Title: Small Mercies Prologue/?
Author:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
laguera25
Fandom: LOTR(TTT Movieverse)
Rating: FRM
Pairing: Haldir/OFC with long stretches of gen
Spoilers: TTT movie
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are the property of J.R.R. Tolkien, the Tolkien estate, and New Line Cinema. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
A/N: Because this is based on Peter Jackson's The Two Towers, it contradicts the literary canon. Likewise, I have taken certain liberties with the nature of Elvish marriage bonds. If you are a Tolkien purist, this might not be the fic for you.
The sea is never silent. It is ever murmuring, ever sighing, wistful and weary as it reaches for the moon and laps at the sides of ships with black, briny fingers. He can feel it in his feet through the thick, wooden hull whose craft his hands can still recall, and through the soles of his boots. It breathes easily tonight, the ship rising and falling on its gentle swells with the faint creak of timber. The wheel is sure in his hands, familiar as the contours of his own face, and the sails bell gently in the breeze.
He rocks with the ship, lets it go where it will. It needs no help from him to reach the shore it seeks. It holds that knowledge in its timber and its hemp, in the pitch that seals its deck. It is a knowledge passed from hand to wood by its builder, a knowledge that swells in his veins in sympathy with the sea. It is his for the taking as long as he rides the sea, and when he has shed his captain's mantle--for the last time, he hopes; he is ageless but no longer young--it will belong to the ship alone until even she is so much dust and memory, and then it shall pass from all knowledge, a secret forever lost to time.
He had not thought to go to sea again, but then, he had never thought to go to sea for the first time, either. But then had come Beleriand, and the great, silver waters of the sea, and it had stolen his heart. He had still loved the land and the green things of the earth, and wood had still sung beneath his passing hands, alive and fecund with secret tongues and unseen faces, but ever more had his heart turned toward the sea. It had stirred a yearning in his soul, bittersweet and unquenchable, and soon he'd abandoned the rooms of his house for the shore, where waves had met the sand like a grasping hand and the air had tasted of salt and endless night.
It had changed him; it had taken the name of his birth and reshaped it. A rush of breath had become the slap of water in the shallow shoals and the slopping lap of it against the hull of a ship. Nowe had become Cirdan, and a young lord had become a shipwright and a ferrier of elves. Salt had roughened his skin, and the sun had silvered his hair. Hands that had once fashioned chairs and desks and small toys for bright-eyed children had carved figureheads from stout wood and hewn planks for sturdy hulls. His hands had been coated with sawdust and slathered in pitch and spattered with ink and pigment as he'd drawn maps of the world as his ships had found it, and the songs of the sea had joined the songs of the forest in his heart. And then drowned them.
He'd never intended to be a captain then, only a builder, but the sea had beckoned him, sibilant and tireless, had entreated him to follow her where she would lead him. He had resisted for a time, had contented himself with overseeing the construction of his fleets and turned himself to the diligent governance of his host, but the song of the sea had become as a fever in his bones, a gnawing ache that had dogged his steps and plagued his restless dreams. His heart had fled to the sea whether his feet would follow or no, and in the end, follow he had, for she was an implacable mistress who would brook no disobedience.
She might be a hard mistress, but she is not without kindness, and full of splendors no earth-bound eye could ever see. The first time he'd rested his hands upon the wheel of a ship bound for sea, all other desires had fallen away. The swell of the sea in the soles of his feet had been the promissory caress of a lover, and as the ship had slipped from its berth and into the bosom of the waiting sea, he'd sung out for the unbridled joy of it, echoed the sea's song with his worshipful lips, and pledged his heart forever to it.
He had followed the voice of the sea, had circled Arda in his gleaming, white ships and passed years gazing at the world from the prow, the wind in his hair and the salt a biting kiss upon his face. He'd stopped now and then at the harbors he'd found in his travels, had dropped anchor and descended to the shore, the sand wet and sucking between his bare toes as he strolled, but always his thoughts had returned to the sea.
Only the path to Valinor had been denied him, but he had counted it as no great hardship. While he had no longing for the soil of Arda, he had adored its seas, and he had filled his endless years with the building of innumerable ships and teaching others his craft. There had been shipwrights before him, but none so fine, and he'd taken immense pride in watching the ships rise from their berths, treasures unearthed by patient, skilled hands.
The sinuous curve at prow and stern. His hands have shaped it again and again, have shaved and sanded and smoothed it with painstaking exactitude, a god shaping the likenesses of his children. Long after he had built his final ship and watched it disappear on the horizon, his fingers had itched with the deathless memory of their making, and he'd risen in the night to carve its likeness into a block of wood. A poor substitute for the beauty he had once wrought, but enough to slake the terrible yearning that often seized him as he stood beside the sea and sent blessings to an Arda he would never see again. Aman is his home now, and its sea is wide and wondrous, but its currents are not those etched into his bones over the course of millennia.
He had not thought to see such a ship again, to feel it take shape beneath his hands. The wars of men and dwarves and elves were long ago and far away, across an ocean and lost to his sight, and the last of his kind had left Arda's shores ages ago. The ships he makes now are smaller, trading schooners and pleasure skiffs, manned by elves who ply their wares from one settlement to the next and drift on the current for the sheer pleasure of it. They are sturdy and stately on the water, and he finds solace in their creation, the serenity of routine and the practice of one's calling, but they are not beautiful or grand, and he does not miss them when they disappear from view.
And then Olorin had come, with his bright eyes and his secretive smile and his unexpected request from Manwe, and so it was that one last ship of Arda had left his hands and sailed from Valinor under the cloak of night. He stands now upon its deck, his feet steady on the rocking wood and hands steady on the wheel that stirs from time to time beneath his hands.
It is a vessel fit for dozens, but aside from himself, it carries but two. Olorin, who sits on the starboard side, visible only by the glint of his blue eyes, and a she-elf sitting leeward, eyes wide and unseeing as she walks the path of waking dreams. A cake of lembas, scarcely touched, sits at her feet, and crumbs scatter over the shiny leaf on which it rests and spill onto the deck to mingle with the salt spray that overlays it like fine dust. She's wrapped in a grey, woolen clock, huddled within it like the refugee of some terrible war, and perhaps she is. The light of the Eldar glows but dimly in her grey eyes, and her face is hollow and etched with an unspeakable grief.
So little of the Eldar left in her now, he muses as he watches her long, golden hair flutter in the breeze that rises from the foam like breath. The faintest spark, and even it is struggling, a candleflame hounded by the merciless wind. A season, maybe two, and it might have died entirely, a wisp of smoke left by a once-raging fire. She would have faded, a shade without substance, a ghost unseen until the breaking of the world.
None of their kind has ever tarried so long, so stubbornly resisted the call of the sea and the home on the opposite shore, and he wonders what she has seen, and heard, and tasted. Too much, he thinks, and much of it bitter. Her eyes are too empty for them to have found sweetness and kindness and joy, and his ears still echo with the reedy, cawing cry that had escaped her when she'd seen the ship bobbing in the harbor, its mainsail popping in the wind. Disbelieving and hopeful, but tinged with an inarticulate anguish that had stirred his pity.
Defeat, he'd thought as she'd taken a reeling step toward it, eyes wide and trembling fingers outstretched as if to caress the hull and the pristine, white sail. 'Tis the cry of wretched surrender.
Just in time, Olorin had assured him as he'd bustled her on board, but he isn't so certain. She has scarcely eaten since their voyage began, and she's spoken even less, the Sindarin soft and throaty, a rusty blade dragged across a pitted stone floor. Still fluent--that is a language she will never lose though a score of centuries pass without it on her tongue--but it is listless and tinged with the inflections of strange tongues. By day, she studies the sea while her hair lashes her face and the cowl of her cloak swells like a bubo at her nape, and by night, she sits starboard and retreats into herself.
"What has she seen?" he asks as she stares into a distance only she can see. The lembas slides jerkily across the deck and comes to a stop precisely in the middle.
Olorin's merry eyes grow grave, and he sets his staff between his knees and wraps both hands around it. "Too much, I fear," he admits. "War, famine, sickness, the rise and fall of kingdoms beyond the counting, the blighting and blackening of the land, the death of innocents, and the rise of tyrants."
He falls silent, considering. He, too, has seen these things, and more besides. The destruction of Beleriand, its shores littered with the smashed hulks of his ships, their timbers blackened and smoldering and sizzling in the churning surf; its forests despoiled and felled in huge swathes, gashes in the land that would never heal; bodies bobbing on the water as if they were swimming for the shore. The soil saturated with blood.
The Second Kinslaying, and the Third, when Feanor and his cursed sons had drawn swords against kin and spilled innocent blood in the name of the Silmarils they so coveted. More boats and bodies, bloody and bloated and ruined. Children with neither father nor mother, dirty and frightened and calling for parents who would never come. Elwing, dead on the steps of her hall, arms outflung and gown drenched in blood, her head lolling at an improbable angle. Two solemn, wide-eyed children playing near a waterfall, one splashing in the burbling foam and the other dabbling listlessly in its cooling mist. One would choose the mortal path; the other the path of the Eldar, and both had been still, warm stones nestled into the crook of nurturing arms as they'd been borne away from the wrack and ruin of their city.
The last alliance of elves and men, when he had stood beside Gil-Galad and watched orcs pour from Mordor in a bilious, black tide. The elf-child carried from Doriath had been there, too, herald to the High King, and too young for the test he faced. But then, so many of them had been. Men little more than boys, beardless and unblooded, had clutched spears and bows and swords that rattled in their grips, and elves just come to maturity had nocked arrows that still wept sap. Gil-Galad's body, broken and lifeless amid the ash and rubble of Mount Doom, and Elrond's sooty, waxen face as he'd trudged from the mountain with blood under his ragged nails and dire tidings on his lips.
His had been the haven for the straggling, sad remnants of the once-mighty Noldor who had been driven from Gondolin by Melkor, the dark and terrible king. So few survivors, and yet they had seemed so many as they'd limped through the gates, bundles on their backs and dead-eyed children clinging to their bowed, grimy necks. Bloody footprints in the earth from ragged, raw feet, and groaning wounded carried on makeshift litters. A few blunted swords and cloven helms, but not many. Most of the survivors had been women and children. Laments unceasing, piercing and intolerable against frayed nerves and shattered hearts. Sorrow and blood mingled on the air in a noxious, dizzying miasma. The eerie, flickering glow of a burning city on the distant horizon. The last hope of Arda, reduced to ash and glowing cinders.
The poison of these memories has faded with time, leached from his marrow by the mercy of the Valar and by his sojourn in Aman. They are distant now, and painless, pictures woven into an artful tapestry, the red of blood gone to duller, safer sepia.
She has never had such respite, he realizes uneasily as he watches her sway with the ship. How many horrors has she seen during the long years of her exile, and each as vivid as the day she witnessed them, or, perhaps, endured them?
"She will be all right," Olorin assures him as though he has read his mind. He sits with his staff across his knees. He braces the stick of white ash with one hand as he shifts and settles and stretches his feet.
"How can you be so certain?"
"She has endured her grief for all these long ages. She can endure it yet a while longer," he answers serenely.
"And what name has her grief?" he asks. Though it be stamped plainly upon her face, its source is unknown to him. The wheel stirs beneath his hands, and he lets it slither through his fingers.
Olorin turns his gaze upon her, and in his expression there is a mixture of consternation and compassion. "Love," he says quietly, the word nearly lost to the sibilant hiss of the sea. "Its name is love."
Author:
laguera25Fandom: LOTR(TTT Movieverse)
Rating: FRM
Pairing: Haldir/OFC with long stretches of gen
Spoilers: TTT movie
Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are the property of J.R.R. Tolkien, the Tolkien estate, and New Line Cinema. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.
A/N: Because this is based on Peter Jackson's The Two Towers, it contradicts the literary canon. Likewise, I have taken certain liberties with the nature of Elvish marriage bonds. If you are a Tolkien purist, this might not be the fic for you.
The sea is never silent. It is ever murmuring, ever sighing, wistful and weary as it reaches for the moon and laps at the sides of ships with black, briny fingers. He can feel it in his feet through the thick, wooden hull whose craft his hands can still recall, and through the soles of his boots. It breathes easily tonight, the ship rising and falling on its gentle swells with the faint creak of timber. The wheel is sure in his hands, familiar as the contours of his own face, and the sails bell gently in the breeze.
He rocks with the ship, lets it go where it will. It needs no help from him to reach the shore it seeks. It holds that knowledge in its timber and its hemp, in the pitch that seals its deck. It is a knowledge passed from hand to wood by its builder, a knowledge that swells in his veins in sympathy with the sea. It is his for the taking as long as he rides the sea, and when he has shed his captain's mantle--for the last time, he hopes; he is ageless but no longer young--it will belong to the ship alone until even she is so much dust and memory, and then it shall pass from all knowledge, a secret forever lost to time.
He had not thought to go to sea again, but then, he had never thought to go to sea for the first time, either. But then had come Beleriand, and the great, silver waters of the sea, and it had stolen his heart. He had still loved the land and the green things of the earth, and wood had still sung beneath his passing hands, alive and fecund with secret tongues and unseen faces, but ever more had his heart turned toward the sea. It had stirred a yearning in his soul, bittersweet and unquenchable, and soon he'd abandoned the rooms of his house for the shore, where waves had met the sand like a grasping hand and the air had tasted of salt and endless night.
It had changed him; it had taken the name of his birth and reshaped it. A rush of breath had become the slap of water in the shallow shoals and the slopping lap of it against the hull of a ship. Nowe had become Cirdan, and a young lord had become a shipwright and a ferrier of elves. Salt had roughened his skin, and the sun had silvered his hair. Hands that had once fashioned chairs and desks and small toys for bright-eyed children had carved figureheads from stout wood and hewn planks for sturdy hulls. His hands had been coated with sawdust and slathered in pitch and spattered with ink and pigment as he'd drawn maps of the world as his ships had found it, and the songs of the sea had joined the songs of the forest in his heart. And then drowned them.
He'd never intended to be a captain then, only a builder, but the sea had beckoned him, sibilant and tireless, had entreated him to follow her where she would lead him. He had resisted for a time, had contented himself with overseeing the construction of his fleets and turned himself to the diligent governance of his host, but the song of the sea had become as a fever in his bones, a gnawing ache that had dogged his steps and plagued his restless dreams. His heart had fled to the sea whether his feet would follow or no, and in the end, follow he had, for she was an implacable mistress who would brook no disobedience.
She might be a hard mistress, but she is not without kindness, and full of splendors no earth-bound eye could ever see. The first time he'd rested his hands upon the wheel of a ship bound for sea, all other desires had fallen away. The swell of the sea in the soles of his feet had been the promissory caress of a lover, and as the ship had slipped from its berth and into the bosom of the waiting sea, he'd sung out for the unbridled joy of it, echoed the sea's song with his worshipful lips, and pledged his heart forever to it.
He had followed the voice of the sea, had circled Arda in his gleaming, white ships and passed years gazing at the world from the prow, the wind in his hair and the salt a biting kiss upon his face. He'd stopped now and then at the harbors he'd found in his travels, had dropped anchor and descended to the shore, the sand wet and sucking between his bare toes as he strolled, but always his thoughts had returned to the sea.
Only the path to Valinor had been denied him, but he had counted it as no great hardship. While he had no longing for the soil of Arda, he had adored its seas, and he had filled his endless years with the building of innumerable ships and teaching others his craft. There had been shipwrights before him, but none so fine, and he'd taken immense pride in watching the ships rise from their berths, treasures unearthed by patient, skilled hands.
The sinuous curve at prow and stern. His hands have shaped it again and again, have shaved and sanded and smoothed it with painstaking exactitude, a god shaping the likenesses of his children. Long after he had built his final ship and watched it disappear on the horizon, his fingers had itched with the deathless memory of their making, and he'd risen in the night to carve its likeness into a block of wood. A poor substitute for the beauty he had once wrought, but enough to slake the terrible yearning that often seized him as he stood beside the sea and sent blessings to an Arda he would never see again. Aman is his home now, and its sea is wide and wondrous, but its currents are not those etched into his bones over the course of millennia.
He had not thought to see such a ship again, to feel it take shape beneath his hands. The wars of men and dwarves and elves were long ago and far away, across an ocean and lost to his sight, and the last of his kind had left Arda's shores ages ago. The ships he makes now are smaller, trading schooners and pleasure skiffs, manned by elves who ply their wares from one settlement to the next and drift on the current for the sheer pleasure of it. They are sturdy and stately on the water, and he finds solace in their creation, the serenity of routine and the practice of one's calling, but they are not beautiful or grand, and he does not miss them when they disappear from view.
And then Olorin had come, with his bright eyes and his secretive smile and his unexpected request from Manwe, and so it was that one last ship of Arda had left his hands and sailed from Valinor under the cloak of night. He stands now upon its deck, his feet steady on the rocking wood and hands steady on the wheel that stirs from time to time beneath his hands.
It is a vessel fit for dozens, but aside from himself, it carries but two. Olorin, who sits on the starboard side, visible only by the glint of his blue eyes, and a she-elf sitting leeward, eyes wide and unseeing as she walks the path of waking dreams. A cake of lembas, scarcely touched, sits at her feet, and crumbs scatter over the shiny leaf on which it rests and spill onto the deck to mingle with the salt spray that overlays it like fine dust. She's wrapped in a grey, woolen clock, huddled within it like the refugee of some terrible war, and perhaps she is. The light of the Eldar glows but dimly in her grey eyes, and her face is hollow and etched with an unspeakable grief.
So little of the Eldar left in her now, he muses as he watches her long, golden hair flutter in the breeze that rises from the foam like breath. The faintest spark, and even it is struggling, a candleflame hounded by the merciless wind. A season, maybe two, and it might have died entirely, a wisp of smoke left by a once-raging fire. She would have faded, a shade without substance, a ghost unseen until the breaking of the world.
None of their kind has ever tarried so long, so stubbornly resisted the call of the sea and the home on the opposite shore, and he wonders what she has seen, and heard, and tasted. Too much, he thinks, and much of it bitter. Her eyes are too empty for them to have found sweetness and kindness and joy, and his ears still echo with the reedy, cawing cry that had escaped her when she'd seen the ship bobbing in the harbor, its mainsail popping in the wind. Disbelieving and hopeful, but tinged with an inarticulate anguish that had stirred his pity.
Defeat, he'd thought as she'd taken a reeling step toward it, eyes wide and trembling fingers outstretched as if to caress the hull and the pristine, white sail. 'Tis the cry of wretched surrender.
Just in time, Olorin had assured him as he'd bustled her on board, but he isn't so certain. She has scarcely eaten since their voyage began, and she's spoken even less, the Sindarin soft and throaty, a rusty blade dragged across a pitted stone floor. Still fluent--that is a language she will never lose though a score of centuries pass without it on her tongue--but it is listless and tinged with the inflections of strange tongues. By day, she studies the sea while her hair lashes her face and the cowl of her cloak swells like a bubo at her nape, and by night, she sits starboard and retreats into herself.
"What has she seen?" he asks as she stares into a distance only she can see. The lembas slides jerkily across the deck and comes to a stop precisely in the middle.
Olorin's merry eyes grow grave, and he sets his staff between his knees and wraps both hands around it. "Too much, I fear," he admits. "War, famine, sickness, the rise and fall of kingdoms beyond the counting, the blighting and blackening of the land, the death of innocents, and the rise of tyrants."
He falls silent, considering. He, too, has seen these things, and more besides. The destruction of Beleriand, its shores littered with the smashed hulks of his ships, their timbers blackened and smoldering and sizzling in the churning surf; its forests despoiled and felled in huge swathes, gashes in the land that would never heal; bodies bobbing on the water as if they were swimming for the shore. The soil saturated with blood.
The Second Kinslaying, and the Third, when Feanor and his cursed sons had drawn swords against kin and spilled innocent blood in the name of the Silmarils they so coveted. More boats and bodies, bloody and bloated and ruined. Children with neither father nor mother, dirty and frightened and calling for parents who would never come. Elwing, dead on the steps of her hall, arms outflung and gown drenched in blood, her head lolling at an improbable angle. Two solemn, wide-eyed children playing near a waterfall, one splashing in the burbling foam and the other dabbling listlessly in its cooling mist. One would choose the mortal path; the other the path of the Eldar, and both had been still, warm stones nestled into the crook of nurturing arms as they'd been borne away from the wrack and ruin of their city.
The last alliance of elves and men, when he had stood beside Gil-Galad and watched orcs pour from Mordor in a bilious, black tide. The elf-child carried from Doriath had been there, too, herald to the High King, and too young for the test he faced. But then, so many of them had been. Men little more than boys, beardless and unblooded, had clutched spears and bows and swords that rattled in their grips, and elves just come to maturity had nocked arrows that still wept sap. Gil-Galad's body, broken and lifeless amid the ash and rubble of Mount Doom, and Elrond's sooty, waxen face as he'd trudged from the mountain with blood under his ragged nails and dire tidings on his lips.
His had been the haven for the straggling, sad remnants of the once-mighty Noldor who had been driven from Gondolin by Melkor, the dark and terrible king. So few survivors, and yet they had seemed so many as they'd limped through the gates, bundles on their backs and dead-eyed children clinging to their bowed, grimy necks. Bloody footprints in the earth from ragged, raw feet, and groaning wounded carried on makeshift litters. A few blunted swords and cloven helms, but not many. Most of the survivors had been women and children. Laments unceasing, piercing and intolerable against frayed nerves and shattered hearts. Sorrow and blood mingled on the air in a noxious, dizzying miasma. The eerie, flickering glow of a burning city on the distant horizon. The last hope of Arda, reduced to ash and glowing cinders.
The poison of these memories has faded with time, leached from his marrow by the mercy of the Valar and by his sojourn in Aman. They are distant now, and painless, pictures woven into an artful tapestry, the red of blood gone to duller, safer sepia.
She has never had such respite, he realizes uneasily as he watches her sway with the ship. How many horrors has she seen during the long years of her exile, and each as vivid as the day she witnessed them, or, perhaps, endured them?
"She will be all right," Olorin assures him as though he has read his mind. He sits with his staff across his knees. He braces the stick of white ash with one hand as he shifts and settles and stretches his feet.
"How can you be so certain?"
"She has endured her grief for all these long ages. She can endure it yet a while longer," he answers serenely.
"And what name has her grief?" he asks. Though it be stamped plainly upon her face, its source is unknown to him. The wheel stirs beneath his hands, and he lets it slither through his fingers.
Olorin turns his gaze upon her, and in his expression there is a mixture of consternation and compassion. "Love," he says quietly, the word nearly lost to the sibilant hiss of the sea. "Its name is love."
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