Twilight, Insistent it Creeps by Isilme_among_the_stars  

In those days Tuor felt old age creep upon him, and ever a longing for the deeps of the Sea grew stronger in his heart.  

- Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin, The Silmarillion

Tuor had always been strong. Annael had known it was so, even when Tuor was but a burbling infant, wrapping tiny fingers around his own. Remembering the powerful grip with which the boy’s father wielded his great axe, a weapon he had met his end grasping still, Annael had not known whether to be glad or weep at that promise of strength. Quickly too had he realised Doom clung to the child like a vine, and neither was that reassuring. For high fated or low, all Dooms were inevitably entwined with the long and bitter conflict that besieged Beleriand. And the Lords of the Edain were pursued just as avidly by Morgoth as the Noldorin houses they had been so quick to pledge themselves to. Not small were his fears for the tiny soul weighing warmly in his arms, and before he was full grown they were proven founded. Neither would they wholly leave him even once Tuor had come safely through many dangers to brighten the edges of his life once more.

In the shelter of Sirion’s delta, danger was at last distant. The target on his foster son’s back had become harder to mark, a faded and cloaked thing, and fate of an altogether different kind dogged Tuor’s steps. It crept upon him, growing slowly like lichen into the bark of their solid and dependable peace, invasive in a way that put down deep roots before either knew its extent. Realisation would come on the day that, for the first time, Tuor’s strength failed him.

“No matter,” he had said, flexing large hands and failing to fully awaken the stiff muscles within. “It is surely only a touch of over-exertion. I shall finish tomorrow.” Then he had laid his splitter against the chopping block with a sigh.

“Tuor,” Annael had answered, “even a knotty hardwood such as this would never have defeated you before.”

But the other had merely shrugged and laughed in that bittersweet way of his. “Men do not heal so well as Eledhrim¹, ada. These fingers were broken too many times in my youth, I fear. They grow stiff is all.”

Tuor did not often speak of his stolen youth, except in horrifying hints dropped negligently as inconsequential fact. Though Annael had let the matter be, inwardly he grew worried, and later, in the confines of his small cottage among the reedy fields, he had wept.

✧

They sat together at times, on a clear stretch of sand between the many mouths the delta flung wide along the coast. And Tuor never looked so content as when he breathed deeply of the salty breeze.

“It is so different here from the mountains,” he had once mused.

“How so, hên nin²?” Annael had asked, and Tuor had frowned before answering with a question of his own.

“Do you remember well our home, in Androth?”

For a moment, gusts that snatched away words and caused gulls to meander in their flight recalled to him the cool winds that once blew over Mithrim’s lake, before turning to carry the sweet rot of seaweed to his nose once more.

“As clearly as water is deep,” he said.

In spite of danger, the years spent raising this golden-haired child in hidden caves had brought them both much joy. The Nírnaeth had robbed much from many; amid such overwhelming collective grief, Annael had not marked how withered and stunted had become the garden of his soul, until he found himself growing alongside Tuor. Men, it is said, need not nourish the souls of their children in the way that elves must, but Annael fed Tuor’s all the same, and found himself nourished in turn. Joy crawled back into his heart like the slow creep of roots thrusting their way through frigid earth thawing on the brink of spring.

“Those years were like pirin³ flowers, hên nin. True, we often hid out of need. Yet, were they not also as sweet as they were brief?”

“Tell me of those days again, ada. Too many of the small details slip away.”

Watching another gull scramble for airy purchase, beaten sideways by the wind, Annael had bitten back his dismay and obliged. 

✧ 

Then came a day when Annael found Tuor poised like a sailor taken by siren song, coiled tight around fraying restraint. On a high clifftop he stood, amid a clangour of waves crashing violently below, his silver-touched hair whipped by the rising wind. He looked a figure of legend, standing tall before the oncoming storm.

“It is like Vinyamar here, almost,” he said as Annael drew alongside him.

“You have told me the tale. It was frightening, the violence of that tempest, even only to hear it from your lips.”

“It was a fearsome thing, true, and yet its song called to my heart.”

“And it calls you still, I see.”

“That it does.” Still Tuor’s eyes roved across gathering clouds on the horizon. “More stridently with each passing year.”

“Will you heed it?”

All the grandeur seemed to leave him then. “Ada, my life, my family, is here. And I sail this coast often.”

“But is that enough, hên nín?” Annael asked, already suspecting the answer to come.

“It never will be. But how can I leave?”

He could not bear the way Tuor turned once more toward the sea with forlorn eyes mirroring the turbulent grey of the oncoming storm. 

✧ 

Annael did not often board the ships hidden within Sirion’s reedy flows, but on this day he was drawn inexorably forward. Sailors told of a mesmerising creature living on the reef far out in the bay, whose skin could come alive with vivid and complex displays of colour. Its strobing body was a thing of such beauty that, transfixed, its prey knew not even a moment of struggle before it was caught. And he wondered if the poor creatures felt, in those last moments, something like he did now watching Tuor and Eärendil sitting on the prow, one flaxen head bent toward the other.

Eärendil’s hand stretched toward the horizon as if he could reach through the clutter of words hanging between them and pull their shared thoughts from the sky. And Tuor? Ah, Tuor was so like Annael had once been! All rapt attention bent toward his son, with his expression the softest rendering of pride. And then, as if both at once heard a call, sweet as the chiming of bells on the wind, they turned as one to the horizon, and were held transfixed.

“Perhaps,” Annael said, laying his hands on their shoulders, “it is time one of you heeded that call.”

Tuor shook his head. “Eärendil is still so young.”

“Too young for adventure?”Annael asked wryly. “Or perhaps lacking the maturity to find his way without you in this world? You were younger by far when we parted, Tuor.”

“And that was an unwanted grief, ada. Besides, there is Elwing to consider.”

“Then I think you know who it must be.”

Bright Eärendil, who had smiled at eight though his heart broke into a thousand pieces, lonely among a crowd as only a survivor who sees ghosts that should still number among the living could be, was not about to give up the habit now. He, a remaking of his father, but with the slender profile of youth beside Tuor’s solid mature frame, took the elder’s hand in his own. “I have known this day would come. Did you think we could fail to see how deep your yearning runs when your eyes turn to the waves? I will follow you, one day.” 

✧ 

Elwing had a way of reading the mood in a room more adeptly than most women twice her age, and of calming others before they themselves knew their cares grew unruly. Already, mere moments after the last bite was consumed, she cleared the leavings of their meal, before Tuor could grow unsettled and begin worrying at a ropy scar at the nape of his neck.

“We will not be alone,” she said, mature beyond her scant two decades upon this earth. Refugee children, he had learned, grew up faster than they ought, and maturity sat upon Elwing like a garland woven of roses, pleasing to behold even as the thorns tore at her brow.

“No, they will not,” Annael agreed, taking the plate from her hand. He would pluck those thorns away, every one, even should it take long ages. “They will have me, just as you once did.”

“A few more years…” Tuor seemed to plead, but to whom Annael did not quite know.

“Go while you are strong, and still full of life!” he said.

“He is right,” Idril agreed quietly. What was it she had seen in him that brought such resignation to her keen eyes?

Only Annael marked how purposefully Elwing busied herself as she spoke, white-knuckled around a cloth held tightly in clenched fingers. “We will lose each other, one way or another. It is kinder that the sea take you than other fates I can call to mind.”

Later that evening, as Tuor walked with him among the reedy fields, Annael could see there were words he wished to carve with his tongue, yet hesitated for the pain they would awaken. Long they lingered under the cold stars.

“Loathe am I to be parted from you,” Tuor admitted, as all around them the reeds swayed and sighed.

“Tell me, how old are you now?”

“More than fifty turnings of the sun, as well you know.” A teasing smile played on Tuor’s lips. “Surely you remember to the very day.”

“So I do,” he agreed. Far the reeds beside him reached into the cloudless sky, high above their heads, but even they had their end. From the nearest he plucked a tender, young leaf. “Barely more than a child you would be, were you among my kin, but measured by the reckoning of your kind, we have had a generous amount of years together. My measure of your companionship has been pressed down, shaken together and is overflowing, Tuor. I could not ask for more.”

“And yet, it seems little enough.”

“For whom do you speak? For me, or you?”

Bowed then seemed Tuor’s tall frame; an unwelcome augury of frailty to come. “Perhaps for both. I do not know… For me, I suppose.”

“You have learned to love like Eledhrim do: to linger where you find wonder and hold tightly to what you love, though these hands were made to let both slip through more easily.”

“Oh ada, what can I do? I am torn,” he cried.

“Loosen your fingers,” Annael advised. “Would sailors not agree? The ropes shall not sting then as they slip past. But cling you can and will, when circumstances warrant.”

The seasons turned, and before the year had slipped away in its entirety, Tuor would be gone.

✧ 

Sea-yearning took many years to build in Annael’s mountain-bound heart. When it swelled at last within, high as the springtide, he came to understand something of what Tuor and Eärendil before him had felt. He and the great ship carrying him across Belegaer were not fast friends, as Eärendil had been with Vingilot. It was only wood beneath his feet, as a bridge might be, and not a revelation, as Tuor had thought Eärámë. From its decks came his first glimpse of the Pelori, raising their spires into the clouds. How fitting to be borne back to the mountains! And to the mountains Annael led the remainder of his kin, having caught rumour of the place those who once lived and fought beside him in Mithrim had settled.

As he crested a final rise, and the world before him levelled to a highland that, though far north of the Calacirya, was no true match for Mithrim’s cool misty sward, Annael was struck by a familiar sight. Before him stood the son he had thought lost to him twice in this life, and twice found, to his astonishment and great joy, that he was wrong.

“Tuor?” he called in disbelief, and his voice broke on the word. And Tuor strode casually forward to wrap powerful arms around him, as if the very laws of nature had not been defied to allow this reunion to take place. Those great hands held him steady, tremulous as a maple leaf shaken by autumn winds as he had become. Annael had always known Tuor was strong.

“But, how?” he asked, incredulous.

“You were more correct than you could have known, when you marked an over abundance of elvishness in me, ada.”

“The sea longing?”

“A call from Ulmo, to once more breach the walls of doom.”

And Annael had laughed, even as he wept for joy. Centuries of accumulated frost, delicate as drifts of powdery snow within, began to melt from his heart.

“Welcome home,” said Tuor, and as he took him by the hand and led him through the grassy plain, Annael thought that perhaps it could become one. They had growing yet to do.

✧ ✧ ✧

1. Eledhrim = "elves" in Sindarin & ada = "dad" [↑]

2. Hên nin = "my child" in Sindarin [↑]

3. Pirin was a “flower that opened and shut quickly with any change of light”. Its name comes from the elvish root word √PIRI “blink” [↑]

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