Trip Not Over Thy Tongue in Wrath by sallysavestheday

Trip Not Over Thy Tongue in Wrath

Elwing has always been a weeper.

In sadness, certainly: for deaths, and losses, and the many small but meaningful unhappinesses of childhood and youth.

In pain, too. No splinter or small wound has ever gone unwashed with tears. No monthly weariness has passed unaccompanied by the slink of dampness down her grimacing cheeks. And oh, the great ache and breach of childbirth -- it left her gasping and afloat, rising on a flood, waters pouring from her eyes until the suffering’s sudden ending.

And beyond it, for Elwing also weeps in joy. Cradling her newborn children on the raft of her body, she dripped and seeped, laughing her delight and love and triumph from the very center of the lake of her tears.

All well and good. A damp eye proves a warm heart, as the old wives of Sirion say.

But Elwing weeps with rage, as well. With fear, and bitterness, and the great frustration of being only her one small self at the trembling heart of this still-tentative sanctuary, built across so many floating platforms of competing customs and expectations. On her high seat, tears are no great weapon, no means to rule. When the tight heat of her chest threatens to burst open, and her lip shivers, and her eyes well at her council’s foolishness or her people’s mutual provocations, it is dangerous. She must not lose control.

Elwing remembers Idril. She takes a lesson from her law-mother’s silent frowns. When her mouth dries and her throat swells, she cultivates stillness: bending her dark brows at the sources of the trouble and waiting as they fumble to right themselves, or talk themselves out, or acquiesce to whatever they read in her quiet disapproval, subsiding with a curtsey or a bow.  

If she carries her frustration home with her afterwards to heave and gasp and snivel with in the silence of her rooms, no one else need know.

Slowly, her anger is trained to silence, to a weighted tongue, a stilled breath, a furling brow. And then the pale sunlight of her apparent calm, her gentle nod of approval for a quarrel ended, a problem solved. The wheels of the city move more smoothly with her conjured peace. A queen by choice as well as destiny, she has firmed the center. Sirion will not fall.

At least not to its own troubles, she thinks, wildly, running across the square toward the clifftop tower, clutching the Silmaril against her swelling throat, her breath battling against her anger, feeling her eyes sting and flare with rage. Her boys are safe, she tells herself, or safe enough, if she can only draw their enemies away.

Maedhros, behind her, calls out, still offering, bartering, splashed though he is in gore, draped in the guts of her city: “Only give it to me, and all will be well. All will be well!”

Elwing scrambles for the parapet, perches herself precariously against the sky. All of Sirion is spread out below her, smoking and shuddering with the clamor of battle – everything she has so carefully wrought now tumbling down.

Wrath chokes her, and her hard-won discipline fails. She cannot breathe or speak for weeping.

“Elwing, I beg thee,” Maedhros gasps, reaching for his blade. “Look how I burn!”

Some small spark of seeing frees the thong from her tongue. The words spill from her mouth, through her furious tears.

“Let the air claim it,” she cries, fiercely, before she leaps. “And the fire take thee!”