Hill and Water Under Sky by StarSpray  

remembrance

this ficlet is a missing scene from High in the Clean Blue Air

The graves were obvious, three small mounds set beneath a mallorn tree tucked into a small garden surrounded by a tall hedge—the only enclosed space Beleg had yet seen in all of Imloth Ningloron. Beleg glanced up to see the silver undersides of the leaves shimmering gently in the sunlight that passed through the boughs. Flowers grew over the graves—roses, snapdragons, forget-me-nots. How very far from home they had come, he thought, and hoped that they had been happy, these three small mortal folk alone among the Elves. 

There were other monuments too, however. A statue of a woman stood nearby, her face turned skyward with a look of gentle sorrow. There were other such statues scattered among the flowers and the shrubs; there were other stones tucked here and there with names carved into them, or just symbols—meant only for those who had known the person they represented, small signs of quiet grief and remembrance. 

Mablung took Beleg’s hand and drew him around the mallorn tree and past the bench set there, to a stone with a relief carving of several figures, rendered in such detail that Beleg’s breath caught. Húrin he had never met, nor Morwen nor Nienor, nor little Lalaith who had perished so young—but he knew Túrin immediately. He had not been carved in the pose of a warrior or a leader, here. Not as Beleg had seen him depicted elsewhere. Here he was just a man, standing between his mother and his father, with Nienor on Morwen’s other side and little Lalaith on Húrin’s. 

“Who carved this?” he asked. 

“I don’t know for sure.”

Beleg traced his fingers lightly over Túrin’s face. He liked that he was not armed. That he looked like himself, and not what doom and fate had made him. He was not smiling in this carving, but he did not look unhappy either. It was so much better than the last glimpse Beleg had had of his face—of fear and fury melting into horror. “Thank you,” he whispered. A few tears escaped, but he had already cried most his tears for Túrin, and for Middle-earth, and all the rest of it. The storm of them had taken him by surprise not long after he had come from Mandos, but Nienna had known, and she had been waiting. Knowing he was not the only one who mourned made the weight of it seem a little lighter.