New Challenge: Title Track
Tolkien's titles range from epic to lyrical to metaphorical. This month's challenge selected 125 of them as prompts for fanworks.

Dye Days are uncomfortable. The newly arrived party from Imladris makes it even more uncomfortable.
Written for S&D 2025, Slide 18 Blood On Their Hands by Zhie

Rescued from a brutal Angband hunt, an ex-thrall with a strange and powerful artifact embedded in his spine is brought to Himring, for it is one of the only places in Beleriand which welcomes such folk. Though he has no memories of his life before, Anniavas slowly becomes accustomed to his new life and finds he has a queer connection with Maedhros, Himring's lord. As their intimacy grows, however, so do the dangers surrounding them, both without and within. What secrets are hidden inside the depths of Anniavas's lost memories--and how will those with whom he is forging and deepening bonds react, when those secrets are at last revealed?

On a walk with Findaráto, Findis learns about her nephew's fear, and decides to do something against it.

Gelmir (the brother of Gwindor) arrives in Mandos, hurting and bewildered and still blind. But there is help and comfort to be found - and to give.

In which Celebrían encounters a satsuma plum, the piercing insight of Finrod Felagund, and the two decide to paint each other’s skin. Or, Celebrían and Finrod do trauma recovery in their own unique way.

Curufin lets Finrod say goodbye.

How high a price, not only for words but for blood on holy shores? For smoke on the horizon? For trust and love unyielding, tossed aside in the hours of one dark night? And what, then, the price for unearned forgiveness? For offering the other cheek, for offering to slay kin all over, again, again, again in his name?
“Would you have come with me, if I had asked?” The truth is, Fingon is not sure of the answer. The truth is, he had asked himself, nights on end, what the answer to that question would be. Had asked himself where they had gone so wrong, that he no longer knew.
“Would you have asked, if you were sure of the answer?”
Fingon rescues Maedhros. He and Finrod grapple with the aftermath.

Maedhros watches him for long moments, his eyes cold in the dim light of morning. “If I wanted to talk to you, I would ask, not use my brother to trick you.”
The implication lands like a blow, precise and devastating. Finrod takes another step closer, then stops himself, fists clenching at his sides. Maedhros has ever been like this, to him—every single word eliciting a reaction; making him fly, bringing him low, tearing him open. What a terrible thing to still find it true, so many years and betrayals later.
Once, Fingon and Maedhros had been Finrod's lovers, the past participle of it carrying the sentence. As it turns out, not everything agrees to be relegated so neatly.

In the war camps of Beleriand, Finarfin assembles the missing pieces of his family’s history; assembles the bits and pieces that make not-regret calcify into something jagged and uncomfortable, where it makes a home beneath his breastbone.
He meets men whose ancestors used to march beneath his son’s banner. Most of their house, too, is decimated now, a strange, hollow kinship that Finarfin wants to flinch from, and that they weather as they bend their knees to him, seeing someone other than Finarfin. He meets victims of his nephews’ terror; meets those who are left of Fingolfin’s people, of Fingon’s, of Turgon’s. Learns how they passed, each of them falling to blazing heroics and bristling despair, and wonders how any of them are ever meant to return from this. How these serrated, brittle remains of a devastated land are meant to be spit out into Aman’s idle serenity, and not break the world all over.
Finarfin, the War of Wrath, and the price it demands.

Drawing of Finrod discovering a new friend while exploring Beleriand.

Celegorm issues an invitation. Finrod takes him up on it--and proves himself the king that neither of them knew he could be.

Finrod visits the hobbits for a snack.

The elves of Beleriand lose the first battle against Morgoth. The Noldor find the free lands they'd been looking for. Lúthien is on the warpath.
And the First Age still is as bloody as it is in canon.
(Please read the author's notes, there will reading-instructions, as this is my first attempt at a deconstructed fic)

When Maedhros returns from Mandos, re-connecting does not prove easy. Nerdanel is determined to care for her son and finds that she must confront grief along the way.
In my dreams my sons wander at length, lost in pathless woods, ancient, sunless and foreboding. In the waking world, Maedhros breathes and moves before me, but is rarely truly there. I see the dream-wraith Maedhros superimposed over my living son, and am sure he never found a path out of that desolate place. The whispers in my dreams insist he never will.
Written for Scribbles and Drabbles 2025 Prompt #53: Night Watch by Zhie, to whom credit belongs for the artwork below (which can also found here).
Many thanks to Elronds_Library and timelessutterances for beta reading, and Double_Sharp for the conversations on equatorial climate.

Galadriel returns to Aman at the end of the Third Age and finds it much changed, just as she herself has changed since she left. There, she reunites with many figures from her past, including a former mentor, seeks answers to loose threads, and ponders the fate of those left behind in Middle-earth. Drawing on a rich array of characters and references, this story considers, among other questions, what became of Galadriel, Frodo, and others after they sailed into the West, why Melian abandoned Doriath, and Galadriel's perspective on the long-term implications of Arwen's choice.

“What if,” said Manwë, regarding Maedhros with star-bright eyes, blue as sapphires and piercing as blades, “you were sent from these Halls for a purpose, son of Fëanáro?”
“I suppose, my lord,” Maedhros said slowly, “that would depend upon the purpose.”
Maedhros is sent back to Middle-earth, in the company of the Maia Olórin.

Two brief scenes featuring Galadriel, one in Valinor in the time of the Trees, one early in the Second Age.

It is clear that that had not been Curufin’s plan, but that Finrod’s tardiness must have got the better of him. He is dressed only in a burgundy robe of silk that leaves little to the imagination, where it hugs him close, a stark contrast against his pale skin. Wears, far more notably, the Nauglamir around his pale throat, a blatant taunt made all the more offensive by the fact that he is not even awake to throw it into Finrod’s face with scathing words.
Finrod closes the door behind himself carefully, then lingers by the doorway. Outrage is mingling with arousal at the sight—the long lines of Curufin’s body, the way the silk clings to him, hides him elsewhere. The way his hair has come loose from its braids, like ink spilt around him.
The colours of Finrod’s house sitting snug around his throat, put there by Curufin himself, no matter the impudence of it.

Finrod is not fool enough to have missed the way Curufin, too, at times looks at him. Is not fool enough to make himself believe that his own attraction is some new thing, something only pushing to the surface now that they are trapped together like this, the undeniable way Curufin had saved Finrod from a worse fate, tonight.
Not that Finrod will ever thank him for it; he cannot. But he knows Curufin’s sharp-tongued, bristling demeanour for what it is, and it does not change that the two of them, whatever lies between them, are a cataclysm waiting to happen. Does not change that, in truth, Finrod should be careful to turn his back, lest he find a knife in it.
And yet.
Curufin and Finrod get snowed in. It goes about as well as can be expected.

In the corner of his eye, Finrod’s form morphs and twists, dark spots against the flickering light like gore and blood on sun-kissed skin.
Is this what he did to you? Curufin had asked once, one of the first times—drunk, not-grieving, his mind a war zone. Finrod had smiled at him then, almost tenderly. It revealed the gorge within his well-loved cheek, and Curufin would have flinched if not for the memory of pressing his fingers there, a coward’s imitation of intimacy.
“Worse,” Finrod’s ghost had said, and then had vanished, leaving Curufin to the rolling nausea of sour wine on an empty stomach.
On the eve of the battle for Doriath, Finrod pays a visit—or rather, whatever is left of him does.

Various instances there are, of the two of them crashing into each other as if it were a contest. In truth, it is unclear who is winning, what they are playing for. Whether there is a prize to be had in the end, or merely mild to severe destruction—of sanity, reputation, hearts; no matter.
It would be wise to stop while he is ahead, Findaráto knows—alas for the ambition and hubris of Finwë’s line.
Curufin and Finrod, a summer lake, and the folly of youth before the world taught them better.

Once, in gold-cast days of careless bliss, the three of you used to be—something. A triangular shape, always revolving around each other. Warm hands, late nights, a tangle of limbs in opulent beds. A reprieve, a stolen treasure, and you all thought, then, that it could always be like that; that one day, the world would bend to your folly, and all would be well.
What fools you had been.
Fingon, Finrod, the Ice, and the gaping space between them.

It is nice, the sunlight and the warmth of a solid body against his. It is nice to be able to think, at least for a little while, that perhaps Curufin had been speaking true when he said he was trying. Nice in a way that means Finrod will miss it terribly when it is gone again.
“You are thinking too loudly,” Curufin mumbles against his shoulder. “Go back to sleep, Ingo.”

Curufin has practiced the words in his head a thousand times, knows what needs to be said to begin to fix this. But what comes out of his mouth instead is, "I'm not sorry." Lie. "I'm not, and I'd do it all again the same way if necessary." Lie. "But I—" and he falters, still unable to push a single truth up his throat. In a way, Finrod is right, he hasn't changed at all.
Finrod is studying him with a resigned air draped about him like a cloak. "Oh, how I hate you," Finrod says softly, fingers loosely curled into fists, and this too sounds like a lie. Neither of them have ever been particularly truthful with each other.

“You cannot mean to go after him!” Celegorm exclaims, laughing wildly. “After what we did? You cannot truly mean to go after him.”
"If you would move, then I suppose we would find out."
“What is wrong with you? What about the oath, Curvo?" Celegorm asks, voice low and furious, eyes blazing so much like their father's. "You cannot go after him."
And Curufin — who has seen the endpoint of what that oath cost them, who has reunited with their father, who has listened to their father curse himself for what the oath brought upon them all — finds it the easiest thing in the world to bare his teeth and snarl, "Fuck that god forsaken oath.”