on.

And on.

And on.

And then a movement.

A Lindar man stepped out of the crowd. Grim-faced. His wife behind him, carrying a small child in each arm. A third clinging to his leg. He handed the older child off to his wife and walked three steps forward and stopped, standing between me and the speakers.

He looked at the lake for a long moment. At the reflection of the stars on the water. At the place where, somewhere beneath him, the very first elves had opened their eyes.

He nodded to himself.

Then he and his family walked across the sand and took up a position just behind and to my left.

The first one.

A second family came. Lindar again. They took the position behind my right shoulder.

Then a third. Then a fourth.

Then a Tattyar stepped out, a young smith, Eol's cousin, the soot not quite washed from his forearms. He did not look at the elders at all. He bowed to the lake. Then he came and stood.

Behind me I heard Eol's voice say something I did not catch.

A moment later Eol himself walked past me into the space behind. He did not meet my eyes as he passed. He was not sure yet. He was choosing with his feet while his mind was still arguing. But he had walked.

Novë did not come.

He stood with his parents on the far side of the shore, arm around Miriël, his whole family in the block of Lindar who had chosen the Journey. Our eyes met across the sand. He did not raise a hand. He did not have to. The look on his face was apology enough.

I gave him a small nod.

He nodded back, fast, and looked away.

Archean did not come either.

Lenwë, his father, was committed to the Journey. His mother. Two of his sisters. Archean was the eldest son of a family that was leaving, and Archean, of all the elves I knew, was not the kind of man who broke from his family.

Something in my chest went very still as he went. Archean had been my quietest, steadiest ally for four years. The one I would have put at my left shoulder in any fight that mattered.

He had chosen his family. That was an honest choice. That was the kind of choice I wanted the Avari to be capable of making, even when the direction of it hurt me personally.

I made myself look at the next face in the line.

Mireth came alone. Her family had decided otherwise. She walked across the sand with her small pouch of herbs on her belt, and she stopped beside me, and she said, very quietly, so only I could hear: "I hope you are worth this."

"I hope so too."

She took her place.

They kept coming. Not all at once. In a slow, steady trickle that the elders on the rise could not stop, because there was nothing to stop.

When the flow slowed and then, finally, stopped, I did not dare turn to count. I did not want to know yet. But I felt the weight of them behind me the way you feel the weight of a crowd in a room even with your eyes closed.

Many. More than the stories had said there would be.

The Minyar had not moved, not one of them.

About half the Tattyar, just as the legend had it.

And my own people, the Lindar, not a third but near half. Near half. Far more than should have been standing there, far more than version of the story I remembered.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—​

Oromë looked across the divided crowd. He looked at the elders. He looked, last, at me.

I held his eyes. I had compressed my Light as tight as I could. I was shaking very slightly, with adrenaline, with the aftermath of what I had just done, with the weight behind me. But I held his eyes.

His face did not change.

After a moment, he spoke, not to me, but to the ones behind me.

"You are certain of this choice?"

I answered before anyone else could.

"Yes," I said. My voice was hoarser than I had meant it to be. "We are certain. We choose our own path. We will walk it by our own will."

Oromë watched me a heartbeat longer. Then he inclined his head, not much, not a bow, but an acknowledgment.

"Very well," he said. "Then you shall be called Avari."

The Refusers.

He turned toward the ones remaining on the shore, and his voice changed, warmer, louder, something almost close to joy.

"And you who have chosen, you are Eldar, the People of the Stars. A long road lies before us. Three days, and we begin. Gather what you need. Make your farewells."

He and the mount were gone again.

The shore broke into motion.

The Eldar scattered toward their huts, already beginning the great sorting, and the Avari, stood where they were, because nobody yet had told them what to do.

I turned to face them for the first time since my speech.

They were looking at me like men looking at a bridge they had just finished crossing and were not sure was going to hold.

I made my voice as calm as I could.

"Go home. Secure what is yours. In the confusion, do not let your belongings be taken up by accident or on purpose. Give the Eldar nothing that is not freely and knowingly given. Their Valar will provide for them. We will provide for ourselves."

"Do not be afraid of hardship. We will face it together."

They dispersed slowly, but they dispersed.

I let out a breath I had not realized I had been holding for about fifteen minutes.

Then I turned to face my family.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—​

Mother was weeping.

Father and Elwë were standing very still. Father looked as if someone had struck him in the chest with a piece of wood.

Olwë just looked lost.

And Tirion, a little apart from the others, had tears running down his face.

"Father. Mother. Brothers." My voice came out smaller than it had any right to be after the speech I had just given. "I love you. All of you."

I swallowed.

"I am staying."

No one spoke.

"I need to walk my own path. I hope you can forgive me."

The silence held for one more heartbeat.

Then my mother broke.

She flung herself against me and gripped me so hard that it hurt, and the sobbing that came out of her was the sobbing of a woman who has just been asked to leave a piece of herself behind on a shore. "I love you, I love you, how will you, how will you live, my son, how will you manage without —"

That broke the others.

Olwë was against my shoulder before I registered him moving. Elwë's hand closed on the back of my neck, hard, almost rough, and then his forehead was against mine, and he was saying something through his teeth that I do not think I was meant to hear.

"You're a fool, Selas. A brave, stubborn fool."

"I know," I whispered back.

Father was the last. He stood for one more heartbeat outside the knot of us, breathing hard through his nose, and then he stepped forward and wrapped all of us in his arms at once, as he had not done since we were very small.

I could feel him shaking.

"Are you certain?" Mother said into my shoulder. "Truly certain, my son?"

"Yes."

"Truly?"

"Yes, Mother."

She held me harder.

When at last they pulled apart enough that I could breathe, I reached into my belt and drew out the small stone knife I had made months before.

"What is that?" Father asked, hoarsely.

"Something I made."

I lifted a long lock of my own silver hair, and I poured my Light into it, slowly and deliberately, the way I had learned in the cove over the course of years. I poured until the hair held the Light, until the strand became a cord of soft silver fire that would not fray and not dull.

I cut it free.

They watched, wide-eyed.

I went to my mother first. Took her wrist. Wound the glowing strand around it, once, twice, and tied it. The hair settled against her skin and set as a bracelet, silver and faintly luminous.

"I have filled it with my Light," I said, and my voice was not steady anymore. "It will not fade. It will not break. Let it remind you of me. Let it give you a little light in the dark, Mother."

She wept harder and touched it with one finger as if she could not quite believe it.

I did the same for each of them. Father, whose hand closed over mine while I was tying his bracelet. Elwë, whose face twisted and stilled and twisted again, and who did not speak at all. Tirion, who could not stop crying. Olwë, who held my forearm with both his hands as I tied his, and who whispered, "Goodbye, brother," when I was done, so quietly I almost did not catch it.

By the time I was finished, even my father was crying.

"One more thing," I said. My throat was raw. "I learned something, on the far shore. I learned how to hold my Light inside, instead of letting it burn out of me. And when I hold it for long enough, there is more of it."

I met their eyes.

"I don't know if it will help you, where you are going. It might. Try it sometime, if you remember. Start with breathing. Close yourself in. Hold until you cannot. Do it again the next night. It grows."

Father nodded once. Slowly.

"Enough," he said. His voice was breaking, but he was holding the break off by force of will, because he was Enel, and Enel did not let himself come apart in front of his children unless he had chosen to. "Enough, my son. Enough of gifts. We have a journey to prepare for. And you…"

"We will not forget you, Selas."

"I will not forget you — never. I swear it."

And then we separated, and they turned toward their hut, and I turned toward the place where the Avari, the phrase was strange in my mouth, were waiting for me to tell them what came next.

I got five steps.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—​

"Selas!"

I knew the voice before I had fully turned.

Ilvëa.

She came down the path at a run, gold hair streaming behind her like something in a wind that had nothing to do with weather. She stopped three paces from me. Her chest was heaving. Her eyes were wide and too bright and she was absolutely not going to let herself cry, and she was absolutely going to cry anyway.

"You really did it," she said.

"Yes."

She took the word like a small blow, swayed almost, and caught herself.

"I thought…" Her voice broke. She tried again. "I hoped, maybe, when the moment came, you would —"

"I wouldn't."

"No." She almost laughed, a wet and terrible sound. "No, I knew that. I knew it. I just…"

She stopped talking. She could not find the end of the sentence.

I stepped closer.

"Ilvëa."

"My parents are going." The words came out fast, tumbling over each other. "They've decided. They told me this morning. I can't, I can't do what you did, Selas. I am not, I can't —"

"I know."

"I am not brave like you."

"You are braver than I am about more things than you know."

She shook her head. Tears fell. She did not brush them away.

"Ilvëa." I kept my voice low. "Listen to me. Choosing your family is not cowardice. Going with the people who raised you is not weakness. I want you to understand that. I will not ever hold it against you. I mean that."

"You make it sound…"

"Simple?"

"Yes."

"It isn't," I said. "It just is."

We stood close enough that I could feel the warmth of her Light. Her control of it was still young and it was flaring, unsteady, the way a candle flares when a hand closes around it. She had not yet fully learned to hold it at a moment like this.

Neither had I, I realized. My own Light was not perfectly held either. Not now.

I reached into my belt for the stone knife again. My hands were not steady.

I lifted a second lock of my hair, shorter, just what I had, and poured Light into it as I had with my family. Then I cut it free.

"Give me your hand."

She gave it. Her fingers were cold.

I wound the glowing silver around her wrist.

"For your memory of me," I said. "So that on a road far from here, on some night in a land I will never see, you will still have a piece of my Light with you."

She looked at the bracelet. Her face did something I did not know how to read.

Then, without warning, she seized the stone knife out of my hand.

She cut a long lock from her own gold hair. Her hand was much steadier doing it than mine had been. She filled it with her own Light, which I had taught her how to do on a rock under a sky not far from here, and she handed the glowing strand to me.

"Tie it."

"Ilvëa —"

"Tie it, Selas."

I tied it around my wrist. Gold fire against pale skin.

Her hand stayed there over mine for a breath longer than was strictly necessary. Her thumb pressed once, gently, against the bracelet.

"Goodbye, Selas."

"Goodbye, Ilvëa."

She turned and ran, fast, toward the fires and her parents and the long road west. Her gold hair caught starlight one last time at the top of the rise, and then she was over it and gone.

I stood where I was for a very long time.

The lake made small sounds against the stones. The stars did nothing, as usual. The bracelet at my wrist was warm.

I have chosen, I thought. And she has chosen. And each of us was honest. And there is a road between us now that neither of us can walk.

I lifted my wrist and pressed the lock of her hair briefly against my mouth.

Then I turned and went to my people.

{Image: Silver-hair bracelet on wrist}

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[End of Chapter 5]​

---

Events​

The Great Journey — The long westward migration of the Eldar from Cuiviénen to Aman. Begins three days after this chapter's events.

The Sundering — The moment on this shore, in Year 1105 of the Trees, when the Quendi split into Eldar and Avari. The oldest and sharpest break in elven history. Everything that follows, on both sides of the Great Sea, begins here.

 

[Afkter02]

The Bitter Decision (11)

[Weeks later. Through the spring of Year 30]

[Selas POV]​

The orcs kept coming.

Not in the same way. Not the same careless little band of a hundred, wandering south as if they had nowhere to be. After the first camp, the shape of it changed.

Two weeks after the first fight, a second band was spotted moving in from the north-west. Larger.

Around a hundred and thirty this time, and they moved as if someone were moving them — in a rough column, with a rough vanguard, and something that might have been orders being passed by noises I could not interpret. They had traded clubs for spears on half of the bodies we counted. A few even had something that looked like leather bound with sinew across the chest.

We met them three leagues from the wall. Same encirclement. Same discipline. Heavier fight, this time — they broke our first rank and we had to reset, and we lost two of our own.

Lost. In the sense that mattered. A young Lindar bowman called Aeglin, who had come up through the drills as a child. A Tattyar archer called Durel. Twenty-one wounded. We burned the bodies on the field, as before.

I brought Aeglin and Durel home on a wagon.

I delivered Aeglin to his mother myself. She did not scream. She took his hand. She sat beside the wagon for an hour without speaking. When I tried to say the sort of things a commander says, she shook her head once, slowly, and I understood that I was to stop.

We buried them outside the wall under two piles of stones. It was the first time the Avari had had to do this. Nobody knew the words. I did not know the words. In the end we stood around the graves in silence, and someone — a young bard — began a wordless song, and we all joined it, and that was the funeral.

That was the first one.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—​

Three weeks later: another band. Two hundred, maybe slightly more. This one we ambushed on the march. We lost one. They lost all of them.

Two and a half weeks after that: another. Three hundred and fifty. We lost six. They lost every one of themselves, and we chased stragglers for half a day.

Six Avari dead in a season.

Six graves added to the row outside the north gate.

Six names added to the book Dirmal had started keeping two months before. He had called it, in neat Avarin: Those Who Stood. I had read the first entries and been unable to look at it for three days.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Year 1135. Mid-spring. A night of cloud]

[Angrod POV]​

Angrod was afraid tonight.

The cloud had rolled in out of the north in the late afternoon, thick and low, and by the time the silver hour should have come there was no silver to be had.

The wall was black against a black sky, and the torches along the watch-walk were the only lights, and they flickered because the wind off the lake had turned cold and rough.

Angrod walked his section with his bow across his back and his spear in his hand, and he did not like the wind, and he did not like the silence below him.

Because there was a silence below him. He could feel it.

He stopped.

He listened.

Somewhere under the treeline, something had stopped moving when he stopped moving. He could feel the shape of that stopping even though he could not hear anything.

He raised his spear. He turned his head, slow, and caught the eye of Thandor two towers down, and Thandor saw his posture, and Thandor picked up the horn at his belt.

Thandor blew it.

One long note. The settlement below began to stir.

And then, as if the note had been the signal they were waiting for, the forest came alive.

Gods.

There were hundreds of them in the treeline. He had not seen them. The dark and the cloud had hidden them. They must have moved into position through the whole afternoon, in ones and twos, each slipping under the trees and waiting.

Five hundred. That was his first fast count. Five hundred, at least, at the first ring of torchlight.

He dropped the spear and reached for the horn on his own belt.

He blew the long three-note call. Attack. Full force.

Below him the bell began to ring.

And the orcs came at the wall.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Selas POV]​

I was out of bed before the bell had finished its first pull.

By the time I reached the wall I was armed, and half the watch had beaten me to their posts, and Angrod's horn was still sounding, and Thandor's from further along, and the Avari were streaming up onto the rampart in organized groups the way we had drilled for twenty years without believing we would ever actually have to.

Five hundred orcs.

Five hundred.

It was the largest attack by an order of magnitude. Larger than any prior engagement combined. And they were throwing themselves at the wall with ladders. Crude ones, half-rotted already, but ladders, which meant someone had taught them what a wall was for.

"Archers!" I called down the line. "Loose at will! Do not wait for a mark!"

The air filled with arrows. They were not as accurate as our archers could be in daylight, on the range, with still targets. They were accurate enough. The first ranks of orcs below the wall went down in a dozen places at once.

But the ranks behind them stepped over the ones in front, and kept coming.

"Spears to the breach!" I called — the first ladder had reached the top of the eastern stretch, and one orc was already coming up. "Do not let them over! The moment one crosses, three more come with him!"

A young Tattyar whose name was — damn it, his name was Voron — put his spear through the orc coming up the first ladder and kicked the ladder back into the crowd below. The ladder fell. The orc at the top fell with it, and the ladder hit two of its kind on the way down.

Further along, two ladders had gone up at once, and for a moment I thought the section would break.

Then Celestia's voice came across the noise, sharp and clear, and four of her drill-circle were at the ladders together, and the ladders went over. The men on them went over with them, and I breathed out for the first time since the bell had rung.

Behind the spears, the archers were still loosing. Behind the archers, another layer of archers — women, mostly and two of Celestia's most reliable shots — stood on the second-line catwalk and picked off anything that had a foot on the wall. Not a single orc made it up into the settlement.

But they kept coming.

I do not know how long it lasted. An hour. Two.

At some point there was a lull. The orcs pulled back into the dark. The archers did not stop. We kept loosing into the treeline until Angrod on the next tower shouted for us to hold.

"Hold! I can't see them!"

The wind had shifted. The cloud was thinning. The next wave came — but weaker. Something had changed in them. Something in the press of their movement had slackened.

We broke the second wave at the foot of the wall.

The third wave never fully formed. They were still coming at us, but in knots now — groups. Not the solid front of the first hour.

Then — slowly, grudgingly, as the sky in the east began to pale to a thin grey — they broke.

We kept loosing until they were out of range.

Then we stopped.

And the silence came down.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—​

The dead orcs at the foot of the wall and on the ground beyond were — I did not have to count. Angrod came up to the walk beside me, blood on one sleeve and a long cut along his jaw, and said, "About four hundred of them on the ground. Maybe more in the brush."

"How many did they start with?"

"Five hundred. I counted twice during the second wave. Maybe a few more. Not fewer."

"And us?"

He looked down. Briefly. Then back up.

"Five dead."

The number hit before the meaning did. Then the meaning arrived, and something in my chest dropped like a stone into dark water.

"Thirty wounded. Ten of those badly. Mireth is already working. The healing-house is full."

"Names."

He told me the names. I wrote none of them down. I would not forget them. I did not know yet whose parents were which, and which were young, and which were married. I would learn all of it in the next day, from the people who came to me to tell me.

I put my hand on the rampart to steady myself for a moment, and then I straightened, because five Avari were dead and I did not have the right to fold in front of the living ones.

"Scouts," I said. "At first real light. Follow them. Do not engage. I want to know where they have gone and what is behind them."

"Chief."

"Go."

He went.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Three days later. The Council hall]​

The report was what I had been expecting and the thing I had been hoping was not true.

Angrod and two other scouts had tracked the retreating orcs north through the forest and then, from the lip of a ridge, had lain on their bellies in the grass and looked out over the valley on the far side of the lake.

What they had seen had driven Angrod back to me at a run that had taken him two days and had aged him in the face.

He stood in front of the Council in the hall, and he spoke without any of the flourishes he usually allowed himself.

"Across the northern shore of Cuiviénen, there is an army."

Silence.

"How large?"

"I do not know precisely. More than I could count. More than I could estimate. More than a thousand. Several times more than a thousand. Perhaps three thousand. Perhaps many more than that. They are spread across a front I could not see the end of, and they have —" he hesitated. "They have camps. They are not passing through. They are gathered. They are being held in place."

"Are they moving south?" Thoron asked.

"Not yet. But they are forming up. I would guess — two moons. Three at the outside. Whatever stopped them from coming against us all at once is holding them together on the other side of the lake, but it will not hold forever. When the order comes, it comes."

Cálros sat down.

The Council did not speak for a long time.

I let it not speak. I let them understand, each in their own way, the shape of what we had just heard.

When I did speak, I spoke quietly, because quiet words in a quiet room did more than loud ones in that moment.

"We cannot hold this place against three thousand orcs. Or five thousand. Or ten. The wall will not hold them if they come all at once. The attack four nights ago was not an attack. It was a probe."

I let the word sit.

"I am calling, now, before this Council, for the evacuation of Cuiviénen."

A sound went up that was not a shout. It was a hundred people drawing breath at the same time, very quickly, and it was one of the worst sounds I have ever heard.

"Selas —" That was Amnion. His voice was shaking. "This is our home."

"Yes."

"We were born here."

"Yes."

"You cannot —"

"I can." I looked at him. I was steady. "I can because I have to. Amnion, I will say this once. If we stay, we die. All of us. The children you love. The grandchildren you have not yet seen. Everyone."

"We can fight —"

"We are forty fighters in every hundred souls, and we have bronze and a wall, and they have numbers," I looked around the room. "I am not afraid to fight them. I have fought them. I will fight them again. But I will not stand on top of a wall watching my people be killed in front of me because I was too proud to tell them we had to go."

I turned to Maethor.

All these years I had been waiting to see what Maethor would do in this particular moment.

He was silent for a long time.

At last he stood up.

"I have spent tens years of the Trees arguing with this Chief," he said. "I have said, in this hall and elsewhere, that he ruled by fear of a darkness that might never come. That he was making of our children what we refused to become when we refused Oromë."

He did not look at me. He looked, instead, at the graves outside the hall, where the five we had buried three days ago lay under fresh stones.

"I was wrong."

The silence in the hall now was of a different kind.

"I do not say this easily, and I will not say it twice. I was wrong. The darkness came. It came on an evening of cloud, at our gate. Five Avari who should be alive are not alive. He was right. He has been right from the beginning, and I have been a man stubborn enough to keep my own dignity in place of seeing what was in front of my face."

He turned to me.

"You are right that we must go, Selas. I will not stand in the way. I will stand beside you. I will make my family ready."

I could not speak for a moment.

When I did, my voice was less steady than I wanted it to be.

"Thank you, Maethor."

He inclined his head, once, and sat down.

Thoron stood. "I support the evacuation."

One by one, the Council rose.

It was done.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[That night. The lake shore]​

I walked down to the water alone.

The lake was quiet. The clouds had gone. The stars were back. Cuiviénen lay before me exactly as it had lain the night I had been born — which I could not remember — and the night of the Sundering, which I remembered very well, and every night between.

I had not told the Avari the whole truth in the hall. I had told them we were leaving because we had to. I had not told them that I had known we would have to leave for all these years.

I touched the pouch at my belt. The acorn was there. Still warm. Still quietly pulsing against my fingers.

Behind me, the settlement was alive with work. Forges already running through the night. Carpenters already mustering every able hand to the wagon yards. Mireth and Lómiel already compiling lists of portable medicines. Caldor already — I knew without having to check — drawing plans for how to dismantle the cement-works and take the method with us as a written set of steps.

We would leave in three moons. Four at the outside.

Two thousand Avari. One hundred wagons.

Into lands I had only half-read about in a life I did not speak of.

I will not fail them, I thought.

I stood there a long time. Then I turned and went back into the settlement, because the work would not do itself.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[End of Chapter 11]​

---

GLOSSARY​

Úrkai (sing. úrka) — The Avari word for the creatures Selas calls orcs. Coined in the early years of the Avari calendar as a deliberate loan — the word predates any actual sighting, a fact only Selas himself finds suspicious.

Utumno — The fortress in the far north from which, the Avari now understand, the orcs are bred. Not spoken of in council by its name.

Bog iron — The only iron available near Cuiviénen. Mined from swamp sediment; limited, slow to produce, and by Year 30 of the Avari almost exhausted. Eol has produced exactly one usable lump of refined iron in thirty Years of the Trees. He keeps it in the Chief's house where no one will ask him to use it.

Cement, stone (poured) — The mortar-and-block technique discovered by two Lindar potters in Year 7 of the Avari and now the standard material for new construction. Unknown to any other Quendi anywhere.

The wall — The perimeter of the Avari settlement. Built in Years 1–8, extended twice. A ring of packed earth, timber, and stone; ramparts for archers, watchtowers at intervals, gates at four compass points.

Those Who Stood — The book started by the scribe Dirmal in Year 30, recording the names of Avari who have fallen in battle. Seven names, as of the evacuation council.

The Great Council — Joint sitting of the Elder Council and the Advisory Council on a matter of the whole people. Convened rarely. Convened at the evacuation.

The Evacuation (forthcoming) — The decision of the Great Council in Year 30 to abandon Cuiviénen ahead of the orc army gathering on its northern shore. Preparations to take three to four moons. The people who depart will, at the moment of departure, number near two thousand.

 

[Afkter02]

Farewell to the Cradle of All Quendi (12)

[Cuiviénen. Year 1135 of the Trees. Three weeks after the Evacuation Council]

[Selas POV]​

The settlement had changed in those three weeks. Not in shape — the walls still stood, the houses still held, the forges still burned. But something underneath had shifted, the way the ground shifts before a landslide, invisible from above but felt in the bones of anyone standing on it.

People packed. Slowly at first, then faster as the reality settled in. Families sorted through thirty years of belongings, deciding what could fit on a wagon and what would stay behind. Arguments broke out in doorways.

A woman on the east side of the settlement sat in front of her house for two days, refusing to move, until her daughters carried her things out for her and she finally stood and helped without speaking.

The wagons filled. One hundred of them, built over the past years for exactly this purpose, lined up along the southern road in rows of ten. Eol's apprentices reinforced axles. Caldor's builders checked every wheel, every join, every lashing.

Celestia's scouts ran daily patrols to the north and east, tracking the orc encampment across the lake. The reports came back the same way every time: More movement. More of them.

We were running out of time, and everyone could feel it.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Same period. The healers' house]

[Mireth POV]​

Mireth's hands were steady when she worked. They had to be. Thirty years of setting bones and stitching wounds and coaxing Light into torn flesh had trained the shake out of them, the way a smith's hammer trains the flinch out of his arm.

But her hands were not steady now.

She stood over Tarnion's body in the half-light of the healing house and tried to make them stop trembling, and they would not.

Strong boy. A spear had gone through his gut two weeks ago during the last raid. Mireth had done everything she knew. Packed the wound with comfrey and yarrow. Poured Light into the damaged tissue until her own reserves ached. Sat with him through the nights when the fever climbed.

This morning he had stopped making sounds.

She pulled the cloth over his face with hands that would not stop shaking.

"His family?" she said to Lómiel, who stood at the door.

"Outside. His mother and his sister. The girl too."

"Send them in."

Lómiel hesitated. "Are you—"

"Send them in, Lómiel."

The door opened. Tarnion's mother entered first. She looked at the covered body. She did not scream. She crossed the room and took his hand through the cloth and held it, and she sat down on the floor beside the table where her son lay, and she did not speak.

Mireth stood by the wall and watched, because there was nothing in her healer's kit for this, no herb and no Light and no words that would do anything at all except make the silence worse.

The door opened again. Selas.

His eyes found the covered body, and something moved across his face, quick and deep, and then it was gone, hidden behind the wall he'd been building for months.

"Tarnion?" he asked, though he already knew.

Mireth nodded.

He looked at the mother on the floor. At the sister standing frozen by the door. At the girl outside whose silhouette was visible through the window, sitting on the ground with her arms around her knees.

He said nothing to them. He stood for a moment, and then he left.

Later — after the family had gone, after Lómiel had cleaned the table and stacked the jars back on their shelves — Mireth found Selas in the corridor.

"How much longer?" The words came out before she could stop them.

"We're almost ready. Days."

"How many more die in days?"

"Fewer than if we'd left three weeks ago without food or wagons." His voice had an edge she hadn't heard before. Not anger. Something colder. The sound of a man who had done the math and hated the answer but could not change it.

"And if we wait too long?"

He met her eyes. Held them.

"We won't."

Then he was gone, walking fast toward the wall, and Mireth stood alone in the corridor with her shaking hands and the smell of death in her clothes.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Two days later. The walls. Night watch]

[Selas POV]​

"Something's moving out there."

Angrod's whisper cut through the wind. Every guard on the eastern rampart went still.

I was already beside him. I had a habit of walking the walls at night, the kind of habit that forms when sleep stops being useful and restlessness becomes a tool.

"Where?"

"The fires." Angrod pointed across the black water. "Watch how they're shifting."

I watched. The orc campfires on the far shore had been a constant for weeks, a constellation of dull orange points spread across the northern darkness. But tonight they were different. Rearranging in patterns that had nothing to do with wind or chance.

"They're staging," I said.

"That's what I see."

"How long do we have?"

"Days." Angrod's jaw was tight. "Maybe less. When they come, it'll be everything at once."

I gripped the wooden railing and stared at the shifting lights across the water. Every instinct I had, every calculation, pointed to the same conclusion.

We were out of time.

"We go tomorrow," I said. "First light."

Angrod turned. "Tomorrow? We were supposed to have—"

"The orcs didn't read our schedule." I kept my voice level. "Tell Celestia. Tell the Elders. Tonight we finish loading. Whatever isn't on a wagon by dawn stays behind."

"People won't be ready."

"Then they get ready tonight. Because if we're still here when that horde crosses the lake, none of us make it out."

He stared at me for a long moment. Then he nodded and went.

I stood alone on the wall, watching the enemy fires multiply in the darkness.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[That night. Various locations]​

Word spread the way fire spreads through dry grass.

Tomorrow. We leave tomorrow.

The settlement came alive in a way it had not been alive in weeks.

Families worked through the night. Loading the last crates onto wagons. Wrapping tools in cloth. Carrying children's things in bundles that grew heavier with every trip. Arguments that had been simmering for weeks — what to take, what to leave, what mattered — resolved themselves in minutes, because there was no time left for arguments.

Some people stood in their doorways and looked at the walls they had built with their own hands and could not move. Others moved with a grim efficiency that left no room for sentiment, stripping their homes bare and walking away without looking back.

In the forge, Eol hammered out one last batch of arrowheads. The rhythm of his hammer had been the heartbeat of this settlement for thirty years. Tonight it sounded like a countdown.

"For the road," he told his apprentice. "For whatever's waiting out there."

In the healers' house, Lómiel and Mireth packed in silence. Every jar, every bundle of dried herbs, every roll of clean linen — measured against the space remaining in the medical wagon and the likelihood that they would need it before they found a place to stop.

"Running low on wound herbs," Mireth said.

"Nothing we can do about it."

"What if we can't find the same plants out west?"

"Then we learn to use different ones." Lómiel shoved another jar into the crate. "Same as always."

The acorn pulsed against my chest. I took it out.

Still glowing. Still gold at the core, threaded now with the silver of my own Light from years of evening feedings. Ilvëa's gift, unchanged in its warmth after all this time.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Dawn. The lakeshore]

[Selas POV]​

They gathered without speaking.

Two thousand Avari. Men, women, children, elders. Standing on Cuiviénen's shore while the last stars faded overhead.

Behind them, the settlement was burning.

They'd lit the fires themselves. Building by building. Workshop by workshop. Home by home. I had given the order, and they had carried it out, and not one of them had refused, and not one of them had done it without grief.

Nothing for the orcs to take.

Smoke climbed into the sky, a black column visible for leagues. Thirty years going up in flames.

One hundred wagons waited in column, loaded and lashed. Warriors stood armed along both flanks. Children pressed close to their parents, too frightened or too confused to cry. The old ones stood quietly, watching the smoke with eyes that had seen the world begin and were now watching a piece of it end.

I stood facing them and felt the weight of it. All of it. Every pair of eyes. Every hope. Every fear.

What do you even say?

I took a breath.

"Avari!"

My voice carried across the water.

"Look behind you. That's our home burning. Look ahead." I swept my arm toward the west, toward the vast unknown. "That's everything we don't know yet."

I let the silence sit.

"Thirty years ago, we could have avoided this. Could have followed the Valar to Aman. Safe and protected."

I paused.

"Controlled."

A murmur ran through the crowd.

"We said no. We wanted our own path. Our own choices. Our own mistakes."

My voice got stronger.

"Now we choose again. Not because some Vala commands it. Not because we're running scared. Because we're smart enough to know when to hold ground and when to give it up."

"Because staying means dying, and we refuse to die on our knees in a place that deserves better than our bones."

I looked at them. Every one familiar.

"This is our journey. Not theirs. Ours."

People straightened. Lifted their heads.

"We carry everything with us. Everything we learned. Everything we built. The skills. The knowledge. The strength. All of it lives in us, not in those walls."

Something was building in my chest, emotion I'd kept locked down for months.

"We'll cross lands nobody's mapped. Face things we can't imagine yet. But we'll see wonders too. Things no Eldar ever dreamed of, because they were too busy following someone else's road to build their own."

My voice rose.

"We'll find a new home. Somewhere the orcs can't reach. Somewhere we can build something that lasts."

Energy crackled through the crowd.

"We didn't bow to the Valar! We didn't break when times got hard! We will not break now!"

They erupted. Two thousand voices shouting back at me, at the burning ruins, at the world.

I let them. Let the fear turn into noise, into rage, into something they could carry.

Then I walked to the water's edge.

And knelt.

Silence slammed down like a door.

Cold water soaked through my clothes, lapped against my knees. The lake, still as glass beyond the first ripples, reflected the smoke and the stars and nothing else.

"Lake Cuiviénen." My voice came out quieter now, but in the silence it carried to the last row. "Where it all began. Where we opened our eyes. Where we learned what we were."

I closed my eyes for a moment.

"You kept us alive, all those years. Water to drink. Fish to eat. Soil to grow in. You were here when the Eldar left, watched them go without a backward glance, without even a word of thanks."

My throat tightened.

"We stayed. And you kept us anyway. Thirty years. You were always here."

I opened my eyes and looked at the water.

"Now the darkness has come. And we're not strong enough. Not yet. We have to go."

My voice cracked. I let it.

"We have to leave you."

Wind picked up across the lake. Ripples spread outward from the shore, though nothing visible had disturbed the surface.

"But this is not abandonment. You hear me?"

Louder now.

"I claim this place. Sacred. Forever part of our realm, the Avari realm. By right of those who stayed when everyone else left. By right of thirty years of blood and work and love and everything we poured into this ground."

I stood. Water streamed off me.

"We'll come back. If not us, our children. This isn't goodbye."

I held their eyes.

"Just farewell. For now."

The roar that answered me shook the air.

I let it wash over me. Then I drew my knife.

Grabbed my hair — silver, long, grown over decades — and cut it off.

Dead silence.

Hair was sacred among the Quendi. A symbol of beauty, of pride, of connection to one's heritage. To cut it willingly was an act of sacrifice so profound that no elf in the history of the world had ever done it.

Until now.

I held the severed hair over the water.

"I am Selas. Son of Enel and Enelyë. Fourth of the Nelyar. The first to refuse the call. Chief because you chose me."

Tears ran down my face. I didn't wipe them away.

"Goodbye, Mother of Awakening. Our first home. Our only true home."

My voice dropped to almost nothing.

"Goodbye."

And for just a moment, I wasn't here at all.

I was somewhere else. Somewhen else. Standing in places I would never stand again, saying goodbye to things that had no names in this language, to people who had never existed in this world and never would. The grief of two lives folded into a single moment, and it almost took my legs out from under me.

I shoved it down. Locked it away.

"But we'll be back!" I shouted it at the sky, at the lake, at the smoke rising behind me. "I swear it! This is not the end!"

I opened my hand.

Wind — stronger now, almost alive, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once — caught my hair and carried it out over the water. Silver strands spreading across the dark surface like a net of promises.

I turned. Held out the knife, blade toward me, hilt toward them.

They understood.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[An hour later]​

They came one by one.

Thoron first. Of course. First to stand with me at the Sundering, first now.

He knelt at the water's edge. Drank from the lake. Washed his face with cupped hands. Then he took the knife and cut his hair — not all of it, but a long lock from the left side, close to his temple. He held it over the water and said something I couldn't hear, and the wind took it.

Then the others.

Each one different. That was the thing nobody had planned and nobody needed to plan. Some cut everything, shearing themselves down to the scalp with quick, savage motions, as if speed would dull the grief.

Others took only a single strand, thin as thread, held it over the water, and let it go with a whisper. Mothers cut their children's hair for them, tiny snips from the ends, while the children watched with wide, uncomprehending eyes.

Eol came forward with his jaw set and his hands shaking, the same hands that had forged the first bronze this people had ever seen. He cut a thick section from the back of his head, where the hair was darkest, and dropped it into the water without ceremony. His face said everything his mouth refused to.

Celestia cut hers short. Military short. She didn't kneel. She stood at the water's edge, cut, dropped, and turned away. Later, Angrod told me she'd gone behind the wagons and stood with her back to everyone for a long time afterward.

Mireth knelt slowly, like someone whose body was finally acknowledging exhaustion the mind had refused to admit. She cut a single long lock and laid it on the water's surface with the delicacy of someone placing a bandage on a wound.

The lake's surface filled with floating hair. Silver, dark, copper. Every color the Avari had among them, drifting outward in the still water like a living tapestry. A memorial nobody had planned and nobody would forget.

When the last one had finished — a tiny girl whose mother had to wrap the child's fingers around the knife handle and guide the cut — I walked back to the water alone.

The acorn was hot in my palm.

Ilvëa's gift. Still glowing gold at its core, silver threads running through it from the years of my Light.

I knelt at the water's edge and plunged my hand in. Acorn and all.

The cold hit first. Then something else.

I poured my Light into the acorn. Not a thread this time. Everything I had. Silver rushing into gold, filling it, merging with it, and the waters of Cuiviénen closing around both.

White fire blazed — blinding, just for a second — as the two Lights fused into something neither gold nor silver but both at once, and the water of the lake sank into the acorn's shell.

When I pulled my hand out, the acorn had changed.

Still gold at the heart. But the silver was no longer threads. It was woven through the whole of it, gold and silver intertwined like two voices singing the same note in different registers.

And there was something else now, something that hadn't been there before. A presence. As if the lake itself had given a piece of its memory to this small, warm thing in my hand.

"Thank you," I whispered. "Part of you comes with us. And from this—" I lifted the transformed acorn, turning it so the crowd could see the light pouring from between my fingers, "—we'll grow something. A tree. A living thing. Something to remember you by."

I stood.

"Goodbye, old friend."

Warm wind hit me.

Not wind. Something older.

The lake — or whatever ancient spirit lived in its depths, whatever consciousness had watched over the Quendi since the first awakening — answering.

Gratitude. For thirty years of care. Of respect. Of the Avari being the ones who stayed.

Sadness. At the silence that was coming. At the empty shore, the cold fires, the absence of voices and footsteps and laughter.

Hope. Fierce and quiet and older than language. That we would keep our promise. That we would return.

And underneath everything, vast and gentle and impossibly old —

Go. Grow strong. Come back when you can.

I will be here.

I will always be here.

I couldn't see through the tears.

"We'll remember," I said out loud. My voice broke on the second word and I didn't care. "I swear it. On everything I am. We will remember."

The presence faded. Like morning fog lifting from the water. Like the last note of a song you didn't know was ending.

I stood alone. The acorn glowing in my hand like a piece of captured star, warm and alive and carrying inside it everything that mattered about this place.

Two thousand people waited behind me.

I turned.

Held up the acorn. Let everyone see the light — gold and silver wound together, burning steady and bright.

"This is what we carry! Both lights! Past and future! Everything we were and everything we'll become! And from this — we build something new!"

They cheered.

Different this time. Not anger or grief. Hope. The raw kind.

I put the acorn away, safe against my chest.

Faced the Avari.

"Avari! March!"

We did.

Two thousand souls. Every piece of knowledge, every skill, every memory we'd built in thirty years, carried in our hands and our heads and our hearts.

We walked away from Cuiviénen. The Water of Awakening. Where everything began.

Some looked back. Children waving at the shore they'd been born beside. The olders whispering last words to the water. Avari burning the view into their memory, because elves do not forget, and they wanted to remember this exactly as its.

Smoke rose behind us.

The unknown waited ahead.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[End of Chapter 12]​

---

GLOSSARY

GOVERNANCE​

The Great Council — Joint sitting of the Elder Council and the Advisory Council. Convened only for decisions affecting the entire Avari people.

The Advisory Council (Small Council) — Selas's hand-picked specialists managing domains: smithing (Eol), healing (Mireth), construction (Caldor), warfare and scouts (Celestia), with Angrod as lead scout under Celestia's command.

The Elder Council — Representatives of the thirty-three founding clans. Voice their peoples' concerns and help shape major decisions.

CULTURAL CONCEPTS​

Ósanwë — "Interchange of Thought." Elvish mind-to-mind communication. During the Farewell, Selas experiences it with the spirit of Cuiviénen itself.

The Ceremony of Farewell — Ritual created by Selas for the Avari's departure.

THE MARCH​

The Great March of the Avari — The Avari exodus from Cuiviénen. Two thousand souls, one hundred wagons. Year 1135 of the Trees.

 

[Afkter02]

Blood in the Ashes (13)

[One week after departure. The Inner Sea of Helcar]

[Selas POV]​

The world broke open before us.

Water. To the horizon.

Helcar — the Inner Sea — so wide it hardly looked real. Water and starlight, all the way to the edge of sight, until the line between them blurred into a single pale band that could have been either and was neither.

"Is that the Great Sea?" a child whispered from the nearest wagon.

"Not the Great Sea," her mother said softly.

The child stared, trying to fit that into her head.

All along the column, the same scene repeated. Avari stopping in their tracks. Staring. Struggling to comprehend a scale they'd never imagined, because for thirty years the lake had been the largest body of water any of them had known, and the lake was a puddle beside this.

Good.

Let them see how vast the world is. How small we are. How much we don't know.

The ones who stayed humble lasted. The ones who didn't learned humility the hard way, sooner or later.

We followed the southern shore, water always to our left, steppe stretching endlessly to the right. Celestia's scouts ranged ahead and behind and along both flanks, probing the dark like the feelers, never more than two hours from the column at any point.

Watching for threats.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Ten days after departure. Scout report]

[Selas POV]​

They came in at dawn — five scouts at a hard run, faces grey with exhaustion and something colder underneath.

Fear.

I met them at the column's edge before the forward guard had even registered their approach. "Report."

The lead scout — a young Lindar named Círyon — pulled up short, breathing hard, and bowed. "Chief. The orcs reached the settlement two days after we left."

"And?"

"They found the ashes." His voice tightened. He swallowed, like he was trying to force the memory back down his throat and it wouldn't go. "They didn't understand at first. They searched. Prowled through the ruins, ripping apart what little stood, digging through blackened beams, shoving one another aside to reach empty storage pits."

He stared past me, eyes unfocused. Still watching from the treeline.

"And then it hit them. There was nothing. No food. No tools. No shelter. Nothing to take. Just smoke and cinders."

"They started screaming. Not like battle cries. Like something inside them was breaking. They kicked over burnt frames, smashed what they couldn't carry, tore down posts that were already half-charred. And when there was nothing left to break…"

He exhaled, ragged.

"They turned on each other."

The other scouts shifted uneasily. One of them looked away.

"It wasn't a fight," Círyon said. "It was a frenzy. They piled into it, weapons rising and falling until the ground went slick. They fell into the ruins and kept going. Crawled over bodies just to reach someone else."

{Image: Blood in the Ashes}​

He paused, and for a heartbeat I thought he was done.

He wasn't.

"When some finally dropped, the rest didn't stop." His voice lowered. "They dragged the dead into the open. Opened them up. Like carcasses."

Mireth, standing behind me, drew a sharp breath.

Círyon's gaze flicked to her, then away.

"We watched it happen, Chief." His face was grey. "They fought, and when the fighting ended, they fed. Like the rage just turned into hunger with no line between."

Silence spread around us. Even the wagons felt quieter. Somewhere near the back of the column, a child laughed at something, and the sound was obscene in the stillness.

"Did they pursue?" I asked, keeping my voice level by force.

"Not immediately." Círyon's mouth tightened. "The frenzy burned itself out over a day. They wandered among the ashes afterward, panting, stumbling, shoving the wounded aside. Some crawled away and were dragged back. Others tried to run and were beaten down."

He hesitated. Then continued, and his voice changed. Harder.

"But then someone ended it. A large one. Bigger than the rest. He walked into the circle of blood like he owned it. Challengers came at him, one after another, and he killed them fast."

Cold settled in my chest.

"And when he finished," Círyon said quietly, "the others stopped. Like a cord had cinched tight around their throats. They fell in line."

Organized orcs. Led by something strong enough to dominate thousands through sheer violence.

I'd known about the warchief from earlier reports. But hearing it described — the casual brutality, the instant obedience — made it real in a way that numbers on a scout's map never could.

"And their equipment?" I asked.

"Better than before." Another scout spoke up — Tarandor, the most experienced of the five. "Some had bronze, Chief. Taken from what we left behind or forged in their own camps."

Bronze. They had bronze now.

They learn. They adapt. And every generation that hatches learns faster than the last.

"They're not pursuing?"

"Not yet." Círyon met my eyes. "The warchief is consolidating. They have no organization for a long march, no supply lines, no discipline beyond fear of the leader. They'll raid each other, fight for dominance, maybe send scouts to track us. But a real pursuit?" He shook his head. "Weeks at the earliest. Months, more likely."

I nodded slowly. "That doesn't mean they've forgotten us."

"No, Chief."

"It means we have a window." I raised my voice so the gathered Avari could hear.

I turned to address the crowd that had formed around us, drawn by the scouts' arrival, by the smell of bad news that carries faster than any runner.

"You've heard the report. You know what waited for us if we'd stayed." I gestured back the way we'd come. "Death. Destruction. Worse than death."

I didn't rush to fill the silence that followed.

"We made the right choice. We left in time." My voice hardened. "And we will never — never — let such creatures drive us from our home again."

"Never!" someone shouted.

Others took up the cry. It spread through the column like a spark through kindling, wagon to wagon, family to family, until the sound of it rolled across the plain like thunder, and for a moment the steppe itself seemed to flinch.

I let them rage. Let the fear burn itself out. Some of it turned to anger. Good. Anger was fuel.

Then I raised my hand.

"We march. We train. We prepare." I met as many eyes as I could. "So that when we find our new home, we'll be strong enough to keep it."

They roared approval.

We marched.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[That night. The first major camp]

[Selas POV]​

We made camp as stars emerged — thousands of them, brilliant and cold.

No fires yet. Too risky until Celestia's scouts confirmed we had a safe perimeter.

The wagons circled in the formation we'd drilled during the last weeks at Cuiviénen — outer ring tight, inner ring open, livestock in the center, warriors at the gaps.

Eventually Angrod brought word from the outer perimeter. Clear. Nothing moving for leagues in any direction.

Small cooking fires sprang up across the camp as families prepared their first hot meal since leaving Cuiviénen. The smell of it — grain and dried fish and herbs from the stores — carried through the cold air like a signal that the world had not ended yet.

I walked the perimeter. Checked the sentries. Made sure everyone had settled.

Families huddled close. Children asked endless questions about where they were going, the kind of questions that have no answers but need to be asked anyway. Warriors stood watch with eyes that had seen too much and would see more before this was over.

I could recognize every cluster by voice alone. Knew their habits after thirty years — who sat with whom, who kept to the edges, who always took first watch without being asked, who sang and who went quiet and who needed company and who needed to be left alone.

This was what I'd spent thirty years protecting.

Not the settlement. Not the walls. Not the workshops, the gardens, the neat streets I'd helped lay out.

Them.

These elves. These families. These children whose names I could recite in the dark, who deserved a future more than they deserved a place.

And I'd give it to them.

Whatever it took.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Same night. Camp's edge]​

I found a quiet spot away from the fires, away from the noise, and sat.

Pulled out the acorn.

It glowed softly in the darkness. Gold and silver wound together, and now something deeper, too — the lake's blessing, a presence that hummed against my palm like a second heartbeat.

"We did it," I whispered. "First step. We're on the road."

The acorn pulsed.

"Yeah. Long way to go. But we'll make it."

We have to.

I tucked it away and looked up at the stars.

The same stars that had watched us awaken at Cuiviénen. That had witnessed the Sundering. That had seen everything we'd built — and everything we'd lost.

For thirty years, I'd fought to protect our home. Poured everything into it. Sweat, planning, preparation. Thirty years of building walls and forging bronze and training warriors and burying the ones who fell.

And still we'd had to leave.

Leaving Cuiviénen should have broken me.

But sitting here now — cold, exhausted, with my people sleeping behind me and enemies far behind us — I understood something I hadn't before.

Cuiviénen had been our cradle. Our mother's arms. The place that sheltered us while we learned to walk, to speak, to be.

But children don't stay in cradles forever.

We outgrew it. Or perhaps it outgrew us. Either way, clinging to that sacred shore while orcs multiplied in the shadows would have been death — not just of bodies, but of everything we'd become.

Leaving made us stronger.

The thought sat heavy in my chest. All those losses, the battles, the choices that kept me awake at night — none of it had broken me. If anything, it had worn down the soft parts. Left something tougher underneath. Something that could carry more weight and keep walking.

I'd been a child playing at leadership when this began. Passionate, yes. Determined, certainly.

But naive. So naive.

Now I understood things that the boy at Cuiviénen couldn't have. That leaders fall. That they bleed. That they bury people and write their names in books and carry those names forever. And then they get up, because there's no one else to do it.

Someone has to make the choices nobody else wants to touch. Someone has to carry the weight so others don't have to.

The road ahead would be harder still. Mountains to cross. Unknown lands to navigate. Rivers wider than anything we'd seen. Enemies we hadn't yet imagined.

But for the first time since ordering the evacuation, I felt something beyond grim determination.

I felt ready.

The path wasn't clear. Victory wasn't guaranteed.

But the things that should have broken us had made us harder instead, and I had stopped being surprised by that. It was simply what we were. What we did.

The stars turned overhead. The same stars that would guide us west. That would witness whatever we became.

We're coming, I thought, looking toward the distant mountains barely visible on the horizon. Ready or not.

We're coming.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[End of Chapter 13]​

---

GLOSSARY

PLACES​

Helcar (The Inner Sea) — A vast inland sea east of the Misty Mountains. The Avari encounter it during the first week of the March. Far larger than Cuiviénen, it gives many Avari their first understanding of the world's true scale.

 

[Afkter02]

The Great March — Ways of the Road (14)

[Three weeks into the March. Evening. The Rhûn Steppes]

[Selas POV]​

Three weeks. Twenty-one days of grass and sky and the rhythmic creak of wagon wheels.

The column stretched behind me for nearly a league, one hundred wagons in paired rows, flanked by warriors on foot, families walking between the carts, children darting from one group to another with the restless energy of creatures who had not yet learned that the world was dangerous.

The camp sprawled ahead. Fires, voices, the clatter of tools being stowed for the night. I walked through it the way I walked through it every evening, eyes catching on details. Who limped. Who moved too slow. Who'd stopped smiling three days ago and hadn't started again.

Eol's forge glowed near the center. Portable. Stone base, leather bellows, nothing fancy. But it worked, and it had worked every night since we left Cuiviénen, and it would work every night until we stopped walking or Eol's heart stopped beating, whichever came last.

Hammer-blows rang steady as I approached. He didn't look up.

"Wagon axle." Sparks flew with each strike. "Third one this week."

I crouched beside him. The metal glowed cherry-red, soft enough to bend under each blow. "Can you fix it?"

"Fixed it twice already." He wiped soot across his forehead, smearing it worse. "Keeps splitting. This bronze is garbage for the weight we're hauling."

I watched him work for another moment. The quiet fury in every strike that was Eol's version of prayer.

"How are the apprentices?"

"Complaining." A faint smile cracked through the soot. "But learning. Tavor shows promise."

"Good. We'll need more smiths than we have."

Eol grunted and returned to his hammering. Conversation over. With Eol, you learned to read the end of a sentence by the angle of his shoulders.

{Image: The Rhûn Steppes}

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Same evening. Healers' tent]

[Selas POV]​

The healers' tent glowed ahead, firelight through canvas.

"How many today?" I crouched beside Mireth's work table. She was grinding herbs in steady circular motions, pestle against stone, while Lómiel wrapped a sprained ankle on the cot behind her.

"Six." Mireth didn't look up. "Sprains, mostly. People loading the wagons wrong, lifting with their backs instead of their legs. One fever. A child, five years old. The march is wearing her down."

"Will she recover?"

Mireth's hands paused. Just for a heartbeat. "She should. But we're exposed to new plants now. New water. New air. Things our bodies have never encountered."

That was as close to admitting fear as Mireth ever came.

"Let me know if it worsens."

"We will."

Outside, the camp sprawled in its organized chaos. Voices drifting. Children laughing somewhere, despite everything. The smell of cooking fires and dried meat and crushed grass, which was the smell of the March.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Same evening. Camp's edge]

[Selas POV]​

The same thought kept circling back, sharper each time it returned.

We were two thousand souls on open ground. Wagons. Children. Healers who couldn't fight.

Not an army. Families with spears.

At Cuiviénen, we'd survived as hunters. See first, strike first, vanish into trees that didn't exist out here.

On these steppes, there was nowhere to vanish. No walls. No forest to hide the weak behind. Just grass in every direction and a sky so vast it made you feel like an insect on a dinner plate.

If orcs caught us in the open, individual skill wouldn't save us. Not against numbers. Not long-term. A hundred skilled warriors, each fighting alone, could be surrounded, isolated, and pulled down one by one. I'd read enough history to know that.

On Earth, I'd read about wars won by discipline over heroics. Lines that held when heroes would have broken. Ranks that stepped forward when men fell. Units that moved as one body.

I didn't have steel. Didn't have horses or siege engines or any of the tools that made Rome what Rome was.

But I had time. And people willing to learn. And the knowledge of how it was supposed to work, which was more than any commander in this world had ever possessed.

We needed a core that could take a charge without shattering.

Shields locked. Spears leveled. A heavy line, the fist that conquered the ancient world in my memories.

And since no one else knew how to build it, I would.

I found Celestia near the perimeter, checking the scouts' rotation with Angrod. She looked up as I approached, reading my face the way she always did, quickly and accurately.

"Walk with me," I said.

We moved to the wagons, away from listening ears. Angrod followed without being asked.

"We can't rely on forest tactics anymore." I kept my voice low. "If we get caught in the open, we die. Every one of us."

No one argued. They'd both been watching the steppes. They'd felt how exposed we were every waking moment.

"I'm starting formation training. A shield line. A core that holds while everyone else moves around it."

Celestia's mouth tightened. Not disagreement. Calculation. "How many?"

"Two hundred to start. Not pulled at random. I want people who can handle weight, heat, and exhaustion. Who won't break the first time someone shoves into them shoulder-to-shoulder."

Her brow furrowed. "We don't have time to test everyone individually."

"You do." I met her eyes. "You and Angrod know who's steady. Who shows up for night watches without complaining. Who doesn't fold when the work turns ugly."

Angrod nodded slowly. "You want veterans."

"And the right build. Strong backs. Strong legs. People who can carry weight for hours and still think straight when things get bloody."

Celestia crossed her arms. "Volunteers or assignments?"

"Volunteers first. We're not breaking families apart by force unless we have to." I paused. "But I want names. Tonight."

She exhaled through her nose. Reluctant acceptance, the kind that came from understanding the necessity even when you didn't love the method. "I can get you names."

"Good. Talk to them before dawn. Quietly. One by one if needed. Make it clear what it is and what it costs."

Angrod looked at the wagons, then back. "And if we don't get enough volunteers?"

"Then you and I start pulling people."

By nightfall, the list existed.

The Chief was building a line.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Next morning. Training ground]

[Vertalas POV]​

"Left! Right! Left! Right!"

The Chief's voice cracked like a whip across the steppe.

Vertalas gritted his teeth and fought to stay in step. He was a warrior. Had been a warrior since the first orc raid at Cuiviénen, a hunter for twenty years before that. He knew how to fight. He knew how to track, how to kill, how to move through forest and over stone without making a sound.

He did not know how to march.

Tried. Failed. Nearly tripped over Kalentin's heel.

"Again!"

They started over. Two hundred Avari attempting to walk in formation while carrying full packs and practice weapons. Half stumbled. A quarter fell out of step completely. One went down hard, face-first in the grass.

He came up spitting dirt, eyes bright with fury.

The Chief didn't even pause.

"Again!"

Laughter from the watching crowd of non-combatants. Children mostly, pointing and giggling at the warriors who'd suddenly become clowns. Vertalas's face burned. He was a veteran. And here he was, stumbling over flat ground because his left foot couldn't figure out what his right foot was doing.

"I hate this," Kalentin muttered beside him. "We know how to fight. Why do we need to march like some kind of dance troupe?"

"Because the Chief says so."

"But—"

"Silence in the ranks!"

Two hours in, Kalentin's legs started shaking. He locked his knees, gritted his teeth, kept the shield up.

Three hours. Someone stumbled out of line, retching into the grass. Nobody stopped.

Four hours. The crowd that had gathered to watch, laughing at first, drifted away. Too boring. The same movements, over and over, until the muscles burned and the mind went blank and the body just did what it was told.

The Chief called a halt.

"Better." Just that. One word. "Tomorrow, we do it again. And the day after. Until you can do it in your sleep."

Groans.

But no one argued.

Too tired to argue.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[That night. Vertalas's fire]

[Vertalas POV]​

Kalentin collapsed beside the fire, face still flushed with exertion and humiliation. "I hate this. Marching in step. Like we're in some damn dance troupe."

"It's not dancing." Vertalas poked the fire with a stick, watching sparks spiral upward. "It's discipline."

"It's stupid."

Silence stretched between them. Vertalas watched the flames.

"You saw the scout reports," he said finally. "The orcs."

"So?"

"Thousands. Maybe more." He kept his eyes on the fire. "If we'd stayed at Cuiviénen, they would've come for us eventually. And we'd have fought them the old way. Each warrior alone or in small groups, trusting skill and speed."

"And we'd have won."

"Maybe." Vertalas looked at his friend. "Or maybe they'd have buried us in corpses. Ever think about that? What happens when a hundred orcs swarm one great warrior? He kills ten. Twenty. Then they drag him down anyway."

Kalentin was quiet.

"The Chief explained it to me once." Vertalas held up his hand, fingers spread. Then made a fist. "Asked which hits harder."

Understanding flickered in Kalentin's eyes.

"The fist."

"The fist." Vertalas nodded. "That's what we're becoming. Not five fingers fighting separately. One fist hitting together."

They sat in silence, watching the fire eat through wood.

Tomorrow, they'd drill again. And the day after.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Two months into the March. Camp]

[Selas POV]​

I called an early halt.

"We rest here. Today and tomorrow both. You've earned it."

Surprised murmurs. Hopeful glances.

"Five weeks of hard marching." I gestured toward the training warriors, the ones I'd been drilling since the column left Cuiviénen, the first true core of what would become our shield wall. "Look at them."

Two hundred Avari stood in something approaching formation. Still clumsy. Still rough around the edges.

But recognizable as a unit.

"Five weeks ago, they couldn't march ten paces without tripping over each other. Now?" I let myself smile. "Now they move as one. Still learning. But improving every single day."

The warriors straightened. Not much. But enough.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Three months into the March. Council tent]

[Selas POV]​

The training had to expand.

Two hundred warriors wasn't enough. Not even close.

I needed a real army. Which meant structure. Organization. A system that could grow beyond me personally commanding every warrior in every fight.

The Council of Elders gathered in the command tent, representatives from all thirty-three founding clans, faces lit by firelight and lampglow.

"We need more warriors," I said without preamble.

Angrod leaned forward. "How many?"

"Everyone capable of holding a spear. Which means recruitment. Training that goes well beyond what we've been doing."

Murmurs rippled through the chamber.

"Mandatory?" One of the Lindar elders, voice carefully neutral.

"Encouraged. But yes, every able-bodied Avari should know basic formation combat. For their own protection as much as ours."

"And who decides fighting age?" Celestia asked.

"We do." I gestured around the chamber. "Some Avari are natural warriors. Tall, strong, built for the shield wall. Others are better as scouts. Archers. We place people where they'll be most effective."

"So some hold the line, and some move around it," Thoron said, nodding slowly.

"Exactly. Heavy infantry forms the core, the fist. Light infantry supports with arrows, skirmishing, reconnaissance." I met their eyes. "Two different roles. Both necessary."

"And women?" Írissë asked. Her voice carried an edge that dared me to give the wrong answer.

"Anyone capable of holding a weapon and following orders. I don't care about gender. I care about competence."

"There's more." I continued before the arguments could begin. "We need ranks. Leadership structure. Units of ten led by decurions. Five units make a half-century under a centurion. Two half-centuries make a full century."

Silence as comprehension dawned.

Celestia leaned back. "You're building a chain of command."

"A military system. Something that can grow as we grow. Something that functions even when I'm not standing in the middle of it giving orders."

More silence. Heavier this time.

"It's a good plan." Thoron broke the quiet. "When do we start?"

"Tomorrow."

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Four months into the March. Expanded training]

[Selas POV]​

And somehow it worked.

I'd expected maybe a hundred additional volunteers. I got three hundred.

They came from every age and walk of life. Everyone who'd watched the first two hundred drill for weeks and had gone from laughing to admiring to wanting in.

Everyone who'd heard the scout reports about orc movements to the north and east and understood, in the quiet part of their mind that did the math without being asked, what those numbers meant.

The original two hundred became squad leaders overnight, each taking a handful of new recruits and grinding them into shape through endless repetition of the basics.

Vertalas stood out among them. Quiet, methodical, already thinking in formations instead of individuals.

{ image: Vertalas }​

He didn't correct mistakes the way I did, with volume. He corrected them by moving to the weak point, standing beside the warrior who was struggling, and doing the movement correctly until the other one matched him.

No words. No shouting. Just presence and repetition.

More and more often, I caught myself watching him. How he anticipated corrections before I made them. How he tightened gaps before they opened. How the warriors around him stood straighter without being told, because something in his bearing demanded it.

While I was noticing him, the training never stopped.

"Shield up! Not at your waist. At your face!"

"Left foot first! Together! As one!"

"If your neighbor falls, you step forward! You fill the gap! You hold the line!"

Commands. Clashing practice weapons. The rhythmic thud of hundreds of feet marching in increasingly synchronized step.

The sound of an army being born, ugly and clumsy and slow, but real.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[End of Chapter 14]​

---

GLOSSARY

MILITARY EVOLUTION​

The Shield Wall (The Line) — The foundational heavy-infantry formation of the Avari: overlapping shields, controlled spear thrusts, and disciplined spacing. Built to survive open-ground engagements where skirmishing and individual combat fail.

Heavy and Light Infantry — Two complementary arms. Heavy infantry forms and holds the line. Light infantry scouts, screens flanks, skirmishes, and pursues fleeing enemies.

COMMAND AND RANKS​

Decurion — Squad leader commanding ten warriors. The first rank of authority in the Avari army. Close enough to correct posture, spacing, and panic in real time.

Half-Century — A formation of five squads (~50 warriors). A maneuver element that can wheel, reinforce a flank, or detach without breaking the main line.

Centurion — Commander of a century (two half-centuries, ~100 warriors). The first rank designed to function independently of Selas's direct oversight.

Century — The basic operational unit: 100 warriors, two half-centuries, commanded by a centurion.

CHARACTERS​

Vertalas — Warrior since the first orc raid at Cuiviénen. Quiet, methodical, with a natural instinct for formation tactics. Emerges as the most capable tactical mind among the Avari fighters.

Kalentin — Vertalas's friend and fellow warrior. Vocal skeptic of formation training who comes to understand its purpose.

Yalinim — Tatyar warrior. Sharp-eyed, disciplined, already thinking ahead during drills. Vertalas's closest lieutenant.

 

[Afkter02]

The Great March — The First Test (15)

[West of Cuiviénen. Year 1137 of the Trees. Second Year of the March]

[Selas POV]​

Two years since we watched Cuiviénen burn.

Two years since we turned our backs on the only home any of us had ever known and started walking toward something we couldn't even name.

Two years of grass.

The Rhûn steppes rolled out in every direction. Flat, brown-gold, endless. Same view yesterday, same today, same tomorrow, probably, and the day after that, and the day after that, until I lost my mind or we finally hit something different.

The other Avari didn't seem to mind. They found beauty in it somehow. The vast sky. The wheeling stars. The way light moved across the grass like waves on water. They composed songs about it. Pointed out plants I couldn't tell apart. Marveled at streams that all looked the same to me.

I tried to see what they saw.

Mostly I just saw horizon. Always the same distance away. Never getting closer no matter how far we walked.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Same period]

[Selas POV]​

Eight months back, I'd started training with the sword.

Every morning, before the camp stirred, while the stars still hung low and the grass was wet with dew. I stood alone at the column's edge and moved through forms until my wrists stopped thinking about what came next and just moved.

Downward strike. Rising cut. Thrust. Guard. Recover. Again. Again. Again.

It had taken me too long to admit that I needed this. At Cuiviénen, I'd trained the way everyone trained: archery, spear-work, the basics of a dozen weapons. Competent in all, exceptional in none. Good enough for a chief who commanded from behind the shield wall and planned rather than fought.

But out here, on the open steppe, "behind the shield wall" was a fiction. If orcs hit the column between formations, or came at us from a direction no one expected, or simply got lucky, I'd have to meet them at arm's length. And a bow wouldn't save me in the press.

More than that: if I fell, the March didn't collapse overnight. Not like cutting a rope. Slower than that.

Panic spreading in whispers. Factions forming around old grudges. Discipline dissolving into a hundred separate wills pulling in a hundred separate directions.

A people could survive hunger. Cold. Fear, even.

What killed them was the vacuum left when leadership vanished.

So "good enough" wasn't good enough.

Not for me.

Sometimes alone in the predawn dark. Sometimes with eyes watching from the camp's edge, warriors who noticed that the Chief no longer trained like a hunter or a skirmisher, but like someone preparing for close, unavoidable violence.

My body was changing in ways I hadn't expected.

Years of holding Light inside with my own discipline, maintained so long it had stopped feeling like effort — had done something to me. Reshaped me from within.

I was denser now. Harder to exhaust. Faster to recover. Strength came easier, and once I had it, it stayed. My reflexes were sharper than they had any right to be. My endurance outlasted warriors who'd been training twice as long.

Within months I was flowing through sequences that should have taken years to master.

Not effortless. I still made mistakes.

Still overcommitted, still left openings that would get me killed against someone faster or smarter or just luckier. But the gap was closing.

Fast enough to matter.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Year 1137. That evening. Camp]

[Selas POV]​

We made camp the way we always did now.

Wagons circled, fires lit after the scouts cleared the perimeter, families settling into the routines that two years of marching had made as natural as breathing.

I found a spot at the edge of the gathering, close enough to watch but far enough to think. Children chased each other between wagons, their games looking suspiciously like the shield-wall drills we'd been running for months. Women stirred pots over cooking fires, making something edible out of dried meat and whatever roots the gatherers had found. Men sat in clusters, checking weapons, mending torn leather, arguing about tomorrow's route in voices that carried across the camp.

"You're doing that thing again."

Celestia dropped onto the ground beside me. She had a bowl in her hands, something steaming that smelled like it might once have been food.

"What thing?"

"The brooding thing. Staring into the middle distance like you're solving the mysteries of creation." She shoved the bowl at me. "Eat. Balga told me you skipped the midday meal."

"I wasn't hungry."

"You're never hungry. Eat anyway."

I took the bowl because arguing with Celestia was more exhausting than eating. Some kind of stew. Wild onions, chunks of dried meat gone chewy from rehydration, roots I didn't recognize. Tasted like exactly what it was: survival food, prepared by people with limited ingredients and less time.

I ate it anyway.

"The scouts found something," Celestia said, watching me chew. "Two days ahead, maybe less. Stream running east to west across our path."

"Trees?"

"A few. Scrubby things. Wouldn't make decent firewood, let alone timber." She paused, and something in her expression shifted. "But there's more."

I set down the spoon.

"Tracks around the water. Orc tracks."

The stew sat heavy in my stomach. "How many?"

"Hard to say exactly. A large group. Over two hundred and fifty, probably. Moving north when they left, away from the stream."

I pushed the bowl aside. Two hundred and fifty in open terrain — we could handle that. Our formations were built for exactly this kind of fight. But orcs didn't come in neat, countable groups. Where there was one pack, more would follow.

"Did they spot our scouts?"

"No. The tracks were at least two days old, maybe three." Her hand drifted to the knife at her belt, one of Eol's, bronze blade with a stone edge that held sharper than it had any right to. "But they'll come back. It's their water source as much as ours."

I nodded slowly, thinking through positions and angles and the thousand small decisions that would determine whether we lived through this. "Then we need to be ready when they do."

"We're always ready."

"Ready to fight." I looked across the camp, at the children still playing, the families gathered around fires, the thousand small moments of ordinary life happening all around us. "Ready to bury people?"

Celestia didn't answer right away. When she did, her voice was quieter. "Are we ever?"

No. Never.

But the orcs weren't going to wait until we were.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Same night. Selas POV]​

That night, lying awake while the camp slept around me, I made a decision I'd been putting off for too long.

Vertalas would command the engagement.

I'd noticed him early on, back when the training first started. Not the loudest. Not the strongest either. But he watched everything, watched and adjusted and figured things out on his own. Picked up concepts faster than warriors twice his experience, and before long he wasn't just learning, he was anticipating. Knowing what I wanted before I said it.

He had the instincts you can't teach, and the patience you can't fake.

Somewhere along the way he'd ended up at my side during drills. Helping run formations when I couldn't split myself in two. Calling cadence. Tightening the lines when they got sloppy. Fixing gaps before I had to point them out. Making sure the shield wall actually moved like a wall instead of a collection of elves standing next to each other.

So I decided. He would command, full authority, his judgment and his responsibility. If this army was ever going to be more than an extension of my will, it needed commanders who could act without waiting for permission.

I would be there. I would fight.

But I would not command.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[Year 1137. Five days later. The Stream]

[Vertalas POV]​

I positioned the forces the night before.

Five hundred warriors spread across the high ground overlooking the stream. Archers in the rocks with clear sightlines. Heavy infantry in loose formation below, ready to lock shields on my command.

My command.

The words felt strange even in my own head. The Chief had made it clear: this engagement was mine. My plan. My decisions. My responsibility for every life on that field.

Am I ready for this?

The question had kept me awake half the night. The Chief had built this army from nothing. He'd invented the formations, designed the tactics, drilled every warrior personally in those early years. Every idea we used came from his mind.

And now he was handing me the sword and stepping back.

What if I fail? What if my orders get people killed?

I pushed the doubt down. Buried it under years of training, years of watching, years of learning to read a battlefield the way the Chief read one. He trusted me. The warriors trusted me. Now I had to trust myself.

Dawn came grey and cold.

"Steady," I said to the warrior beside me. Yalinim. Tatyar, young, sharp-eyed, already thinking two beats ahead during drills. He'd been solid in training. Now his knuckles were white on the spear shaft, his breathing too fast.

"Remember what we practiced," I told him. "Slow breaths."

He nodded without looking at me. His eyes stayed fixed on the grassland below.

I understood. My own heart was beating faster than I wanted to admit.

The orcs emerged from the morning mist like a spreading stain. More than the scouts had estimated. A large mob, maybe three hundred, moving without formation or discipline. Shoving each other, snarling, weapons waving in every direction.

No coordination. No leadership I could see.

Good. We can use that.

I raised my hand. Held it.

The orcs reached the stream. Some dropped to drink immediately, faces in the water. Others filled waterskins, fighting over position. A scuffle broke out. Shoving turned to punches, turned to one orc face-down in the shallows while the others laughed.

Closer. Let them come closer. Let them drink. Let them relax.

Movement at the mob's edge. Heads turning. Fingers pointing up toward us.

Too late.

I dropped my hand.

A hundred bows released as one.

The sound — I'd heard it in training, but never like this. A single sharp hiss, then silence, then screaming. The first volley tore through the packed orcs before they understood what was happening. Bodies jerked. Then fell. The stream ran dark.

"Second volley!" My voice came out stronger than I felt. "If lere Avari!"

"IF LERE AVARI!" A hundred throats roared back.

Another rain of arrows. More screams. More bodies.

It's working. The plan is working.

The survivors charged. No retreat, no regrouping. Just a snarling rush straight at our position, because that was the only thing orcs knew how to do when they were hurt and angry.

I'd expected that. Counted on it.

"Shield wall! Now!"

The heavy infantry surged forward, flowing together like something alive. Shields rose and locked. Edge overlapping edge, gaps vanishing as warriors pressed shoulder to shoulder. Exactly like we'd drilled. Exactly like the Chief had taught us.

"Spears ready!" Yalinim's voice from the line. "First rank — brace!"

The orcs hit us like a wave hitting rock.

And broke.

The formation held. Shields absorbed the impact. Spears thrust forward, short, brutal jabs into the press of bodies, then back behind the wall.

Step. Thrust. Recover. Step. Thrust. Recover.

Orcs died faster than they could climb over their own dead.

We're winning. We're actually winning.

Then — movement on the right flank. A handful of orcs, faster than the rest, slipping past fallen bodies where the line hadn't fully closed.

I opened my mouth to redirect reserves.

I didn't need to.

The Chief was already moving.

His sword cleared the sheath in a motion I couldn't follow. Just a blur of metal, and then an orc collapsing with its collarbone split open. A second folded around a thrust I barely saw. The third swung wild, missed, and the Chief stepped inside the arc and drove the blade home before the creature finished its swing.

Three orcs. Maybe four heartbeats.

I'd watched him train every morning for months. The same forms, repeated until they seemed almost boring. Downward strike. Rising cut. Thrust. Guard. Recover. Over and over, in the grey light before dawn, while the rest of us slept.

This was what those forms were for.

No wasted movement. No hesitation. Every strike flowing into the next like water finding its path downhill. The orcs weren't opponents. They were obstacles, and he moved through them like they weren't there.

That's what a true warrior looks like.

The Chief stepped back into the line as shields closed behind him. The breach sealed. The rhythm resumed. He didn't look back, didn't acknowledge what he'd done.

Just another warrior in the wall.

"Left flank!" Celestia's voice cut through from somewhere above. "Archers in position!"

The surviving orcs found themselves caught. Arrows falling from the rocks, spears waiting below. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

They broke. What was left of them fled back across the stream, scrambling over corpses, abandoning weapons and wounded alike.

"Hold!"

The line stopped as one. No pursuit. No breaking formation.

Discipline held.

Silence settled over the stream. Water lapped at bodies. Somewhere, a wounded orc made noises that cut off when an archer finished it.

I counted my people. Checked the line. Looked for anyone down.

No dead. A handful of serious wounds. Dozens of smaller ones.

Against three hundred orcs.

It worked.

My hands were shaking. I hadn't noticed until now.

I commanded, and we won.

The doubt from last night felt distant now. Foolish. The Chief had trusted me for a reason. He'd seen something in me I hadn't yet seen in myself.

I looked across the field to where he stood, cleaning his blade on orc cloth, expression calm as if he'd done nothing more strenuous than morning exercises.

Someday, I thought, I'll be worthy of that trust.

Today was a start.

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[That evening. The camp]

[Selas POV]​

Word traveled faster than the warriors did.

By the time Vertalas led his people back to camp — Yalinim at his shoulder, the grim-faced Tatyar who'd become his closest lieutenant — half the Avari had gathered to meet them.

Cheering started before they even cleared the last rise.

Ragged at first, then building as more voices joined in. Children pushed through the crowd to touch bloodied shields, to stare at warriors who'd actually fought and won.

I watched from a distance, letting the moment belong to the people who'd earned it. Vertalas stood at the center of the celebration, accepting congratulations with the awkward grace of someone who wasn't used to being the focus of attention. His decurions clustered around him, trading stories that were already growing in the telling.

We can win.

The thought kept circling back, impossible to dismiss.

We can actually win against these things. With tactics and discipline.

Relief washed through me, stronger than I'd expected. I hadn't realized how much weight I'd been carrying until some of it lifted.

It didn't last. Relief never did. But for a moment, I let myself feel it.

Celestia found me before the questions could fully take hold. She was dusty, tired, and smelled like sweat and blood, but her eyes were satisfied.

"It's done," she said quietly, stopping beside me. "We caught them at the river bend. Fourteen orcs. None escaped."

I nodded. The decision had been instant, made while Vertalas was still calling the hold. The formation had worked perfectly, but letting survivors flee meant letting them find others. Rally them. Bring them back in numbers we couldn't handle.

Vertalas had done the right thing, keeping the line intact. That discipline would save lives in harder battles to come.

But discipline wasn't enough on its own.

"Any casualties?"

"Scratches." Celestia shrugged. "They were scattered, panicked. Easy prey."

"Good. Get some rest. You've earned it."

She melted back into the crowd, moving toward the fires where voices were already rising in celebration.

I turned my attention back to the fires. Vertalas had noticed me watching and raised a hand in acknowledgment. I returned the gesture but didn't move to join him.

His victory. His moment.

"You should be down there."

I turned. Thoron stood behind me, silver hair catching starlight. One of the first to stand with me at the Sundering. One of the few I trusted without reservation.

"Vertalas earned this. I'm not going to steal it from him."

"It's your victory too." Thoron moved to stand beside me, looking down at the celebration. "Your tactics. Your training. Your vision."

"His execution. His command." I shook my head. "The warriors need to see him as their leader. Not my puppet, not my shadow. Their commander. That only works if I stay out of his moment."

"And Celestia's hunt?"

I glanced at him. Of course he knew. Thoron always knew.

"Insurance," I said. "Vertalas made the right call holding the line. But someone had to make sure those runners didn't become a problem later."

Thoron nodded slowly. "You're building more than an army."

"I'm building something that works without me standing in the middle of it." I looked back at the fires, at Vertalas laughing at something one of his officers said.

"Commanders who can lead. Hunters who know when to chase. People who understand their roles and trust each other to fill the gaps."

"But you still had to send Celestia yourself."

"This time." I shrugged. "Vertalas will learn. I'll talk to him tomorrow. He held the line perfectly. That mattered more in the moment."

I watched the celebration for another beat.

"That's how it works. Everyone makes mistakes. What matters is learning from them. We talk about it, they don't make the same mistake twice. Eventually they stop needing me to catch what they miss."

Below, someone had started a song. New words, victory words, fitted to an old melody. Other voices picked it up, rough and joyful.

Thoron was quiet for a while.

"You're thinking about what comes next," he said finally.

"Always."

"And?"

I didn't answer right away. The celebration continued below. Laughter, singing, the sounds of people who'd faced death and walked away from it. Sounds I wanted to protect.

"There will be more orcs," I said.

"There always are."

{image: An approximate depiction of the battle.}

—•——•——•——•——•——•—

[End of Chapter 15]​

---

GLOSSARY

CHARACTERS​

Vertalas — First field commander of the Avari army. Quiet, methodical, with natural instincts for formation tactics. Commands the engagement at the stream, the first true battle won through disciplined formation combat rather than individual skill.

Yalinim — Tatyar warrior. Vertalas's closest lieutenant. Sharp-eyed and instinctive, already thinking ahead during drills. His voice from the shield wall becomes one of the defining sounds of Avari warfare.

Celestia — Commander of scouts and rangers. Leads the pursuit force that eliminates fleeing orcs after the main engagement, demonstrating the complementary relationship between Vertalas's discipline and her ruthless pragmatism.

MILITARY CONCEPTS​

The First Test — The engagement at the stream in Year 1137. Three hundred orcs against five hundred Avari in formation. No Avari dead. The first proof that disciplined formation combat could defeat numerically significant orc forces with minimal casualties.