here we go again by lonelyvisitor  

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the gods may throw the dice

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When he and Gil-galad again passed through the courtyard, it seemed to Orodreth that Uinen was appeased. No further fractures were apparent in the masonry, and the day had dawned clear and calm; from the rampants of the inn, risen Arien’s rays could be seen sparkling on her sister’s gentle seas. Though her gold glow mingled with a queerer and more beguiling incandescence: that of true Treelight, and the star that had come ashore with Eärendil. In his off-hours the silmaril was typically kept in a safe, but it was a very special occasion.

As they crossed the gates of the inn, Orodreth fussed with the sprig of aeglos at Gil-galad’s collar, hoping this would hold off his tears.

“I suppose that means it’s time.”

But Gil-galad stalled at his side. “I suppose it does.”

“Then what are you waiting for?” Orodreth gave him a gentle push. “Go off and get married! Círdan must have gotten here, for there’s incense rising from the temple altar — I know your old Adar will be wanting a moment with you before the ceremony, even if he won’t say it himself.”

Or provide adequate time for such a conclave — but then the old Shipwright was a peculiar sort. So Orodreth had learned over a few centuries of sharing custody of the son they both had parented. Particularly since his governmental and magisterial duties had been left behind at the havens of Mithlond, Círdan preferred to minimize his time on land. As a sea-captain he still happily officiated weddings, however.

“That he will.” Gil-galad sighed. It seemed to Orodreth that some anxiety simmered within him; he watched as his son straightened his robes and assumed his bravest and most noble countenance. “Wish me luck, Ada?”

“May a star shine on the hour of your marriage.” Orodreth reached up to cup his cheek. “And I suspect one will!”

He watched him walking off into the mingling light, sun and silmaril. Guests acknowledged Gil-galad reverently as he passed in his raiment all of blue and silver, stepping aside and bowing as he made his way to the little temple of Ulmo on the hilltop.

Orodreth steadied his own step. He’d never put much stock in weddings, having not had the chance to go through one himself (only a moonlit tryst and some awkward paperwork). And yet it was the same as when Finduilas and Gwindor had plighted troth some years ago: his whole body trembled with feeling, exhaustion and overwhelm and delight and joy. And memory, of the too-short time that Gil-galad had been a child in his care, of the man he had become. Even had the preceding day not been so disastrously eventful Orodreth suspected this tide of emotion would have come to take him over, to sweep him up the hill to where this moment so long-awaited would come to pass.

With welling eyes he walked forward, only for something—some elf—to crash-land directly in front of him.

“I must speak with you,” Celebrimbor insisted, stumbling up with his dented wings still spread.

For an instant Orodreth was too stunned to speak, but then he strode on past. “If you’ll excuse me, I have somewhere to be.”

“It concerns the wedding, I made the utmost haste to return before—”

“What, Tyelpe?” Orodreth whipped around. He watched as Celebrimbor’s eyes sought his snaking jewelry; now he wished he could tear it all off. “How many times in a single day can you tug me about? If I have been called soft-hearted, it is because I am! Yet I must now harden my heart against the vagaries of yours, before it breaks into a thousand tiny bits!”

“Artaresto—” Celebrimbor’s gaze flinched between Orodreth and the sky; he could not even maintain eye contact. “If you would heed me, just but a moment—”

“Heed you?!” Incredulous laughter spilled up Orodreth’s throat. “First you arrive here utterly unasked for, all charm and musculature and freckles, then you treat me as an anvil against which to dash your malcontent, then you—well, fortify the island against Uinen’s wrath, which was nice, I guess, then you disappear, and re-appear, and this was supposed to be a very happy day for me. And while I still have a chance at happiness I will heed that, and go to see my son wed, for I know as long as I live in these undying lands, I am certain I will never be happy if I am anywhere near you—”

The kiss was a shock. Yet after a muffled squeak Orodreth yielded to Celebrimbor, lips parting to receive him as one who had long been starving.

All too quickly it was over, but Tyelpe still held him through the heartbeat that followed, strands of their hair entwining copper, gold, and silver in the hillside breeze.

“I’m afraid that was all the time I had to explain.” Celebrimbor laughed, and not charmingly; Orodreth saw his darting eyes in fact were flush with panic. “Better hold on.”

Orodreth was far from finding words to voice objection. Before he even attempted, Celebrimbor had taken off into the air, and they were flying at speed toward a wisp of strange cloud that was hovering above the wedding ceremony, Orodreth clinging on for dear life.

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Before the altar of the open-air temple Círdan was presiding over the presentation of parental gifts, his long beard looped over his shoulders like a chain of office.

Through the litany of archaic prayers Gil-galad tried to mask his anxiety about his father—all his fathers, confirmed or otherwise. Now of course Orodreth was running late, though it seemed Gil-galad had seen him moments before.

(Then he’d already given Elrond and Celebrían their gifts—two olive trees planted in a little grove overlooking the Sea—and they had loved them very much.)

Galadriel’s sparkling gaze fixed Gil-galad’s attention back to the present moment: she was passing him a carven box that he knew contained mallorn-seeds of Lothlórien. Gil-galad bowed, grinning to his new mother-in-law; these were the descendents of saplings that he had once been given by Tar-Aldarion of Númenor, and they had never grown in Lindon. Yet in the Golden Wood that he had never seen it was said their trunks had held up the skies.

Beneath those storied boughs had once walked Celebrían. Now she stood before Gil-galad, tall as her mother and silver as her father, beaming and beautiful with strands of varicolored pearls cascading over the collar of her pale-green wedding robes. Gil-galad wore a matching necklace, for this had been their gift from Elwing, a careful harvest from seven thousand years of oyster suppers.

Beside Celebrían, as it always and ever would be, stood Elrond. If his wife’s raiment was green, and his husband’s blue, he was their perfect mingling in a gown the color of light on water, a shade impossible to capture and yet contained somehow by the light of the silmaril set upon his brow.

From the crowd of guests came murmurs that he was the very image of Dior Eluchíl returned to life. Eärendil and Elwing stood holding one another, mesmerized by pride and wonder.

Oh Gods, I can’t bear to look at them—I’ll ruin my kohl.

Elrond’s voice flickered through Gil-galad’s heart—so strange and wonderful was the feeling of mind-speech, brought on by the new marriage-bond! When he looked upon his husband he did see that Elrond’s eyes were glossed with tears.

In their braided thought Celebrían steadied him.

Come, elig, we’re the ones who’ve gone through this show before.

Though grinning wildly at his spouses, Gil-galad kept glancing back toward the temple gate. Fingon kept trying to catch his eye from the back row, though as Orodreth had said Celebrimbor now seemed absent. But then where in all the themes was Orodreth? At least it seemed this wasn’t going to happen quickly: Círdan had now begun a slow and solemn orison in Old Telerin invoking the waters of Cuiviénen. Some guests stumbled to follow along, though most swiveled their heads to observe each other’s wedding outfits, or else catch sight of new arrivals.

Swiveling prevailed when Finrod arrived, fashionably late, in a ransom of gold and malachite. On his arm was Curufin, who looked hungover, eyes shaded by dark glasses, and behind them Celegorm, who blew a kiss to Gwindor while Finduilas glared. It seemed it had been an eventful evening for everyone.

Still it was the Fëanorians who drew the most intrigue. An appearance at the party had been one thing, but the ceremony? With all the crowd cast in the silmaril’s light, and Elrond at the fore blazing like Lúthien? Galadriel looked at her brother petting wretched Curufin as if her eyes might burn holes in both their silks, and Elwing seemed about to summon all the pelicans of Ellairë to tear the smug look off Celegorm’s face.

The eyes of the crowd shifted from the infamous brothers to Elrond and the silmaril, then back again. A hush descended, all breath bated. Just when Gil-galad was about to step forth and say...something high-kingly, he wasn’t sure what yet, Curufin thrust up his sunglasses into his tangled hair, and squirmed out from under Finrod’s arm to walk into the aisle.

“O brother mine, is that not a silmaril, the hallowed jewél of our father’s make.”

He gestured flatly toward furious, glowing Elrond. Celegorm squinted in response.

“Hm...think so. They looked a bit like that.”

Curufin nodded as if to prove a point, and continued with vicious enunciation, like he stood before a lecture hall full of dullard students.

“And do you, Turcafinwë Tyelkormo Fëanárion, feel inveterately compelled at this moment to seize the gem from the grasp of this Elda and Maia and Aftercomer, Man yet unborn, in one single person — in the face of law, love, league of swords, dread, danger, and Doom itself.”

For a moment Celegorm considered Elrond, and Elrond’s gaze bore back on him in turn. One imagined similar confrontations in Nargothrond of old, involving Elrond’s foremother. Yet now the hungry hunter made to shield his eyes from grace divine.

“I’m all right. Now what I’d really like is breakfast—d’you suppose we missed the pastry?”

“Ipso facto!” Curufin swept a hand, “we have been reborn without the clutches of the Oath. I believe many of you have spent time in Mandos; you are aware that they are rather stringent. I cannot speak for the rest of my siblings—perhaps they are still shackled to guilt and shame, or sad about their mortal girlfriends—but after seven thousand years, utter repentance was starting to look good. Which is why the Doomsman directed me to Ellairë, to make amends, starting with family and thereafter...continuing outward.”

He swallowed this last bit somewhat, with eyes that had been at Alqualondë and Menegroth circling him—though this was undermined by the singular exuberance of Finrod (and only Finrod) applauding loudly.

Curufin drew a long breath like a forge-stroke, and concluded:

“I have come therefore to seek my son!”

Fëanor’s namesake did have a flair for the theatrical, even in a haggard state. He turned to the gate, having certainly seen Celebrimbor’s arrival from the corner of his eye. Indeed his son now stood before the gathered crowd with a rather frenzied look upon his face.

Gil-galad was glad to see Orodreth at Celebrimbor’s side, if again curious as to why it was they kept gathering so furtively. (Not to mention perplexed by the state of his father’s wedding-finery, which in the space of ten minutes seemed to have been caught up in a hurricane.)

Yet there was no time for Celebrimbor to give an answer. “Then our purpose is alike, cousin.”

With a single step into the aisle Fingon shoved Curufin from the silmaril’s spotlight. He gravely approached the altar, the gem’s fey gleam caught in his eye.

“For I have come to bless a scion of my house, my own son and the son by birth of my beloved. Ereinion Gil-galad Nelyafinwion! I am most honored by your invitation.”

Gasps of intrigue rose up from the crowd as Fingon bowed low.

Oh, the Tirion gossip-rags would make a meal of this—yet that was the least of Gil-galad’s worries, for he saw Orodreth’s face crumple at the far end of the temple, and his pale eyes filling—

—then turning up, as all their eyes were turning, for the dawn skies were growing shadowed with strange clouds, and the caressing breezes cold—

A chilling laughter echoed like the roll of thunder, resonant in Gil-galad’s ribcage as the beat of his own heart.

Now a voice rose up from everywhere and nowhere: a voice like smoke from the altar, like a silk ribbon tied about the throat.

“Silly incarnates. Always so troubled by the question of kinship.”

Two gleaming, gold-flecked eyes resolved before the wedding-party. The body that followed seemed also to be made of molten gold, though it settled soon enough to elven-shape: pale of skin, pale of hair, sashed in red and black—and with a flame playing about the fingers, that hand held aloft which had once burned two kings in the tower’s shadow—

Impossibly, unmistakably, Gil-galad perceived his old enemy in fair and ancient form.

“I thought you would have learned by now.” A smile curled the lips of Sauron the Deceiver. “What truly matters is creation.”

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