[Cuiviénen. Early childhood. The waking hours]
"Race you to the oak."
Novë was already moving when he said it, which, in Novë's definition of a fair start, counted as a warning.
I went after him.
Novë was one of mine. Nelyar, silver-haired, whip-lean, with a laugh he pulled out at the slightest provocation. We had drifted into each other's orbit without anyone arranging it. He had the same restless streak I did, except his came from nothing worse than being happy and not knowing where to put it.
A few strides behind us, Archean was running the way he did everything else: economically, without wasted motion.
The three of us tore across the settlement, past a pair of bewildered adults, past a few birds that decided to relocate on short notice, and reached the oak at the edge of the trees in a knot of shoulders and elbows.
I beat Novë to it by half a body length, mostly because he hit a root.
"Cheater." He went down in the grass, grinning up at me. "I demand a rematch."
"I didn't touch you."
"You exist in my general vicinity. That's provocation."
Archean arrived a few seconds later, barely breathing. "You're both idiots."
"You still came."
"Someone has to carry you home when you break something."
The three of us collapsed under the oak, ribs heaving.
For a minute I let myself just be there. The branches sighed overhead. Starlight came down through the leaves in small scattered coins. The grass was cool.
It lasted about thirty seconds.
Then my head was off again, as it always was. Off to the future, to plans stacked on plans, to everything I could not control.
[Selas POV]
Walking had become running. Running had become climbing. Climbing had become swimming in the shallows while my mother watched from the bank, torn between laughing and dragging me out by the back of the neck.
I could not stop moving.
To hold still was to feel something pressing in from behind. Every other elf around me seemed perfectly content to sit for hours, for days, and do absolutely nothing about it.
They watched the sky. They listened to whatever wind was in the trees. They sang thin wandering songs that trailed into silence and then started again.
I understood some of it.
The stars here were not decoration. They had weight and presence, a quiet pull that settled into your bones the longer you stayed still beneath them, and if you let yourself sink into it, the world seemed to sink with you, breathing in time with your breathing.
I felt it too. It made me want to claw the walls.
Because I also knew what was out there, past the starlight and the songs, and every hour my people spent dreaming into the horizon was an hour they weren't spending preparing for what was going to come crashing through it.
So I moved instead. I ran until my body forgot how to argue. I climbed higher than was strictly safe. I stayed underwater long enough that my chest burned, and then I stayed a little longer.
The body, to its credit, kept up.
I could sprint for hours without my lungs admitting they had noticed. Trees that would have been impossible for a human child were nothing. My breath-hold underwater stretched until I lost count of the seconds.
The other elflings took notice. Some of them gave me a wide berth. A few, mostly Nelyar like me, started falling in beside, shyly at first and then not shyly at all.
[Months later]
The group kept growing.
Novë and Archean first. Then Eol, a Tattyar boy with dark hair and hands that never held still.
Then a girl named Mireth, who showed up one day without announcing herself and kept showing up after that.
Mireth didn't run fastest. She didn't throw farthest. What Mireth did was notice. When somebody scraped a knee during a game, Mireth was there before the knee had finished registering the pain: crouched, examining, her face so focused you forgot she was a child. A healer was already living in her somewhere, long before she knew what the word meant.
Then a girl named Celestia, who went everywhere at a run. She was the sort of child who would climb a tree not to see the view but to find out how high she could get before the branches gave up on her, and who would then jump out of it rather than climb down, because climbing down was boring. She wrestled the boys and usually won.
And Ilvëa, of course.
Ilvëa had fastened herself to our group on day one and refused to be pried loose. She was there for everything: races, climbs, the endless contests I invented and tried to pass off as fun. She lost most of them and didn't seem to care. She was not there to win. She was there to be there.
She had her own thing, though. While the rest of us ran, Ilvëa would peel off and crouch in the dirt at the treeline, coaxing seedlings out of seeds she had saved. She built small circles of stones around the new green shoots and murmured to them in a voice too low for anyone else to hear.
"Why do you do that?" I asked her once. She was patting soil around a new sprout as though it were made of glass.
"Because they're alive," she said, in the tone you'd use to explain that water is wet. "They grow if you help them."
A child's hobby. A strange one, even by elven standards.
I filed it under interesting and did not think about it for a long time.
The games themselves started innocently.
Races. Seeing who could throw a rock farthest or hit a target most often or climb a tree highest without losing a grip. Kid stuff, exactly what it looked like.
Except I was nudging it, quietly, in a particular direction.
A foot race became a relay. A throwing contest became target practice from various distances. Climbing a tree became climbing a tree within a given count. Tag shifted until, if you weren't paying close attention, it looked very much like stalk-and-evade.
Nothing alarming. Nothing to raise an eyebrow at the adults' fire. Just games that happened to build coordination, endurance, and the habit of acting as a group.
I ran them with the others. I suffered through the same invented rules and pushed myself as hard as I asked anyone else to push. I was a child, and nobody follows a child's orders. But they would follow one into the next stupid dare if he was the first up the tree and the last out of the lake.
"Again. Faster this time."
Novë groaned from where he had just finished a sprint, but he got up and did it again. Archean counted aloud to keep the pacing, and Ilvëa waited at the midpoint with a wooden token ready to hand off.
A little further out, other elflings were throwing and climbing and swimming. The numbers crept up week by week. One extra child. Two. Three.
"Why do we keep doing this?" Eol asked one evening, sprawled by the fire and rubbing a bruise on his shin. He had tripped during a run and gone down hard.
"Because it's fun."
"Is it?" He examined the bruise with genuine offense. "My leg disagrees."
"Your legs are getting stronger. You fall less often than you used to."
He couldn't argue with that.
Mireth settled down beside him, pulled a small pouch from her belt, and crushed a leaf between her fingers. She pressed the paste against his shin. He hissed.
"Hold still," she said. "It brings the swelling down."
"Where did you learn that?"
"My mother." A pause. "And I tried it on myself first. Several times."
Eol gave her a flat look. She returned it without blinking.
I hid a smile by turning my face toward the fire.
Something was forming here. I could feel it. A handful of elflings running together, hurting themselves together, and mending each other after, none of them understanding what it was they were practicing for.
If I was right.
If anything I thought I knew still applied.
That was the fear I didn't say out loud, because saying it would have undone everything. What if none of what I was bracing for ever arrived? What if the future I was preparing against turned into something else entirely, something I wouldn't see coming because I had been staring in the wrong direction all along?
What if I was just a confused soul in somebody else's body, playing war with children and calling it strategy?
I could not afford that doubt. So I shoved it down the way I shoved down so many other things, and I called for another run.
[Years later. The waking hours]
To the others, the games were games.
They were not games.
The circle was close to twenty by now. Mostly Nelyar, a scatter of Tattyar who had drifted over out of curiosity or boredom or both, and one stubborn Minyar girl who had absolutely no intention of being excluded from anything. They were faster than they had been, stronger, smarter about moving together. Every season, a little more.
And the settlement around us had changed by exactly nothing.
That was the thing I could not get used to, no matter how long I lived here. The Quendi did not develop. Not really. Not in any way that would matter when matter arrived.
Hunting was done today the way it had been done the first time anyone thought to do it. Houses were built the same way, from the same materials, by the same process. The food, the songs, the paths between the huts were all the same as they had been, and all of it would be the same a hundred years from now, and none of that was because the Quendi couldn't do better.
They could do far, far better. Their minds were astonishing. Elven memory held whole libraries perfectly. I had watched a Tattyar woman correct a song she had heard once, months before, down to the exact syllable.
They just didn't care about better.
Why make a spear that killed deer more efficiently? The current spear killed deer.
Why build a wall? Nothing was coming.
Why plan for next year? Next year would also be beautiful.
It was paradise. And paradise doesn't make people ambitious. It makes them soft.
Sometimes I would catch myself watching them, these graceful, immortal, astonishing people drifting through their days like leaves on a pond, and something close to grief would settle in me. They were the most extraordinary beings I had ever known, living in the most extraordinary place I had ever seen, and they were content to do absolutely nothing about any of it.
Maybe that had been the point. Maybe Eru had made them this way on purpose. At peace. Complete in themselves. Demanding nothing from a world that was demanding nothing of them.
Fine.
But the world would start demanding. Sooner than they thought.
And when that day came, being at peace was not going to keep anyone alive.
"Selas."
I turned. Ilvëa was standing next to me, gold hair catching the light the way it always did, her eyes on my face uncomfortably sharp.
"What are you actually doing?" she asked.
"Playing."
"No you're not." She crossed her arms. "You're teaching us something. You have been for a long time. I want to know why."
I looked at her for a second, then at the children still running through the drill.
She had caught on. Nobody else had, nobody had come this close, and that should not have surprised me. She had always been sharper than anyone gave her credit for, including me.
"Because the world won't be this quiet forever," I said at last. "And I'd rather be ready than sorry about it."
"Ready for what?"
"Everything."
She frowned. She was not satisfied with that answer, and I could see her deciding whether to push.
She didn't. She nodded, slowly, and walked back toward the others.
I watched her go, then turned back to the group.
[Same period. Dusk]
[Olwë POV]
There was something about his youngest brother that had never been right.
Olwë had known it for years, since Selas had been a baby with eyes too steady for a baby's face. He had never said a word about it to anyone, because nobody would have believed him, and also because he was not the kind of elf who rushed to speak.
What he did was watch. That was what Father always said about him. Olwë sees what the rest of us miss.
From a branch in a low tree at the edge of the clearing, Olwë watched his brother run drills with the circle of children. They were running and jumping and flinging stones at targets gouged into bark.
The other elflings followed Selas's directions as though following them were the only sensible thing to do. Even the little Minyar girl, Ilvëa, who normally floated through the day in her own dreamy cloud, moved with a sharp-edged focus when Selas was explaining something.
"Still at it?"
Olwë glanced down. Tirion stood at the base of the tree, arms folded.
"When is he not?"
"Fair." Olwë swung himself onto a neighboring branch with easy grace. "What do you think it is?"
"I don't know."
"Guess."
Olwë watched a moment longer before answering. "It looks like training."
"For what?"
That was the question.
Down below, Selas was demonstrating a throw. A small shift of the hips, a snap of the arm, a stone flying dead into the marked bark. He did it twice, slowly, so the others could see each step. Then he had them try, and he walked between them adjusting grips and stances with a patience that felt older than he was.
"He never throws a stone badly," Olwë said. "Have you noticed? Whatever he picks up, he picks up as though he already knew how to use it."
Tirion was quiet a while.
"He might just be gifted."
"He might."
Olwë didn't believe it.
Gifted explained skill. It didn't explain the way Selas sometimes looked toward the horizon as if he were measuring a distance nobody else could see. And it didn't explain the words Olwë had heard him mutter in his sleep, thin fragments of sound that didn't match any language Olwë knew, and Olwë had heard everyone.
[Later that evening]
[Selas POV]
When whatever passed for twilight settled over Cuiviénen, I slipped out.
I went where I always went. A little cove on the far side of the lake, tucked behind a stand of boulders. Too far from the settlement for anyone to wander past by accident. No paths. No reason for anyone else to be there, which was the whole appeal.
I sat down on a flat stone, crossed my legs, and closed my eyes.
The Light was there. It was always there. Under the skin, humming, bleeding outward from every elf the way warmth bleeds off a banked fire.
And it was, in my opinion, an enormous waste.
If Light was what I suspected it was, an energy, a power, something that could be used, then letting it pour out into the air around you every second of every day was like leaving every valve in a house open and wondering why the water bill was ruinous. Worse than waste. Stupid.
I had been thinking about it for a long time.
Months by now. Quiet hours spent sitting still while nobody was watching, trying to feel my way around the inside of my own Light, mapping it, learning how it moved. The stillness that made me want to chew through walls in every other context was actually useful for this. Out here I had nothing but time, patience, and a brain that refused to go to sleep when told.
Eventually I had started trying to pull the Light inward. To keep it, instead of let it drain.
It didn't want to be kept.
The Light wanted to radiate; that was what Light did. Pulling it in was like cupping water in my hands and trying not to let any drip out. Possible, but only if I thought about nothing else.
Breathe in… I pictured the Light as a liquid, moving through channels I couldn't see.
Breathe out… I pictured those channels narrowing, closing, sealing the Light behind them.
In.
Out.
In.
Sweat at my temples. A tremor in my hands. But slowly, very slowly, over the first hour of trying, the soft glow around my skin began to dim. It faded, and then it was gone.
In the dark I smiled.
There you are.
I held it for ten seconds before my focus slipped, and the Light burst out of me all at once, flaring across the water. Ten seconds was not nothing.
Again.
And again.
Each time I kept it a little longer. Each time I felt it gather inside me like water pooling behind a wall.
Hours went by. The stars drifted overhead. The lake whispered against the stones. The boulders warmed slightly where I leaned against them.
When I finally opened my eyes, the sky had changed. Whatever this world used for dawn was beginning, a slow paling of the dark, stars thinning out.
And I felt different. I was stronger, and there was something more inside me that I couldn't put a word to.
I stood up and stretched, and I noticed something odd as the stored Light finally slipped my grip and spilled outward. It was brighter than before. Not just the same Light coming back out. More of it, as though holding it compressed had done something to it. Made it denser.
I started back toward the settlement with my head already running the next experiment. If Light could be stored, could it be shaped? Pointed? Used for something?
And if keeping it inside made it stronger, what else did keeping it inside change?
I sat by the lake and watched the stars write themselves across the surface.
Behind me the settlement was drifting into sleep. The fires were low and the songs were thinning. Somewhere a long way off, a baby was crying faintly.
I pulled my Light inward without thinking about it. The motion was automatic now, as natural as breathing. I felt it compress. I felt it settle.
I was noticeably stronger than I had been a year ago. The gains were small month over month, but year over year they were not.
I had been thinking, lately, about the four-child rule.
Every elf family capped at four children. No more. Not a law, not a guideline, just what was. Everyone took it for granted because everyone had always taken it for granted.
But why.
If Light was life, if it was the energy a body ran on, then a child growing inside a mother had to be drinking from that supply. Whatever made an elfling an elfling, it wasn't coming from nowhere.
And if the mother was bleeding Light into the air around her every second of her life, the way every elf did, then by the time she had carried and nursed four children…
Maybe there simply wasn't enough left.
But if Light could be held.
Then maybe. Then maybe a lot of things.
I didn't know. I didn't know whether any of this would work. I didn't know whether any of my plans, any of my scheming in the long hours when the rest of the settlement was sleeping or singing, would add up to anything at all.
Most of what I was working from was memory of books. Stories. Written by people who had never seen a lake respond to a father's prayer, never watched a child's Light brighten the air in a hut, never considered that any of it might be real.
I was guessing. Stacking maybes on probablys and calling the result a plan.
If the Avari happened. If I could steer them. If the Sundering unfolded along the lines the story said it would.
If. If. If.
The stars said nothing. They never did.
But I smiled anyway.
Because uncertainty was still better than surrender, and a flawed plan was still better than no plan. And I had, for the first time in either of my lives, time.
A great deal of time.
Enough, maybe, to get the rest of it right.
{Image: Selas — eyes like captured stars.}
[End of Chapter 2]
GLOSSARY
For those who wish to go deeper into the world and its vocabulary. This entry covers terms from Tolkien's legendarium that appear in this chapter. Reading it is entirely optional — the story is written to stand on its own — but it may add a little texture to the journey.
PEOPLES & KINDREDS
Quendi — The elven word for "those who speak with voices." What the Elves call themselves. All Elves are Quendi; they later divide into many different groups.
Nelyar — "The Third." The third and largest group of Elves to awaken at Cuiviénen (74 of the original 144). They called themselves Lindar ("Singers") internally, and were later named Teleri ("The Last") during the Great Journey.
Lindar — "The Singers." The Nelyar's name for themselves, from learning music and song before formal speech. Selas's people.
Minyar — "The First." The smallest group of Elves, first to awaken (14 original souls). Later called Vanyar ("The Fair Ones") for their golden hair and beauty.
Tattyar — "The Second." The second group to awaken (56 originals). Later called Noldor ("The Wise") for their craft and lore.
Eldar — "People of the Stars." The name for those Elves who accepted the summons of the Valar and began the Great Journey to Aman. Separated from the Avari at the Sundering.
Avari — "The Unwilling" or "The Refusers." Elves who refused the summons of the Valar and remained in Middle-earth. Our protagonist will lead a group of these.
DIVINE BEINGS
Eru Ilúvatar — "The One, Father of All." The supreme creator who made all things through his divine music. Elves are his firstborn children.
Ainur — "The Holy Ones." Angelic beings Eru created before the world existed. They sang the world into being at his direction. Divided into Valar and Maiar.
Valar — "The Powers." The greatest of the Ainur, who entered the world to shape and govern it. There are fourteen chief Valar, including Oromë the Hunter.
Oromë — Vala of the hunt, of forests, and of wild beasts. First of the Valar to find the Elves at Cuiviénen. He will serve as herald and guide for the Great Journey to Aman.
PLACES
Arda — The name of the entire world in Tolkien's mythology.
Cuiviénen — "Water of Awakening." The lake in eastern Middle-earth where the first Elves opened their eyes under starlight. The birthplace of all Elven-kind.
Endor — "Middle-earth." The great continent where mortal peoples dwell, east of the Great Sea.
Aman — "The Blessed Realm." The continent far to the west, where the Valar dwell, separated from Middle-earth by the Great Sea.
Valinor — "Land of the Valar." The Valar's realm within Aman, lit by the Two Trees.
CONCEPTS
Years of the Trees — The age before the Sun and Moon, when the world was lit only by stars and the Two Trees of Valinor. Each Year of the Trees was roughly ten mortal years long.
The Sundering — The division of the Elven peoples into Eldar (those who accepted the Valar's call) and Avari (those who refused). A pivotal moment in Elven history.
The Four-Child Limit — A biological constraint on elven reproduction. Traditionally, no family can have more than four children. Selas suspects this is connected to the Light energy required for pregnancy — and that learning to contain Light might overcome it.