[Cuiviénen. Year 1101 of the Trees. Spring]
[Selas POV]
Four Years of the Trees.
In mortal reckoning, that is forty. In elven reckoning, it is the space between one long exhale and the next.
Four years of watching the children I ran with grow into young men and women who were, without knowing it, the first generation of a people who would need to fight.
Some of them had already done the thing every elf eventually does. Novë had found his Miriël, a Lindar girl whose voice could pull grown anyone to tears, which I say without exaggeration, having once seen my own father put down a piece of work to listen.
Archean was courting Silwen. There had been no announcement of intent on either side. There did not need to be. Everyone who watched Archean for more than five minutes understood that Archean had chosen, and that was the end of it.
And me?
I carved bows. I stacked knowledge like a man expecting a siege. I kept my mouth shut about ninety percent of what I knew and worked the other ten into anything and anyone who would take it.
Because I knew what was coming.
I just hadn't known it would arrive that morning.
The horn broke the morning open.
No elven throat had ever blown such a note, and no instrument any of us had ever made could have produced it. The sound had weight. You felt it in the bones of your chest, in the soft places behind your eyes, in whatever you carried under the skin that I had, by then, come to think of as Light.
The bow I was shaping slipped out of my hands and thumped against the grass.
The horn sounded again, nearer this time.
"Selas!" Eol crashed out of the trees at a dead run, soot still dark on his forearms from the cookfire he'd apparently left mid-task. "The lake, you need to come, there's —"
"I know." I was already moving.
We ran side by side. By the time we reached the last stretch of forest before the shore, we were running inside a river of elves: Minyar drifting out of the golden huts on the western side, Tattyar pouring out of their workshops, Nelyar shouldering past each other with the hurried grace that only my own kindred possessed. Everyone headed the same way. Everyone pulled.
The crowd thinned at the shore, and then it parted.
And I saw him.
[Moments earlier]
[Oromë POV]
He crested the last ridge above the water and reined in.
Below him, in the soft, unfathomable grey of star-blessed shore, were figures. Tall and slender, silver-haired and gold-haired and dark, moving between small huts. Children ran through grass. Someone was singing, without words, and the song was not a prayer to any power Oromë knew. It was a song for its own sake.
He sat on his mount for a long moment and simply looked.
Children of the Father.
His eyes, which were not like the eyes of any creature that had ever walked the world, filled with something that had no name in any speech he had yet learned. It was not pity, or joy, or triumph, but something else, quieter, nearer to love than the Valar usually allowed themselves.
Do you know what you are? he thought, watching them. Do you know what waits for you?
They could not. They had been awake so short. They kept no watch. They had posted no sentries. A great predator could have come down this slope and been among them before the first of them thought to ask what it wanted.
And the Shadow was already moving in the north.
He had seen its signs, fresh ones. The Hunter did not report what he did not know, but he knew this: Melkor had felt these children stir as he himself had, and Melkor had come east sooner and less kindly than the Valar had reckoned.
Already there were hollow places in the woods of the far north where something had been taken and twisted. Already there were things wandering the edges of the world that had not been there the last time he had ridden this way: shapes at the tree-lines that were almost familiar and almost not, crouched around their fires in the way a person crouches but with something wrong in the line of the back, something in the silhouette that did not match anything written in the First Music.
What Melkor did in the deep places he did slowly, working one living thing against another and noting, what came out of the join. Oromë did not yet know what would come of those joins. He could guess, and he did not want to be right.
He could not leave the Quendi here, not with what was coming.
And yet, looking down again at the shore, at the children running across it, at the singing woman with her hair loose and her feet bare on the grass her own people had first stood on, he understood that the taking away would not be simple.
These were not a folk who would leave their cradle easily. He could feel it rising off the settlement like warmth off a stone, the old, sweet, rooted thing that every awakened creature feels for the first ground beneath its feet.
This was where their eyes had first opened. The water below was the same water that had first touched their lips. No elf on that shore would walk away from such a place on the word of a stranger standing above them on a ridge. Not all of them would come. Perhaps not most.
Persuasion would not be won by a single speech from a height, nor by fear, nor even by truth if truth was all he had to offer. The Quendi would need to be shown.
He had a plan.
He blew the Valaróma.
And on the shore below, every one of the Quendi looked up.
[Selas POV]
He stood at the water's edge as if he had always been standing there, and the lake itself had arranged itself to frame him.
Taller than any elf I had ever seen by a full head and shoulders, dressed in something the color of spring woods at dusk, a soft layering of greens and dim silvers, all of it moving slightly as though a wind were blowing through it that did not reach us.
Beside him stood what I could only call a horse for the sake of having a word. The creature's coat caught and held light the way water holds a reflection. Its eyes were intelligent in a way that I did not want to look at for very long.
Oromë, Vala of the hunt, of forests, of beasts and wild places. One of the fourteen Powers of Arda, come in person to a small shore at the eastern edge of the world because what was gathered here was worth his personal attention.
{Image: Oromë arrives at Cuiviénen}
He looked at us, and I felt it in my teeth.
The Light pouring off him was immense. It washed across the crowd in long, warm pulses, and I watched, and felt, every elf around me lean imperceptibly forward, as if their bodies had decided, without consulting their minds, that they wanted to be closer to whatever this was.
Something crawled up the back of my neck.
The Light itself was not hostile. It was not even unpleasant. It was the opposite of unpleasant: warm and welcoming, with a current underneath it that whispered, in a voice that was not words, it is good to be here, it is good to listen, it is good.
Which was exactly the problem.
I had no way of knowing whether I was reading a deliberate pressure into what was only the natural radiance of a god, or whether I was reading it exactly right. Both were possible. Both meant the same thing as far as I was concerned.
I shut my Light in.
The motion was habit by now. A breath in, a tightening of some inner valve, and the pale warmth that wanted to drain out of me stopped draining and stayed.
And the pull on me slackened.
It wasn't gone entirely. You could not stand in a field with the sun directly overhead and pretend there was no sun. But the soft insistence in my mind, the gentle steering, let go.
I could think again.
Around me, nobody else could. My mother's lips were parted. My father's face had softened into the open wonder of a child watching stars. Elwë, who was ordinarily the most self-possessed person I knew, looked as if he were dreaming with his eyes open.
And he was not alone in it. Every elf on that shore wore the same shining, unarmored simplicity.
Standing among them with my Light shuttered, I saw for the first time how little defense these people had against anything at all. Not against a god's radiance, certainly, but not against much of anything else either. Their ears caught beauty without caution. They had no word for liar in their daily speech, because dishonesty had not yet become useful enough to name.
If Oromë had come down that slope with an army behind him instead of a promise, we would have been gathered on this shore just the same, smiling up at him, waiting to be told what to do.
"Children of Ilúvatar!" Oromë's voice came across the water, and it was the same sound as the horn translated into syllables. "Long have I hunted these eastern lands. At last I have found you, the Firstborn, awakened beneath stars that have never seen day!"
A ripple of indrawn breath moved through the crowd. Someone near me actually sobbed, not from sadness, but from the sheer overwhelm of being seen by something so large.
"I bring word from Aman the Blessed, where the Valar dwell in light beyond your imagining. We have made a home ready for you there, a realm of beauty and peace, where darkness cannot touch you, where you may grow in wisdom under our care."
Under our care.
Even through the crowd's glazed reverence, I heard those two words. They did not fit with the rest. The rest was a poem; those two were a cage.
I did not know if I was the only one hearing it. I suspected I was.
"I ask only that you send emissaries," Oromë continued, and his hands opened like someone offering bread. "Three, one from each kindred. Let them come to Valinor. Let them see it with their own eyes. Let them return to you with word of what awaits."
The silence that followed was the silence of a held breath.
Then Ingwë of the Minyar stepped out of the crowd, tall and gold and untroubled as a clear sky. "I will go."
Finwë of the Tattyar came next, steady-eyed, his hand at the belt where he habitually kept a small carving knife he had not remembered to leave behind. "I also."
And then:
"I will go as well."
My mouth opened before I knew it had.
No.
Elwë. My oldest brother, stepping forward with that unforced assurance of his, the one that had made every younger Nelyar imitate his walk without knowing they were doing it.
My father's face shone. My mother pressed both hands against her mouth.
My own face, I felt, did nothing at all.
It is happening, I thought. Exactly the way the books said it would. The three chosen, and my brother among them.
Oromë raised his hand. Light flared outward like sunlight from the opening of a door.
And then the three of them were gone.
The Vala turned his impossible mount. "I will return when they have seen. Then you will choose."
{Image: The Three Emissaries — Ingwë, Finwë, Elwë}
He and the horse were gone between one breath and the next. The shore was empty. The horn, the shining mount, the three emissaries, and the being who had called them, all of it gone.
The crowd stood staring at the water for a long, frozen moment.
Then it broke open into noise.
[That evening. The hidden cove]
Tirion found me where I always went when I didn't want to be found.
The flat stone above the deep water, the one place on the whole lake where the rocks came together in a way that blocked sightlines from every direction but the water itself. I had been sitting there for hours. The half-shaped bow was across my knees.
"You didn't stay for the fires," Tirion said, easing himself down beside me.
"No."
"Mother noticed."
"I'll apologize."
The settlement was still in full uproar behind us. You could not hear individual voices from this far out, but you could hear the general sound of it, the low roar of a community that had just been told something it did not yet understand.
A Vala came. Our brother was chosen. We might all be going to paradise.
"You're not happy," Tirion said. Not a question.
"No."
"Father's happy."
I looked at the stars in the water. "It doesn't mean he's right to be."
Tirion was quiet for a while. Of all four of us, he was the only one who did not need to be filling a silence.
"You don't trust them," he said finally.
"I don't trust anyone who shows up offering paradise with conditions."
"Is that what he did?"
I turned my head enough to look at my brother. "Did you hear him? The last line. Grow in wisdom under our care."
"That sounded kind."
"It sounded like a hand on a leash."
Tirion frowned. He was thinking. I could almost hear him doing it. "You might be reading things that aren't there, Selas."
"I know I might." I pulled my knees up against my chest, something I would have been embarrassed to be caught doing in daylight. "That's the worst part. I could be wrong. And if I'm wrong, I'm going to spend my very long life watching everyone I love sail off to somewhere they were going to be happy, standing here alone, because I couldn't make myself believe a stranger's promise."
"So why not believe him?"
"Why now?"
Tirion blinked.
"Why now?" I repeated. "We've been awake a long time. We've been here a long time. Why does a Vala show up today, out of nowhere, and say now, now, come with me, it is not safe here anymore? What changed? What does he know that we don't?"
My brother had no answer.
I turned back to the water.
"Something is coming," I said. "Something they're afraid of. They want us out of its way before it gets here. And if I'm right about that, even a little, then the price of getting away from it is whatever they want to charge, and I don't know yet what that is, and neither do you, and neither does Elwë."
"Elwë is going to see it himself."
"And when he comes back and tells us it is wonderful, he will be telling us the truth as he knows it. That is what frightens me."
Tirion sat with that for a long time.
"You're going to refuse," he said eventually. Not a question.
I didn't answer, which was an answer.
"Even if Mother —"
"Yes."
"Even if —"
"Yes."
He looked at his hands, then at the lake, then at me again, and his face was doing something I didn't have a name for, a kind of look that was neither disappointment nor admiration but sat quietly in the place between them.
"You'll stand alone if you do that."
"I know."
"I don't want you to stand alone."
That I had not expected.
I turned to look at him properly. He looked very young in that moment, and very serious, and more like our mother than he usually did.
"Tirion —"
"I'm not saying I'll stay." He said it quickly, "I can't say that. Not yet. I don't know what I'd choose. But you…" His mouth worked. "You shouldn't have to stand alone. It isn't right."
I reached out and put my hand on the back of his neck, the way Father did when one of us had said something that mattered.
"Whatever you choose," I said, "I won't hold it against you."
He closed his eyes and nodded once.
We sat there for a while longer. Neither of us said anything else. After a time he got up and went back toward the fires, and I stayed on the rock, and the stars did what stars do, which is to keep burning whether or not anyone is watching.
[End of Chapter 3]
Glossary
Peoples and Kindreds
Quendi — "Those who speak with voices." The name the newly awakened elves use for themselves in these early days, before any sundering.
Firstborn — Ilúvatar's name for the Quendi; the first of his Children to awaken in Arda. Oromë addresses them by this title.
Minyar — The First Kindred. Golden-haired, noble, dwelling in the western huts of the settlement.
Tattyar — The Second Kindred. Craftsmen and makers, with their workshops at the settlement's heart.
Nelyar — The Third Kindred. Selas's own people, carrying what Selas calls "the hurried grace that only my own kindred possessed."
Lindar — "The Singers." The name the Nelyar use among themselves, for those whose voices carry across water.
Powers and Beings
Valar — The fourteen great Powers who shaped Arda in its beginning; servants of Ilúvatar.
Oromë — The Hunter. The Vala of forests, beasts, and wild places. The first of the Valar to find the Quendi at Cuiviénen. Rides an impossible horse whose eyes one does not look at for long.
Melkor — The fallen Vala. Not seen by the Quendi and not named aloud on the shore. Already moving in the far north, and already, Oromë suspects, working one living thing against another to see what comes of the join.
Ilúvatar (Eru) — The One. The creator of Arda and of all the Children.
Places
Cuiviénen — The Waters of Awakening. The eastern lake where the Quendi first opened their eyes. Home ground, cradle.
Aman (also Valinor) — The Blessed Realm across the sea, home of the Valar.
Arda — The world.
Concepts
Years of the Trees — The unit of time before the Sun and Moon, when Arda is lit by the Two Trees of Valinor and the stars. One such year is roughly ten mortal years. "Four Years of the Trees" is about forty in human reckoning'
Two Trees — Telperion of silver and Laurelin of gold; the twin sources of light in Aman.
Light — The inner radiance every elf carries, natural and usually unnoticed, flowing out of a Quendë.
Valaróma — The horn of Oromë.
First Music — The song by which Arda was made, sung before time by Ilúvatar and the Ainur. Its silhouettes are written and known.