On Tides of Light by potorov  

ARCANDË

Hear us. We have no other word.

She did not begin with war. She began with wood, because that was where it began.

She told them how Elwë had wandered into the trees of Nan Elmoth after his friend Finwë. Lost among trees, he stood bound in enchantment for long years, under the starlight with Melian's hand in his. His kindred had gone up and down the shore calling his name, until at last Ulmo bore away those who would depart. She told them how Elwë had gotten lost but was neither slain nor made forgetful. His life had simply been elsewhere during that time. She had given them the grace of mercy, if only for a moment.

That was the first cry, and it was one of gladness. It rang through the hall and along the terraces, among those standing in the shallows in the dark. It carried over the quays and down the shore, though those who made it did not yet know what else their voices would be asked to carry. Yárawë, the oldest woman in the city, had walked the whole length of the Great March and remembered Elwë's voice giving orders under the stars beside a river whose waters ran sweet, in a country whose name faded into twilight. She put both hands flat upon the table before her and laughed aloud.

Elwing told them of Menegroth: the Thousand Caves under Esgalduin, its exquisite halls adorned with birds and beasts of stone, its towering marble columns that disappeared into heavens, and the mighty beeches of stone that were crowned in halos of shimmering emerald light. Elwë had taken the name Thingol Greymantle, King of Doriath and held dominion over this realm while making Melian his queen. She wove her Girdle about the wood, barring all who came against her will unless a power greater than hers compelled it; and for a long while that realm endured.

She spoke of Lúthien dancing in Neldoreth in the spring, and of the mortal Man who came through the Girdle out of the North with nothing to name but hunger and courage, and looked at her, and was undone.

Then she spoke to the tale's end: of the Silmaril cut from the Iron Crown; of the hand smitten off by the jaws of the Wolf; and of their desperate flight from the nethermost deeps. She told of the death of Beren, and how his beloved died of an unbroken grief; of the song of sorrow she wove before the knees of Mandos, which moved the unmoving heart to pity; and of the doom that was there granted to her. For she revealed that Lúthien had chosen the fate of Men, forsaking the Firstborn, and in the end had passed with her beloved beyond the circles of the world, where none among those listening were fated to follow.

That was the second cry, and it had no gladness in it at all.

When the hall had quieted, a voice from somewhere near the back asked the question that everyone there had been holding: did Elwë ever know, at the end, that Olwë had never ceased speaking of him? Did even a single word, message, or sign ever find its way to him from Alqualondë? Did he truly meet his end without knowing his kin still loved him deeply?

"I do not know how he could have," said Elwing. "These shores were always beyond the reach of our line."

That was the third cry, and it was the smallest. It was not a wail. It was the sound of several thousand people breathing out at once in a stone hall.

Then Olwë wept. The hall wept with him, and Elwing had to stop. She reached for the table because the floor seemed to move beneath her. Astoron set water beside her. Olwë raised one hand when she tried to speak again, and no question was put to her until she herself lifted her head.

The lamps burned down. Beyond the doors the tide turned, filling each hollow it had left in the sand.