Work Text:
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'...following the birds under the shadow of the trees he passed deep into Nan Emloth and was lost [...] and straightaway a spell was laid on him, so that they stood thus while long years were measured by the wheeling stars above them; and the trees of Nan Emloth grew tall and dark before they spoke any word.'
— "Of Thingol and Melian", The Silmarillion
✧
The blue glow of the woods and the woman in them, the woman who isn’t a woman, who is of the woods more than the woods are of themselves. The blue glow is dangerous. He looks at it anyway, mothlike, and this is not the first divine light he’s seen but it is the most beautiful, beautiful in that he drops his quiver and bow and his own personhood, knees and spine going slack and tears sliding from his eyes, a vein of spittle from the corner of his lips, slack-jawed, looking—
Do not look at them directly. Lower your eyes. Let them come no closer than—
A hand on his throat that’s not quite a hand. A glow that thrums through him as though he is the insubstantial one, as though what he is made of is just a lesser subset of air. A nothing. A hand that tilts his jaw up and examines him, the way that hand could tear through the paper of his bones and leave him folded on another shore — a shore he knows, now, that he will not be returning to by any other means than death.
He waits for her to offer it.
She does not.
✧
Your child, they say in whispers, ostensibly to him but not really to him, vague enough he does not know whence they come: Your child is other.
She is delivered to him one day, having strayed too far. Dark hair arrayed in a blaze of night, deep enough to mesmerise, to hypnotise. The one who delivers her cannot take his eyes from it, from her hair. What does he see there? Thingol wonders. What visions does she show him?
What she shows Thingol is the rippling fire of gems, as always, the great burning fire of that which is out of reach — does his daughter intend to promote longing, he wonders? Does she intend to promote greed? Why should he hunger for beauties he can hold, when Melian is his Queen?
“You must stop wandering, my daughter. It is dangerous.”
For me, or for you? she says to him, soundlessly. Her eyes are huge and dark, like the black pebbles on the bed of a clear-running river. Or is that an idea she plants in his head? Based on the images he cherishes close to his chest, of the earlier days, Melian and himself in that wide green river as Melian first shaped herself to look as a elleth might look, skin that blistered him as he touched it and the blisters she healed; is that what Lúthien finds, when she studies him, what she projects back at him and does not notice that she does because it comes as naturally to her as a breath?
“For us both,” he says. Though her you does not mean him alone, he knows this. He knows it is a separation — you, the elves of Doriath, and me, half-Maia, half-other, something different to everyone else. “My daughter–“
She rakes a hand across her collarbones, a habit of hers. Her gown, according to the latest Doriathrim fashion, cuts to the middle of her breastbone and makes sleeves at the tips of her shoulders, allowing him to see the way her skin shallows and thins, as she touches it, the way the path of her fingertips reveals the white lines of her upper ribs. If he asked her, she’d show him her heart, the way it thumps away inside the cage of her bones. But he does not need her to show him. Melian has shown him her own heart already, constructed out of pure thought, out of starlight; he knows the half-other heart. Knows what it looks like, knows how it tastes. Lúthien’s heart is Melian’s and his own, drawn together. Of course he knows it. “You do me little justice,” she says. Sharp and young. Because that is also the matter — that she is young, a being that should never have been young. Melian was young only in the inception of the universe — why is Lúthien young? Why is she allowed to be young, while she is strange at once?
“I do you more justice than I ought,” he responds, sharp. His throne, even draped in charmeuse and brocade and velvet, is becoming uncomfortable to sit on. And his braids feel sharp against his scalp and the crown sits heavy on his brow and really she is his daughter so must he conduct this audience with an audience? As an audience?
“Oh?” she says, and her eyes flash, and she is Melian in this instance, she is something he cannot reach at all — “And what justice is that?”
His guards, behind the throne, beside the entrances, they are watching. He knows it hysterically, almost, that they are watching. Convulsively. Lúthien is his daughter and yet Lúthien is so far beyond that — Lúthien is— and the guards do not—
“Later,” he says, and it emerges grittily, and unevenly, as though there is damage in his throat. “We will discuss this later.“
And she tilts up her chin, that chin like Melian’s chin, the chin Melian chose for herself that Lúthien did not choose and yet holds anyway— “My lord,” she says, and it does not feel like an honorific.
He loves his daughter.
You are afraid of her, Melian says, running a fingertip down the ridges of his spine. He turns his head in answer, sends his silver-rich hair across his shoulder blades, pooling around her hand. Yet you are not afraid of me.
He looks at her. It is easier to look at her, now. Easier than it has been before. He still sees the brightness of the Trees in her eyes, the darkness of an inky promise in her hair; but it is addition, not cancellation. It does not consume everything else. Coexists, instead. He has wondered if she is weakening. The protection of Doriath, he knows, takes much of her energies. So he can look at her, and he is grateful for that, that he might look at her and still feel awe without the pain that accompanied it—
Why is that, Elu?
He moves his arm, reaches for some part of her, any part, any fragment of skin he might be permitted to touch. His hand finds her thigh, bare and softer than the cool embrace of the river in high, hot summer. She runs her finger down his spine again and he shudders under the touch. Heavy and fatal and dear. “I cannot say,” he says. “You are—“
I am what she is, she reminds him. As she is what I am. And she is yours in a way that I am not, nor will ever be.
“Perhaps that is what scares me,” he allows. “That she is me, and yet also you, stronger than me and yet also the same—“
That she is what you might have been, Melian says, thoughtful. She has never had much of an interest in tact, in couching her words in prettiness, in lies. No one may lie to Melian. Indeed, no one dares. Had you returned West.
He dares. “That is not—”
It is. Do not deny it, my Elu, your thought spills out before me like a fallen jug of wine — of course you wonder how it might have been, had you returned West. Of course you do. Perhaps there you might have learnt the ways of the Maiar, become as Lúthien is without the trials of our path—
“I could not have done,” he says thickly. His mind is clouded, heavy, as it often is when she has been in it too long. He lets his eyes fall shut as her body settles over his. “You have told me I could not have done.”
I have told you many things, she says. How can you be so sure none of them were lies?
✧
The river is wide. It is green, rich with summer, and wider than a furlong, though no deeper than a tall elf’s height. It ripples and sings, clear all the way to the bottom. Stones like jewels at its bed.
Here, she says, in a voice that still hurts. I shall do it here.
✧
His nephews are afraid of Lúthien too.
Not in a cowardly way, perhaps — Thingol defies anyone to call the Doriathrim cowardly — but in a cautious way. A way in which one might treat a strange insect one meets in the woods, some exotic creature with spindly dark limbs and eye-markings that glow bright even in the dark.
Galadhon has been hesitant since the first. That is his marker, hesitancy, and may Thingol not be forgiven for wishing him to set aside his caution for once? Caution in the face of his cousin?
“The Princess Lúthien,” she is called, by Thingol and so by the rest, and yet Galadhon does not repeat it, watches her with a troubled look in his eyes. You abide in my city, Thingol thinks. Under Melian’s protection. You will repeat it.
But he looks to Melian, and Melian does nothing, says nothing, riveting hair pulled away from her face. (She lets it down only in private. In private, he sees what he saw in the trees. In the blue. In the green. Colours that shimmer in the intricate locks she pours down, feathery, only for him; to all else she is dark and grey.) She will not make Galadhon repeat it. Let him waver, she says to Thingol, out of reach of anyone else. It does not matter. It is a nothing.
But it does matter, he believes. It is a something. It matters when Galadhon introduces his sons as Princes Celeborn, Oropher, and Galathil and asks for Melian’s favour, and Thingol blazes; jolts to his feet and strides down the dais, tosses his hair (loose, to Melian’s bound), says, “You would ask for favour, from a house to whom you denied it?”
“I did not deny it, my King,” Galadhon says, all bowed head, all sinking to his knees. Does he think that is the issue? Does he think servility to his King will help? Does he think it is Thingol’s authority that he has questioned, here? Does he think it is Thingol he ought to fear? “I would not—”
“You will look at those whom you offended, when you apologise,” Thingol says, finds himself saying, teeth gritted and sharp against the inside of his cheek.
(
She got it wrong, at first. Teeth too razor-like. Sliced his lip open, tasted his blood as he tasted her STARLIGHTRIVERWATERLIGHTDARKNESSLIFEDEATH taste, lips that fit wrong, lips she hadn’t perfected yet. Lips she hadn’t tamed.
)
You are harsh on your nephew, Melian says in the dark. He will not betray you.
“Implying that someone will.”
She sighs. She has started to do that more often, taking on the little bodied traits she doesn’t need to live — breathing, eating, sighing. Perhaps she does need them now. Perhaps he has changed her, he can dare to think, as she has changed him. You will betray yourself, if anyone does.
He knows her foresight well. It is the same sight that watched him in the glade, in the green, flickering around him like a bird. “What would you have me do?”
I would have you not forget yourself. Listen to my words; I will not lead you far wrong. Have I ever?
He looks at her. For a moment, the room’s shadows lengthen. Grow large. Her own shadow large, looming. Perhaps he has forgotten what she looked like. Has she led him wrong?
She led him into the woods, the river, two centuries long. Two centuries that dawned and crested and broke over their heads like waves, so naturally did they pass, so inevitably. They might have been longer. They might easily have been an Age.
“No,” he concedes, and her shadow is just that — a shadow. Is she anything beyond that, now? Does any of that remain in her still?
She pushes him down. Do not forget yourself, and perhaps it does.
✧
“Where is Gladil?” Thingol asks, scanning a circle of Galadhon’s rooms, Galadhon who stands there with his hair undressed and mouth open, like he had not expected this. “Well?”
“She is–” Galadhon looks around the room himself, as if uncertain they will meet his King’s standards. They are by no means plain, Thingol will allow, though they do not match his own monarchic finery. Good. “I apologise, my King, I had not expected you.”
“Your wife?”
Galadhon surrenders, apologetic. They are always apologetic but they are never true — “She is in the libraries, my King. With Daeron. She has an interest in language, as you know–”
“She was not at your sons’ presentation, was she?”
He inspects his hands. “No. She was not.”
He does not have the temerity to give an excuse, at least. Thingol would not have forgiven him for that. And that is why he is here, after all — to be forgiving. Gracious. As Melian asked him told him to be. He is here, not forgetting himself. “Nephew, I am here to make peace. I should like our children to be friends; this divide seems senseless to me.”
Galadhon has gone white, eyes on the middle distance as though he’s imagining such a thing. What is that that comes into his eyes, then, while he is imagining? Surely not fear? “And to me,” he says at last, though Thingol does not believe him. “I shall talk to them.”
“See that you do.”
On his way out he all but collides with young Oropher, a tall, joyous child, he’s always thought, watching him grow, but today he seems taller, more joyous, even, the way joy can increase as one ages because one finally understands what it is for–
“You have grown,” Thingol finds himself saying, unable to keep the surprise from his voice.
Oropher inclines his head respectfully and then keeps it tilted, as though he is puzzled. “It has been a long while since last you saw me, my King. I am glad I have grown, else I should be an elfling forever!” There is easy laughter in his voice, but Thingol does not share it. Cannot share it. Something is strange, in the air. How long has it been? Surely only a year; three summers at the most. Oropher is young, still, he can be forgiven for considering three measly years a long while. And yet.
“Princess Lúthien would like to see you and your brothers,” Thingol settles on saying, watching the little vein that appears and disappears between his grand-nephew’s eyes. What is that vein? Is it something learnt, learnt from the cowardice of his father or the suspicions of the court in general?
(Because Thingol holds no illusions about that; he cannot. His people are protected by the strength of Melian, but does that strength make them feel at ease? Does it make him?)
“We should like that too,” Oropher says, and for all his joy there are equal and opposite diplomacies within him. He reminds Thingol of himself, somehow, though he isn’t sure where his joys have gone. If he asked Melian what her foresight tells her about Oropher, what would she say? Would she say anything?
They take their leave of each other. When Thingol finds Lúthien and tells her her cousins will visit — Celeborn, Oropher, Galathil — she tips her hair over her shoulder and smiles a smile that, for just a moment, appears to contain too many teeth.
✧
The teeth are not the thing, really. The teeth were somewhere between what she was and what she became, a stop on the way when she was carrying over an essence of herself to a body that was new, a body that was not meant to be predatory. (Or perhaps it was. He does not know.)
Sorry, she said into his mouth. Blood was dripping from his chin. His own. I know only one way of doing this.
A way that bled. A way that spilled out red into the river. As feathers moltened and bruised into skin under his fingertips, there was a moment, between god and god made flesh, that held fur.
Years later, uncountable years, Lúthien will stand before him and also talk of teeth. Of molten skin made fur made flesh again, the evils of the god he sent her against, and he will wonder. He will wonder, then, whose way it was that Melian knew.
Today he will not. Today he will witness the meeting of Lúthien and her cousins and realise that her cousins are in some way older than her, all of them, though it cannot be possible, since only Celeborn was conceived before she was — and yet. It is true. They are taller, less assured of their innate unassailability and yet firmer in their pride of their own talents. The naivety of childhood, taken off.
How many years has it been, he wonders? Since the insult? Since they were presented at court?
When they leave again, the three of them, they drift. Dazed. Thingol cannot help himself: he watches them, tries to understand. Celeborn has the vague edges of a smile about his mouth, as though she showed him something of what his future would look like and it was as he desired. Galathil looks troubled, nervous eyes, the closest to his father in temperament. Only Oropher seems unchanged. He laughs in delight as they step out into a stream of sunshine and says “Are the woods not fine today? What say you to a walk?” and Thingol wonders at that, at the magnetism of the trees, at the touch of the divine.
“How long has it been?” he says to Melian.
No time at all, she says. We are still there.
There is the river. There is the glade in the woods and the river — there is the fluttering of wings. Wings, he thinks. He is hungry. He must eat; he has wandered far. Nan Emloth will forgive him for that. He strings his bow, tests it sharp against his fingertip, tests the point of his arrow too and lets a drop of blood fall.
It was that, she says. Your blood. I could feel it land. It enchanted me.
He nocks the arrow. Moves carefully through the undergrowth, woven roots and greenery, a gentle carpet of moss under all. The wings are ahead. It is large, he thinks. A large bird, swift and cunning, but his aim is true, ever true. He shall eat, and return to his people, and complete the journey to the shore. From there–
He lets the arrow fly. He does not feel it land.
He feels instead a great rush of the air around him, woods going blue from green, something larger than himself feeling the idle outrage of a cat annoyed by a fly —
She is a bird. She is not a bird. There is no forest, he begins to understand, except the circle of her wings.
I had thought to fly somewhere else, she says. I had been told to fly somewhere else.
“Who told you?”
But you enchanted me. You did.
It is accusing, somehow. He has never known Melian to be accusing. He looks at her, at her almost-elvish form, still something strange about her, a touch of feather to her hair. A gleam in her eyes.
Her raiment is dark. Like the sky. Like a raven.
She winds a hand over his chest. She presses down on his ribcage, as if demonstrating the ease with which she might dip her fingers in and remove his heart, or else demonstrating the mercy of her restraint, because she does not do that. She never yet has. Things are soon to change, she says. I feel it, in the West.
“What do you feel?”
They have freed him. Their enemy. He will come.
She does not have to specify her ‘they’; she has never aligned herself with the Valar, with the Maiar, all the wondrous gods he found in the glory of the West. There was a time he thought her glory surpassed theirs. Now, he can realise it was never glory, but something closer to beauty, something closer to terror. Still, she surpasses them.
He orders that his people be armed.
✧
✧
“Have you never considered why she was there?” Finrod, whose name is not yet Felagund, asks, the night before he leaves in search of the High Faroth, where he might build a cavernous palace like Thingol’s. When Thingol turns to him, he gains an apologetic look, diplomatic but not deferential, these Noldor are never deferential — “I mean no offence. I am glad that she was; Doriath and her girdle are achievements that find their like only in Aman. But do you not find it curious?”
It is a new Age. They are showered in Sun and Moon. The river runs with strangers and Thingol and Melian have built their walls high; some, they have allowed to slip through, but not many. They have learnt suspicion. “You would know the ways of the Ainur better than I,” Thingol says, evenly, regarding Finrod and that tumbling fall of gold around his shoulders, like Finwё and yet not like him at all. “I take it you do find it curious.”
“No, I do not. But there are some who would,” and what is it, that lies hidden behind his eyes? Dancing, Tree-lit eyes?
(So long since Thingol saw eyes like those, until the Noldor came. So long.)
There is something they do not say, Melian tells him, this house of Finarfin.
“What do they not say?”
I will find out.
Perhaps that is why he sees her with Galadriel, much of the time. Rooting out the secrets. Flaying her open with a heavy eye, the way Thingol was flayed, though Melian is by no means raw, not anymore. That sharpness has faded. As though in giving of herself to the circle of his kingdom she has taken that piece of herself away, removed it from him. He does not know what she is anymore.
He’s not sure he is afraid of her anymore.
Thus he asks it, the question, the one Finrod has had him unable to forget. “Why were you there?”
And she looks at him, and there remains a wildness in her eyes, and suddenly he recalls that the girdle is hers as much as she is its and if she so chose she could draw it tight as a garrotte around her; that the lives of himself and his people are entirely hers to hold. I longed for shadow under Arda’s trees. I have told you this before.
She does not lie, he knows this. The way Lúthien does not lie. But that is the strangeness of them, on occasion: the painful honesty of fae that does not seem to fit rhaw, the detachment of rhaw, the shimmering purpose to it all, as though Lúthien was born decisively. As though the air bends around them decisively. Hiding their too many teeth.
He does not see Lúthien often. She spends her days in the forest and each time she returns her beauty is somehow more difficult to look at, as though while Melian’s strangeness recedes, Lúthien’s only grows. And they teach that strangeness to Finrod’s sister, too, and when he sees Celeborn watching Galadriel as though he would let her pick him up and fly him away — Thingol wants to stop him. Wants to take him by the arm and say do not, my grand-nephew. Do not let her. You know not what you tangle with.
But Celeborn loves her, because how can he not? Just as Thingol loves Melian, because how can he not?
And yet the rumours come. And yet they swirl around court, no longer whispered fear of Melian — they grow to love their strange protector, after all — but whispered fear of the Noldor, of the Exiles, of their different ways and different tongue. In darkened, moon-lit nights Thingol asks Melian if she has learnt anything; each night, she tells him she has not.
He feels strangely defiant about it.
“You spend a great deal of time with my Queen,” he tells Galadriel one day, catching up with her in the gardens. She has adopted the latest Doriathrim fashion, silken gold cut low beneath her collarbones, though the shade is not one commonly seen in Beleriand. Something more commonly seen across in the West.
“She has a great deal of knowledge to offer,” Galadriel says, inclining her head. “And I am ever willing to learn.”
See that you do not learn overmuch, he thinks. See that she does not–
Does not what? What has she done? He tries to pin down what he means inside his own head, and it slides away from him, slippery and dark like oil. Galadriel watches him carefully. “King Thingol, are you quite well?”
“There are rumours about you,” he says, finally, giving up the attempt. “About the reason you and your companions left Valinor. About the circumstances in which you did it.”
She raises an eyebrow. Her face is lit blue in the woodland light. “Oh?”
“You unsettle my people.” It does not need saying: you are different from them. Taller, eyes aglow with the long-extinguished light of the Trees.
“I am more alike to them than their Queen is,” she says, and the impertinence should have a blaze of anger racing through him but instead it settles cold over his head. “I have no desire to cause strife here, King Thingol. I desire only Prince Celeborn, and to live in peace with him, undisturbed.”
“You do, do you?”
“I do.”
He cannot explain the wrongness he feels in the air. He has not been able to do much of that, explaining, since Melian’s hands-not-hands first clawed around his throat and made them both something new. All he knows is — Galadriel is right. The Noldor are not the strangest beings among them, by any means.
(His people have forgotten that.)
✧
He forgets it too.
The truth comes out, spills out, seeps across the floor into the earth into the waterways never to be contained again, as truth often does, and he forgets to remember what Melian is, what the Noldor are not. He forbids the use of their tongue. And most of them leave; and Doriath is as it was, enclosed, protected, at one with its only Other. Thingol claws onto that, onto the known quantity of the great force with whom he resides. The Noldor were liars; Melian has never lied.
And yet–
“You think I should assist them,” he says, when he feels the weight of her eyes one night. “The Noldor, against their enemy.” He cannot fathom any other reason she looks at him this way — but she moves towards him, cups his cheek with a well-shaped material hand.
“No. I do not.”
(Speech more speech than thought, this time; she moves ever closer to material existence.) “You do not?”
“No. Keep yourself removed; keep your people safe. I will not move against the forces of Melkor, and without my aid–”
She turns away. He sees her profile silhouetted against the silver-falling moon-light, that fine nose she chose, the intricate river of her hair, and for a moment it is as if she is afraid. Afraid for him? “You would not move against him?” he echoes.
“You will die if you do it,” she mutters, in a tone not quite directed at him. “You will die if you– I know not how, I know only I must keep you safe–”
“Melian,” he whispers. “What have you seen?”
She looks at him. For an instant, just an instant, she is small. “Your death.”
She will not lie to him; she has never seen the point in it. He lies down and draws her down with him, staring into the empty air, thinking of his own death. Nor will she lie when he asks her, softly, “Is that why you would not move against him? Against Morgoth?”
And so she does not lie: “No.”
“Why, then?”
“I would not move against him because I owe him a debt.”
Have you never considered why she was there?
When he looks at her then, she does not seem material at all. Fleeting. Furious. And he feels fury too; it ignites in the back of his head, the sense of what he missed, the sense of what she did not allow him to see. If only he had asked the right question. If only he had been able to ask a question at all. Failing to return West for the love of a servant of the Valar is one thing. A servant of Morgoth —
Quite another.
But he is enmeshed in the girdle. He is held in her grasp, in her net. Caught. All he can do is cling to the material, to the real, to the next thing that might bring him closer to the Valar he surrendered in falling to her touch — the rumoured light of the Silmarils, the heavy darkness of Morgoth’s crown. And Lúthien brings Beren before him. And Thingol sees his chance.
(“Do not do this,” Melian cautions, hisses, orders. “Do not–”
But he owes no debt to Morgoth. Not as she does. So he may do as he likes.)
They will call him greedy. They will call him jealous. Guarding shining riches while a lesser god of all the world stands Queen by his side — you looked for too much, they might say. You ought to have been content with what you had. But what did he have? Was he rather not had?
It is his ruin, in the end. You will betray yourself, if anyone does. But the Nauglamír was more than his ruin; it was his rescue. His escape. His disobedience.
The necklace, before it is robbed from his body, hangs pretty around his throat, just as beautiful as an Ainu’s feathered hand.
✧