Wreath in the Rapids by Elleth

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Chapter 1

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The dark.

It was roiling at the edge of her sight, lurking beneath the trees, a shadow behind her reaching its claws at her.

Nellas spun around. Nothing. There was nothing there, only a nightingale trill of alarm somewhere further in the forest. Instinct told her to run to it, seek help from Melian's messenger, but her feet were as though frozen, her very limbs immovable even as she fancied herself running.

The trees swayed above her. The sun darkened. An empty abyss yawned up to swallow her. Ninglyr withered into slime in the stream.

No.

And then it passed.

Nellas blinked, and sat up. Her knees were stiff with dried dirt, the legs of her trousers splattered with mud, and her feet coated in loamy soil up to her ankles. She did not recall how it had come to pass, nor anything except the images she had seen, and now lying stretched in a clearing on the forest floor it seemed she had merely swooned, but something gave her pause: her throat parched, her lungs burning, her muscles aching as after chasing deer in the autum hunt – all the signs of panicked flight. There was a scratch, burning from jaw to temple, twigs in her hair as though she had not merely gone walking in the morning, to a forest pond to observe a choir of brown frogs gathering to mate, but indeed dashed through the underbrush like a hunted deer.

And there was no trace of Niënor on her mind, none of the comforting presence that had always shone like a beacon of light and warmth at the back of her mind and heart. It was this sudden absence, after Nellas' thoughts had dwelled on her ever since her departure a handful of days ago, that gave her the most pause, as though a kernel of strange darkness had folded within her and taken Niënor's place.

Melian had warned her, had she not? Had warned her of grief and joy, and more beyond it that even my eyes cannot see.

That this darkness should be it... Nellas stumbled forward a few steps, curling up in a hollow beneath the great, twisting root of a beech, and reached within, toward the kernel of dark.

Nothing.

It was then the tears came; great wracking sobs like the gurgle of Esgalduin in hidden cracks in the bank, and beyond the trees the sun set, extinguishing the gentle light through the forest in favour of a grey dusk. She pressed her face into the cool earth, alive with the scent of green shoots and budding things forcing their way toward the light.

Niënor was not gone, could not be gone.

* * *

"Nellas, it has been days since you last ate. You are letting your grief overwhelm you. At least take this from me." Her mother handed her a bowl of steaming broth, and Nellas balanced it precariously on one knee to wait for the concoction of meat and herbs to cool, not caring that it might fall, and then took a first careful sip.

Against her expectations, for she had thought it might taste like water even as the scents made her stomach ache, the flavour of wild leeks and venison burst on her tongue.

Nellas drank down more of the broth to avoid looking at her mother, now crouching by her underneath the overhang at the cave-mouth, while the rain beat a staccatto into the night and splashed to earth in rivulets. Thunder rolled west away in the evening, and behind her Gellorn jumped, peering over her shoulder out into the storm.

"Is it very bad?" asked he, threading her leather-band necklace around his fingers until Niënor's pendant hung like a choker's on her neck, and she prised her brother's little hand loose again.

"Yes. Will you leave that alone?"

"Nellas..." said her mother, sighing. "It has been the girl was ill-fated, as was her brother. I do not understand why you insisted on mingling with mortals knowing all it would bring you in the end was grief. Melian will have had her reasons, but why she must use my daughter for her designs, and why my daughter emmeshed herself in such spiderwebs so readily..."

"Túrin and I were friends. He was adrift, he needed someone to steer him, and the Queen would not have needed to come to me. And Niënor I love. Mother... there is more to her than her name and her curse. I gave her a new name, and before she left I gave her my armour as bride-gift."

Her mother's lips thinned. "That was ungracious to us."

Gellorn slipped onto her lap, nearly upsetting the soup-bowl, and her mother rescued it with a cluck of her tongue.

"Does that mean you're plighted, Nellas?" he asked with a grin that she could not return.

"Not yet. But soon, I think, if she still wants me when she comes back." She ruffled her brother's hair.

"If she returns," her mother cut in. Outside the shelter, the storm raged on unchanging, and still the thunder continued to rumble away. Lightning jagged over the sky and threw the swaying trees into sharp black relief, all their bare branches lifted up. "I do not think this is a weather of the world, nor one of Melian's making. It has an evil air to it."

Another flash of light, and the falling rain shone like pearls and crystals pelting from the sky.

"Storms in spring are not very strange," said Nellas. "Why would it be evil? How would it cross the Girdle if it were? And it rolled in from the south, not the north, and I do not think evil is so strong or reaching so far already. It is not Niënor's fault."

Her mother leaned forward and whispered something in Gellorn's ear. He pulled a face, but clambered to his feet and wandered deeper into the cave, where their father had lit a fire that flickered away low in the drafts of wind that pushed into the grotto. The noise of the storm would swallow their words, and Nellas felt a cold dread reach its fingers through her, the very same she had felt girding Niënor. Her mother's tight-lipped expression had not softened in the slightest, but her voice was at odds with it, small enough to have Nellas lean closer to understand her among the rush of rain and wind.

"Let the girl go, Nellas. She passed beyond Melian's protection, and I think whatever blight is on her family is reaching for you as well. Holding on to her, even through such a tenuous bond, is to make yourself vulnerable. Perhaps, had she stayed, both of you might have lived out her days in all the happiness Doriath allowed, but..."

"... but I refuse. I won't." Nellas brought her fist down hard on the stone, wincing at the impact. "Our bond is not tenuous, if it still holds despite whatever Dark came on her! She would never hurt me, she wouldn't bring evil on me."

"It is not a matter of ill will on her part - Nellas, I am afraid for you!"

In the cave her father looked up at the outburst. The soup bowl slipped and upended, spilling the remainder of the meal. In the forest, the space between lightning and thunder shortened.
It took Nellas a moment's breath to fight down to the urge to rush out into the storm, to relax her limbs, and to breathe. Her mother looked on.

"Mother... the Queen herself, she told me that we might be doing our part against the Dark – that love lived and given freely is ever the truest weapon. How can I let Niënor go if my part is not yet done, if she needs me now, regardless of what evil has befallen her?"

Her mother sighed and pushed a hand through her brown hair, half unravelling the braid coiled around her head. "I still worry for you, and my heart is too heavy for me to be glad about your choice, but my daughter is an honest child... and perhaps I misjudged you, and all this matter. Perhaps it is from Melian you ought to seek counsel, not from me."

Nellas rested a hand on her knee. "I do not know if I can wait until the court comes into the forest, but I will try. And Niënor may have returned by then. I will not give up this hope. She was not alone, and unless all the company was worsted... I refuse to believe that she is gone the way mortals go at their end. And if she does not come home, but still lives, I will find her. And if I can, Túrin. And Beleg." She shuddered. The very idea filled her with terror, but if Niënor was out there she would have to dare it, even against her will.

Her mother pulled Nellas to her side, so she rested against her shoulder, a warm hand on her cheek. "My daughter. You would risk the wide world without our borders for this girl, but not Menegroth, where you have friends and no ill will befall you?"

"I do not think I need to. Melian watched over us before Niënor left – should we have needed help, there was never not a nightingale, and when... I understood that Niënor was in danger, there was one, also. No doubt it saw, and the Queen knows; I only wonder why she does not come to me."

"Perhaps she does not yet know enough. Or perhaps it was her who stayed the fit of fear that came on you. You will soon know more. I am sure, Nellas." Her mother glanced out at the storm again. The thunder and lightning had passed away to the north, rolling over the highland of Dorthonion now, but the rain continued to spatter down unchanged. They lapsed into silence, and Nellas, suddenly weary with the fear for Niënor, shelterless in the wild, found herself reaching out to her, and her hands curled around the pendant.

In the east, a pale morning dawned.

* * *

"She told me once that she felt restless here in Doriath. After last summer, when I took her wandering, the winter was hard on her," said Nellas to Gellorn, who crouched by her on the oak branch, holding open a sack half-filled with the white umbels of elderflowers. Although elderbushes grew abundantly around the guarded bridge, it was still early in the year, and only the highest and most sunlit spots already sported flowers, but her little brother's impatient pestering had finally led Nellas to comply to an afternoon of gathering, and now she was glad for it: The joy on his face made for a good distraction from her own troubles, and the fact that Melian still had not sent for her, although even now there was a nightingale flitting through the tree above them.

"Is that why she left?" asked Gellorn, frowning. He fished an umbel from the sack and pulled the blooms off it with his lips, scattering yellow pollen all over the lower half of his face. Nellas smiled against the twinge of pain and wiped a smudge off his nose, before turning to descend from the tree. "Let us move on to the next bush." She dropped easily into the grass, brushing a hand over the elderbush and murmuring thanks, when something else caught her attention, movement beyond the rushing of the river – and indeed, there was a small company walking among the trees on the western shore of Sirion, barely visible in the intricate shadow-and-light mosaic of the forest.

"Gellorn," called Nellas, putting a note of urgency in her voice to forestall his usual dawdling. He peered down through the thin spring leaves of the oak. "Return to camp. We have enough, and there is something else that I must see to."

Her conscience reared up briefly, to leave her brother unattended in a border region, and undoubtedly her parents would not be happy with her decision, but they still were within the Girdle. The bridge was guarded and the forest lay calm and drowsy in the spring sunlight. She ignored his complaints, and sped south to the bridge clearing, waiting there poised on the balls of her feet. Before her, Sirion met the darker, wilder forest waters of Esgalduin, before the great sluggish river swallowed them up in a series of swirls and eddies up to the four stone pillars supporting the graceful arch of the bridge into Nivrim. On the far end of the bridge stood two guards in heavy plate who eyed her with bemused expressions, but soon returned to speaking to one another, understanding that she was no threat, perhaps they even remembered her: Nellas had been here before – indeed, when Niënor and her mother had been found by the marchwardens, this was the very road to Menegroth they had taken.

Perhaps again.

The company took their time. They had been too far away to make out any individual features, most had had their hoods drawn up – and even though they came marching from the north rather than from the Aelin-Uial, there was no saying what delays and twists had sped them onto that road. Niënor might be among them. Niënor must be among them.

The bridge-guards, who must at last have heard them, assumed position, either to hail the newcomers or to stop them.

Four emerged from between the trees, all so beset with weariness that Nellas could see their shoulders slumping, their feet beginning to drag now that they knew they had come to safety, their eyelids drooping and heads nodding forward. These people had marched to the edge of weariness, and there were stains, dried black, on their garb that spoke of battle with not a few orcs.

Nellas sought their faces, but none of them was Niënor.

Two she did not know, their cloak-clasps a holly twig and the arrow-leaf of black nightshade – from Region, and from the northern border to Dungortheb – but the other two at least were familiar. Walking foremost, and hailed with the respect due to the Master of the Hunt, came Mablung. Behind him walked Annuidh, pale-faced and her left arm splinted in a sling.

Mablung exchanged words with the bridge-wards that she could not understand beyond the rushing of the river, but when his eyes lit on her, her heart began to sink, for they flicked to a bundle he bore in his arm, the same grey as Annuidh's garb. The same grey of the garb she had lent Niënor.

Once beyond the bridge, Mablung flung himself into a sunlit spot in the grass and closed his eyes. The others followed his example. Nellas stood rooted to the spot, as though the ground had become a quagmire that kept her in place, until Mablung, with a weary noise, sat up and gestured to her.

"Nellas – the very one I need to speak to."

Apprehension dragged Nellas' feet, and her teeth were sinking deep into her lip against the words that wanted out, and in the end she meekly asked, "You bring news of Niënor? Is -"

"- she dead? Nellas, we do not know."

Her knees buckled, and if not for Mablung's steadying hand, heavy on her shoulder, she might have fallen, but he helped her sit in the grass and handed her a flask from his belt, empty except for a final sip or two of honey-brew that brought tears to Nellas' eyes, for the winter of the past year, she and Niënor slung about each other under the blanket of her make, and the sweet-lipped kisses they'd shared that evening. Mablung begun to recount the tale – the coming of Glaurung out of the ruins of Nargothrond, Niënor standing dumb on Amon Ethir, the long, slow plod toward Doriath and meeting the survivors of the confusion – three out of the erstwhile thirty of the host, and Annuidh wounded – the orc-attack and Niënor's escape.

Mablung's shoulders slumped. "She outran us."

Nellas couldn't hold back a choked sound, one that she was not sure was meant to be tears, or disbelief. "She outran you? You kept up with Túrin's chase!"

Mablung knelt, so his eyes were at one height with hers, brows knit, and Nellas fought against the impulse to turn her head away, the guilt roiling and simmering in her stomach when in the reflection of Mablung's dark eyes she could almost see Niënor, deer-swift with terror, burst through the underbrush, away away away and no other thought, the dragon's blackness swallowing all but the very first instinct of a hunted beast, the very one she could not act on when Glaurung took her mind – and Nellas, instead, had. She felt her cheek, for the cut from the branch as she'd dashed mindlessly through the forest. It had healed into a thin ripple in her skin, invisible to anybody's eyes now, but the terror of that moment still kept returning when she slept.

"I believe you," she said at length. Something in her voice cracked. Mablung squeezed her shoulder, and though the defeat clung to his every movement still, it seemed a little lightened at least.

"These she tore from herself when she ran," he said in a low voice, at last unrolling the bundle to reveal cloak, mail, tabard, girdle, and clasp, as well as shreds of Niënor's own dress she'd worn setting out. There still was golden hair caught in the chainmail, a thick strand and its roots still attached. Nellas drew her fingers over it and winced. How swiftly she must have wanted to get away, how terrified she must have been to rip all her clothes from her body – and now, unless she had been found by some kind stranger (and she did not want to think the alternative, an unkind one) – out there all alone, and with nothing but her skin on her, and mortal, subject to sickness and wounds so much more easily, and the spring nights often chill and rainy...

Perhaps Mablung had guessed her thoughts, perhaps her expression had given her away, for he took the now-empty flask from her hand and continued, "We sought for them as far as we could – through Brethil, for that was where she ran, but the storm washed her tracks away, or anything that might have befallen her – so we turned north, to find traces of her, or her mother, or any of the people under my guard, and it was not until we reached Anfauglith and found no recent tracks that we turned homeward again. If the King and Queen permit it, I intend to set forth again after I have delivered the tidings to them. I am not fit to be Doriath's huntsman unless I find them. And I would ask those who love them to come with me. I will not lie and say that we will meet no peril on the road, for the lands outside the Girdle have grown dark indeed, and although Morwen may be slain or lost without trace, Niënor is no spectre, and if she lives yet, we will find her. Enough grief was upon that family."

Nellas' throat felt tight with tears that must any moment come spilling, now that her very own idea was put before her, and her cough was the sputter of someone drowning. Leaving her mother and father, leaving Gellorn, leaving the woods and the Girdle that had cradled and nourished her as much as her family had...

"I will come."

* * *

Her house had fallen into disrepair. Nellas had not come back there after her fit – after the day the dragon had taken Niënor's mind – the storm had torn away half the beech's crown, a large branch crushing her roof. She packed little; the blanket Niënor had made, clothes, her bow and daggers. The winter stores she had had left were sodden, many moulding; the bowl of grain on her shelf was sprouting small green stalks stretching toward the light. Between her honey-jar and the wall clung a ball of moss and leaves – a wren's nest, already empty of nestlings.

Nellas might have laughed if not for the knowledge that she would not return here for a long time, and this was a strange omen for a farewell. She plucked a feather from the nest, a speckled brown, soft, shorter than her little finger: some said it was a charm against ill-luck and drowning, and if she needed anything on the travels that Mablung had proposed, it was this.

He had found her two days after his return, and out of Menegroth he had brought the permission of Melian and Thingol to depart and seek the lost with a company of eleven others. Annuidh had insisted on coming despite her wounded arm. There was also Aurlamath the healer; one Eluir, whose friend Thingalad (he said, and clutched the ring on his finger) had been among the company that had set out for Nargothrond; Maltheniel of the court who went to seek her mother and had herself been a friend of Niënor; and other wardens, trackers and huntsmen whom Mablung had chosen for their skill and craft. They gathered beneath Hírilorn, and Nellas had breathed her thanks to not be made to go into Menegroth again, with its pillars and prying eyes. She did not think she could have borne it, and even now it seemed that all eleven pairs of eyes rested on her.

Thandil, mistress of a beautiful hunting hound, cleared her throat, and the thought finally came back to Nellas, although she still hated to share it with the others, rather than clutch her mind around the kernel of darkness, as though it were a beacon of hope still – but if Niënor were dead, why would she still feel it? Why not instead the blazing light that must be without the world? And if Niënor was chained in darkness entirely, then why did it not weigh heavier?

"I am sure Niënor still lives," Nellas said, willing her voice to strengthen. "I am sure."

"So am I," said Mablung. Perhaps he understood her unease, perhaps it had been a token reassurance to the group that they would not go searching for a lost mortal girl entirely in vain. "And I am certain that not all the company were slain or taken – they must have fled the dragon – some may be finding their way homeward even now, or recovering in a safe place from the hurts they bore when the attack blinded and scattered them. There have been no orcs within the halls of Nargothrond since the city was sacked, this much was plain to see when I sought for signs of Túrin and the tidings the King bade me bring, nor between the doors and Amon Ethir. Glaurung must have driven them forth, or preyed on them."

"The fewer of them, the better," said Thandil with a hard glitter in her eye. There were nods all around the circle they had made around Mablung, and then he unrolled the map he had brought to outline their routes and areas of search.

* * *

The sea stretched, flat and black, until the edge of sight.

The calm was deceptive, she knew by now. Silachíl, a sea-captain of the Haven-Folk that had taken root around the mouths of Sirion, and with distant ties to Doriath, was harbouring them in his house, and he was fond of stories of the ocean, the terrifying storms, the unthinkable monsters that lurked in its depths, krakens and water-dragons, and ones in fish-form, whales that would swallow a ship whole, and tear all the unfortunate crew into darkness... they explained, easily why the ocean bore the name Gaearon among the inland dwellers if only half the stories she had heard were true. It was terrible.

Most of the time Nellas would leave before the stories turned to monsters, before the thoughts of Niënor reared up and threatened to swallow her, and often Maltheniel would follow her. Two years and a half, and there had been no trace, neither hide nor hair, of Niënor. Mablung and Annuidh had led them to the very place where they had lost her, but not even Thandil's hound had been able to pick up the cold trail, instead running a few confused circles until he sat, cocked his head, and whined.

Among those few wandering folk and woodsmen they met and spoke with in the bright second year of their search – unlike the folk of Amon Obel who fled or refused the Elves, afraid of becoming ensnared in Doriath's magic – none had heard of or even seen a lost woman, certainly none as striking as Niënor, and without help, Mablung concluded, she would not have stayed in the forest. Overturning every stone and hollow trunk seemed senseless indeed, Nellas agreed: Niënor had always been somewhat restless, and when it was summer again the season invited wandering as much as the past ones had, and the woods teemed with yellow flowers of all sorts. Melilot abounded in the high, dry banks of Brethil rising above the cleft that Teiglin scoured into the land.

She had resisted, barely, the idea of weaving wreaths and floating them away on the water, in the vain hope that somewhere Niënor would find them, pick them up, and wander upstream until they happened upon one another. The wreath she had made had barely survived a little stirred up water of a shallow brook in Doriath two years before; the whitewater of Teiglin would tear them apart in no time at all. Nor, should any of them stay whole against hope, would Niënor remember that they were a sign from Nellas. The alternative, that she did remember and could not return, was unthinkable, and Nellas refused the thought outright.

She rubbed a knuckle over her eyes and looked away when Maltheniel wandered through the warm sand of the shore toward her, stooping only to pick up a shell or pebble she'd happened upon, and then with a flex of her wrist cast it at the gulls screeching overhead.

"They're making me uneasy, as though they're trying to steal something of mine unless I'm not careful," she said. "Although I wouldn't know what that should be – Thranduil stayed in Doriath, my mother is not here..." Her face crumpled.

Nellas sighed. Rather than strengthen her resolve that Niënor would be found, the travels had gnawed and chipped away at it, until she herself felt like a flower-wreath in Teiglin's rapids being torn apart, disjointed, and now only a sharp sliver of hope was left that tended to slash at her often and unexpectedly. In spite of that she reached out to touch Maltheniel's hand.

"You are very brave to keep looking for her, but perhaps she made it home in the meantime – perhaps she also was hurt and recovered since. It has been a long time. And we have not found any sign that she died," Nellas heard herself say over the rushing in her ears. She no longer could be sure whom she was referring to, but at least Maltheniel's eyes, reddened, seemed to clear a little, and she gave a watery smile.

"You are a good friend, Nellas."

"The world is wide. There are so many things that may have happened. We found two of ours here. Eluir found Thingalad in the wild," she reminded Maltheniel, and it was with a bitter pang that he remembered finding, near the beginning of the journey, strange tracks upriver from Nargothrond, where his horse had carried Thingalad, wild with terror after the dragon's approach, and then thrown him onto rocks that had broken both his legs and left him incapable of travel – but being a resourceful man he had dragged himself to shelter in a dense copse, sang the brambles and branches into a roof of sorts that would at least keep him dry and hidden, and fed on the rations in his pack, sparingly. Eluir, near aswim with tears, had kissed his face over and over, and they had returned to Doriath together, leaving the company smaller, but heartened.

That, too, had worn away, and much of it very recently, for the northern lands were struck so heavily with orc-attacks that they all agreed to seek downriver rather than risk their own lives also. Nellas felt the eyes of the others upon her more and more often, and Aurlamath, a small, stocky woman who would heal anything from blisters to broken bones, with curiously squirrel-like eyes and cheeks that looked stuffed with nuts more often than not, had taken her aside the past winter and made clear that Mablung's command constrained the company to stay together much more than her faith in Niënor's being alive, and some were beginning to grumble against her stubborn hope.

It had been Annuidh who had folded an arm around Nellas' shoulders at those times, wordlessly.

* * *

Autumn this far south differed from autumn in Doriath. There was none of the blaze of colours Nellas was used to; instead it gilded the willows and birches stretching along the water-courses and in the reed-fields surrounding the Havens, then browned them, and a storm rolling in from the sea stripped the leaves in a single night and day. Nellas shivered in her bed, drawing the blankets up. The storm reminded her of the one shortly after Niënor's vanishing, and in that, the howling of the wind seemed oddly final.

The following morning Mablung came to her, and shook his head slowly. "I cannot hold them any longer. Nearly three years of fruitless search will wear anybody thin, Nellas, perhaps except you, and even the respite here has done nothing to calm them. I finally met with the leader of the Nargothrondim, one Ivrellain, and from her I heard some tidings she gathered of Túrin, all saying that he survived the city's fall, but was as one bespelled – like his sister, and it is likely that if they even still live, they were both taken. We cannot go into Angband, Nellas, and even Maltheniel has nearly stopped hoping to find her mother." Mablung's eyes hardened, though they were not without pity. "I have been running from my shame long enough. We are returning home."

The air went out of her before Nellas could think of words to reply.

* * *

They had made the road to Doriath with the first snow of winter drifting down Sirion to meet them, and it seemed the promise of home granted the feet of the company wings. Where Nellas had often been walking in the lead alongside Mablung before, anxious to miss any sign at all, she now lagged behind as the chill in the air grew the further north they travelled and the woods of Doriath, first only a jagged line in the distance, resolved itself into individual, barren trees, like a row of teeth waiting to snatch her up again – and unless Niënor had in the meantime returned to Doriath, Nellas doubted that another chance to find her would arise.

Three years, or nearly so. Fruitless.

Three years in which her brother would have grown, perhaps to her shoulder's height, perhaps higher, six breeds of wrens in the nest behind her honey-jar, three summers for the ninglyr in the stream to spread and carpet the bank, three summers in which Nellas had worn the facets of Niënor's pendant smooth with so many touches that the leather band had rubbed thin and torn, and she'd had it replaced...

... and three years without Niënor. Among her own people she would no longer be young, at least not unquestionably so, and once again the thought left Nellas with her throat tight, the idea of Niënor rushing to her end with exuberance – but all that had become so commonplace in the meantime that it barely still registered as strange in her mind, and when the mists of the Girdle swept aside before her feet, the urge to cry, to turn and run, had made way for a leaden weariness that settled into her very bones.

* * *

After, Nellas drifted.

"The world is far wider than you would believe," she said to her brother. Gellorn had not grown as much as expected, and it seemed he had inherited their mother's short stature, so far coming only to Nellas' chest, although she saw it less now that they were both crouched over a drift of snow into which Nellas had begun to sketch a map of the land outside Doriath, and the routes they had trod throughout their travels.

"And you even made it to the sea?" asked Gellorn, eyes wide. "What is it like?"

"Vast," Nellas replied slowly, "and very strange. The air stinks of fish in brine, and even though it is safe there, I like the forest better... but I brought you a gift from the shore all the same." She withdrew something from the pouch on her belt, wrapped in several layers of cloth, and carefully placed it into her brother's hands.

"A shell!" he exclaimed when he had unwrapped it. It was the size of his fist, twisted in on itself, and shone an iridescent white against the snow. Gellorn looked as though he had never seen anything more mesmerizing. "One day I will go down the river, much like you, and see it with my own eyes."

"Perhaps - but for the time being, hold it to your ear and they say that you will hear the rushing of the sea caught in it," said Nellas. "For now you will have to be content with hearing it, perhaps later someday we will all be standing on the shore together. Should any danger come on Doriath, we will go down Sirion to the sea."

* * *

Maltheniel came to her often. Like Niënor, her mother still was missing and she took the loss hard, wrapped in a formless grey mourning shroud that veiled both her dark hair and the golden-brown eyes she had been named for.

"Thranduil asked for my hand," she said one day when the new year had passed and the last of the spring thaws swamped the ground. Green shoots were creeping through the loam, but it promised to be a strange year, wan and silent in a way that Nellas did not remember. The very air in Doriath seemed strange with a heaviness of portends to come, and more and more Nellas found herself reaching again for that kernel of dark in the back of her mind, where Niënor's light had been.

"I refused him," said Maltheniel, when Nellas made no reply. "He stood by me as long as I recall, and I know that he means well, but I will not wed him as long as I grieve, and I will grieve as long as I know my mother's bones to lie unburied beneath the sky. And what of you?"

"I am promised. And I will not look at another until I know whether Niënor lives – or not. I remember hearing once – the lady Galadriel and her husband walking by Esgalduin near my house, and she told a tale of the early years, of a relative captive in the enemy's stronghold until he was rescued by the Goldin king's son, who loved him, and all that because he was hoping against hope. The lady Lúthien found her Beren again, even though he lay in Gorthaur's dungeons. Why should I do any different?" Nellas felt her lips form into a hard line, and in a flash of memory she remembered her mother doing the same. Was she becoming this resolute?

Maltheniel shook her head. "I heard those stories, too – they were hushed at court, and the King was unhappy that the Goldin should be revered, even if it was for just and good deeds. But daring them again... it may be easier to simply let her go, Nellas, and try to make such peace as you can. We can strive for it together."

"Perhaps I am not meant to be a hero, but the lady Melian herself told me once that love was not without purpose, and I want to hold to that."

Maltheniel sighed, biting her lips and glancing at the forest around her. "The Queen is uneasy. She was reluctant to bless the year, and have you not noticed how none of her nightingales fly, or sing any longer? Many of them have come into Menegroth, but even there they are silent. The lady Galadriel and others are even making preparations to depart – they do not like it and want to go east away. It is said that the Lady Nimloth conceived, and Mírian means to travel to Lanthir Lamath to mind Lúthien's grandchildren now as she once minded Lúthien herself."

"Then it is all ending?" asked Nellas. Maltheniel made no reply, and they sat together until night crept between the trees.

* * *

Nellas dreamt of a wreath in the rapids, caught in an eddy that twisted and swirled it around and around in the rush of white water. The flowers refused to break asunder, and the candle-like blooms of the melilot clung together stubbornly until a hand shook her shoulder and Nellas looked up into her mother's eyes.

"Mablung has come to find you. Wake up."

A brief time after, when Nellas emerged from the bed of moss she had slept on, Mablung was crouched by her brother, who admired the hunter's garb with wide eyes, and Nellas' mother was reluctantly, moving in the same clipped way she had spoken, serving him a guest-meal of bread and salt that he took, but with bewilderment – a formal gesture of welcome and blessing, but also often delivered as token goodwill to an unwelcome stranger.

"Please do not blame her," Nellas said in a low voice, while her mother pulled Gellorn away by the arm and busied herself with stoking the fire. "She failed to see me for three years," said Nellas, "while I wandered afield with you. Letting me go was not easy on her, and I think she fears that you will come and take me again."

Mablung wiped a crumb from his lips and nodded. "Then she is not wrong: I have come to ask you to strike out with me a last time. Glaurung is making for Brethil, and from the tidings that I received, I think both Túrin and Niënor may be there – and even were they not it would not be a vain errand, for still we may save lives."

"Do you think," Nellas said in a halting voice that she did not trust to remain firm long enough to continue the sentence, "that it may be her? That she was so close so long?"

"Brandir of the Ephel turned us away, do you not remember? Some thought that he was indeed speaking as one who had foresworn Doriath, and he, what reason would he have if not for... another voice laying those words in his mouth?"

"... Túrin? I... he said then, to you and all that would hear..."

"And, the word runs, he bears a black sword of fame among Men and terror among Orcs."

"The sword Beleg chose." Tears started into Nellas' eyes, remembering him.

"Anglachel, yes. And what is more, he is wedded to, as they call her, one Níniel, tall and fair and golden-haired."

Before Mablung had finished the sentence, Nellas was already on her feet, and her fingers wrapped tight around Niënor's pendant.

* * *

The road to Brethil sped away beneath their feet. They had intended to make haste to begin with, to offering what help and warnings they could against the dragon, for twelve against an enormous creature would be no aid whatsoever in combat, but Nellas found herself falling into a jog in her eagerness to get there, and even as they passed over the bridge and from the Girdle, she did not slow. Her pulse beat high in her temples and her lungs began to ache well before anything but a distant sheen on the horizon heralded the dragon's coming in the evening. On a high point of the road Mablung bade them rest, and he gazed south where, somewhere in the settling night, Nargothrond must lie hidden beyond the reach of hills.

"He is making for the straight way into Brethil," Mablung said, and his brow furrowed. "There is some impatience on him. Either it is his intention to make for Angband in a straight line – or something aroused such haste and anger that it is Amon Obel he seeks to find."

"Then we must be swifter," said Nellas. "But the only way we may pass the river is via the Crossings, is it not?" she asked, and Mablung nodded in answer, grimly.

"Melian grant us speed," he murmured, and began to stride onward again.

* * *

The acrid stench of dragonfire and the thick grey shrouds of smoke enveloped much of Brethil, robbing sight, air, speed and will, and for a mile or more they groped forward in the mist, feet faltering and dragging through the ash that carpeted the ground ankle-high. Annuidh, who had once again joined the company, looked about to faint, and Nellas felt her head spinning more with every step, and the thought that lent her strength to carry onward flickered like a candle in her mind.

Niënor Ninglor Níniel.

As much as she had turned it over in her mind, it could be no other, for, for, for... Túrin was under the Enemy's sway, crooking his life entirely into misfortune and grief, and another woman's love, that would have been too much happiness, too much true kindness to befall him – and the crooked evil in that story apparent now, the direction Niënor had ran, the refusal of the people from the Ephel to aid them, the fruitless search and the surety in her mind and heart that Niënor lived...

It must be her. This time it must be. It must be. It must be.

The thought drove her forward.

And then, light.

Not moonrise, not the noise and blasts of fire of the dragon that had subsided to the east behind them, not anything physical, but the darkness Nellas' her mind lifting to a blinding flood of light, awareness, memory, life.

Niënor.

Nellas pitched forward into the warm ash, overwhelmed.

* * *

Her skin was burning where the ash clung to her face, and she was shivering in cool air. Someone had wrapped her in her cloak and laid her in a swath of long grass, but waking was enough to drive Nellas to her feet again. Only a short distance away, beneath a clear sky studded with an impossible field of stars in the westering moon, nearly full, lay an enormous dark shape, and the moon gleamed a colourless light onto the body, serrated scales, jewels and coins clinging to cracks between them, while the underbelly, corpse-pale and soft, lay twisted to the sky, with a dark smear that could be nothing but a death-blow.

The dragon was dead.

As in a dream, the edges of the world still spinning and the burned trees all around her swaying as in a storm, Nellas walked to the cluster of people gathered on the promontory above Teiglin rushing away, and she pulled the sleeve of the first person she reached, a woman of the woodsmen with her face too pale and her eyes too wide. "What happened here?" asked Nellas, and her voice rasped painfully in her throat. The woman, who clutched a bundle of wood looked at her uncomprehending – perhaps she did not speak the language of Doriath, perhaps she thought it must be obvious, and in a way it surely was.

"Where is Niënor?" asked Nellas, remembering the new name she had been given here. "Níniel?"

The woman shook her head and turned away, and Nellas received no more answers until Mablung parted the crowd toward her, his face graven with sorrow and shadow.

"Nellas," he said and pulled her into his arms. The wool of his garb scratched against her face, and it stank – not merely of the ash and smoke they had passed through into Brethil, not merely of sweat from the haste, but there was the smell of cooled blood, already beginning to cloy, earth and rock. Nellas, pressing her face against his chest, felt her stomach churn.

"Where is Niënor? I know she lives – she is somewhere here, is she not? Please, Mablung, tell me where to find her. I was not – it was not the ash and smoke that overwhelmed me, but – she came back, she remembered – herself."

"Niënor is dead, Nellas." His grip tightened, and he held her while she wept.

* * *

The dragon's corpse was nothing but black ash crumbling over his skeleton by the next day's end, still glowing with embers here and there, and sparks scattered when another part of it collapsed inward. Already woodsmen with their axes had begun to hack away at the skeleton, while somewhere at the other side of the place – Cabed-en-Aras – a voice lifted up, to commemorate the slaying of the dragon and his destruction at the hands of Túrin, spinning forward and onward to the grief that both his life and death had carried, and the light and kindness that Níniel's beauty had brought to the woodsmen in the scarce years she had dwelled with them.

Nellas felt cold anger seep through her. Túrin had a bed – they were building him a cairn even now, and Niënor... Mablung had told her all the tale as he knew it, Niënor's dreadful leap into the water after understanding what had come to pass, her own brother's child – and how Teiglin's rapids had borne her away. Should she lie in the river forever, unadorned and forgotten?

There were melilot growing here as well, only a short distance away from the dragon's ruin, and this time Nellas allowed herself to act on the impulse that she had fought those years ago – had she done so, had she not resisted, might Niënor have found it, might she have remembered, might she have been saved before the worst had come upon her? Her fingers twisted the weed tighter with every single thought, until it was as hard and strong as wire.

Then she walked to the edge and cast it down, watching the fragile thing float until it alit on the water gently, gently, and twisted away on the swirls and eddies without sinking.

Somewhere behind Nellas, amid the wrack and ruin of dragonfire, a nightingale trilled, and she thought she knew the call, a thing out of the past that, though cherished, she had banished into the darkest reaches of her mind to still the pain that came with remembrance of Niënor's first arrival.

She is close, she is close, she is close. Go go go go go go.

The limestone at the edges of the ravine was crumbling, but Nellas sped away without much heed for the rocks breaking under her feet, always a leap away from falling, already onward by the time the stones were clattering down to be lost in the river.

The wreath swirled and danced, and Nellas followed along the path of the ravine. The Cabed-en-Aras lay far behind her by the time she lost sight of the wreath where the gorge narrowed and the water gurgled as though it had been dammed by something, fallen rocks, a log, it might be anything and nothing, but the wreath had not sunk, the nightingale had said...

Nellas slipped and scraped downward, tearing the skin off her fingers on the cliff – she knew how to climb trees, rocks she had rarely dared – and there, there, a speck of evening sunlight slanting golden beneath the overhang, a stand of ninglyr, visible to Nellas and no one but – a white swirl of foam dancing, and amid the driftwood and debris of the river, there – golden hair crowned by her wreath of melilot, red blood on a white dress dissolving into pink in the water, a battered hand clawed into the earth with the utmost resolve to not let go, unfocused, open eyes in the most brilliant of grey-blue, the swell of chest and belly rising and sinking with the barest of breaths --

Niënor.

---

Chapter End Notes

ninglor (pl. ninglyr): The Sindarin name for the Yellow Iris (Iris pseudoacorus). In the prequel to this, it also is the new name Nellas gave Niënor.

Obviously there is some canonical liberty taken here, but considering how Niënor's fate remains unknown, this doesn't seem to be outside the scope of the possibility, at least not for this story. I played with various different endings, including a canonical one, but found I couldn't be quite that cruel to characters I'd become very fond of (it seems I'm the wrong person to go to if "kill your darlings" is requested).

As for Nellas' wanderings – they make use of a mention in the Children of Húrin that Mablung, after losing Niënor, went into the wild with a group of others for three years trying to find her, so not merely befitting the implied high status she is given in Doriath, but also offering an avenue for Nellas to become an active character in the story and work towards a resolution ("Nonetheless Mablung would not rest, and with a small company he went into the wild and for three years wandered far, from Ered Wethrin even to the Mouths of Sirion, seeking for sign or tidings of the lost." - CoH, Chapter XIV). Likewise, Mablung and his band coming to Teiglin shortly after Glaurung's attack is taken straight from the books, but since I could not figure Nellas into the picture being silent at meeting Túrin again the way I'd written her, the timeskip seemed the way to go, and kinder on her as well.

I had also originally written an epilogue to tie together several dangling strands of plot that were introduced, but found it somewhat took away from the emotional payoff (which I hope I'm not imagining) of the end of the fic proper, but on the other hand I thought it might be necessary to include after all. (As is probably obvious, editorial decisions like this aren't my strong suit). So I'm giving that here rather than as part of the story.

* * *

Healing had been long and arduous, and not without tears – more than not, Niënor lay rolled in on herself in the cave Nellas had discovered not far away, trading only bitter words and griefs, that her fall into the water had been a mercy unsought for, that she had hoped to shatter on the rocks, to drown, and why life had won out she herself did not know, whether the curse upon her kindred had been lifted or not, whether she was a danger to Nellas or all others or whether her near-death had washed her clean. Nellas was more afraid than she ever remembered being, but at last Niënor's mood began to calm and change, slowly and haltingly, with more than a few returns into her grief and anger the larger her child grew, and more than once Nellas found her contemplating the water as though to cast herself in again.

Niënor tore out the ninglyr after they had bloomed, churning the water up with the little mud they had taken root in, and yet, later, showed Nellas the handful of seeds that she had salvaged, and first speaking of her fear of the impending birth, to be alone in the wild only with Nellas to help.

"Shall we return to Doriath?" asked Nellas, wrapping an arm around Niënor then, and receiving only a headshake in answer, but after a while, a hesitant, bitter question. "Would they still have me, with this -" her hand brushed over the swell of her belly. Nellas could only roll her shoulders, not knowing – whoever heard her tale would have to hold her innocent, but pity might sting as much as scorn. But her travels - they also had happened for a reason, had they not?

Nellas turned to kiss Niënor gently, and said, "I think I know where we should go – after all, all rivers lead to the sea, do they not? Even Teiglin, in the end. I know a place where we would be safe, all three, where my family may come in time. It is not all sweet water, but I think these seeds would be happy to grow there, also."