On Tides of Light by potorov  

OMENTIË

Let light go with them, and not come back alone.

So it was that the Falmari did not go to war, and yet the Host of Valinor crossed the Sea.

They took no armour and bore no swords, and no Falmari set foot upon Middle-earth. They made one condition besides: the white ships would remain under Telerin hands. Their own mariners stood at the helms, in the tops, and upon the sheets, and carried the Host of the West across the Sundering Seas.

No levy was made. In each household a mariner spoke or remained silent for himself. Some ships stayed at their moorings because their masters would not take them east; some because hands enough had not come; some because a harbour, too, must be kept. No door was marked for remaining shut. By the appointed tide, mariners enough had come.

The Vanyar came down out of Valimar in gold and singing, and their trumpets filled the road with glory. The Falmari fleet came out beneath the arch of rock in silence: white upon white, more ships than Elwing had known were in the world, without banner, drum, or war-mark of any kind. The singing upon the shore went quiet as they passed.

The old shadow went aboard with them. They sailed beside the Noldor who followed Finarfin, not the sons of Fëanor, and still their decks held the memory of Noldorin swords. At the helms the Falmari gave their orders; the Noldor carried them out. No song passed between them.

On the morning of their sailing, the shipwrights went down before dawn and painted upon every departing prow the same grey device, at no king's command: a mantle, for Elwë Greymantle, whom they had left upon a shore an Age ago, and for whom, in the only way now left to them, they were going back.

Astoron painted the first. When it was done, he sat upon the slipway and could not rise for a while. The younger shipwrights worked around him. One mixed the grey; another steadied the wrist of a man whose hand had begun to shake. No one told Astoron that he must stand.

The fleet went east out of the light and into the dark that the Falmari had feared for an Age. It carried no promise of return. It opened a road west for any of the sundered kindreds who might still be reached.