A Living Ring.

At last Finrod rides to Valmar to find Amarië.  This follows the events in "A Ring of Words," in Chapter 15.

On he rode Finrod the Faithful, fairest and most beloved of the house of Finwë, and he felt that his heart would burst in joy as he hurried at last to his love.

With no more doubts in his heart, he went about swift and easy as a questing wind, humming merrily as his nervous steed flew under the starlit skies and across the well-known fields that led to Valmar.

Forge her a ring of words, Finarfin had said.

And yet he felt music was needed, too. Bliss and relief bubbled too intensely to be freed by mere words. Forgiveness had come naturally to him after his conversation with his father, and his generous heart now longed to hold her in his arms forever, fears and lingering questions already forgotten. Gone too at last was the itching, sore place where the small grudge he had carried across the Ice, and into Mandos, and then back to life –that she had abandoned him to his doomed fate so many sun-rounds ago- had festered.  

“But that was another life,” he smiled, threading nimble fingers on the mare’s mane, anticipating the soft touch of golden strands only his mind recalled now. “We have a new one to build forever.”  

“And my heart springs anew, bright and confident and true...” he murmured happily, trying different melodies.“What do you think, Lintâl?”

For all answer, the opinionated mare struggled forth with even more energy, apparently eager to race for the whole night as long as she was not forced to listen to love-sick princes making up poetry on the way.

“And the old love comes to meet me, in the dawning and the dew...” Finrod insisted half-laughing, for thoughts and feelings rumbled and bumped inside and his chest felt too narrow to hold them all.  “You fear she might again fail to come?” he asked softly, for Lintâl now snorted and tossed her head in obvious discontent. “Fear not on my account, my friend,” he soothed. “This time I am going to her…and everything will be as it should have been. I have forgiven her. She was not allowed to come though she wanted to, I am sure…”  Unbidden, the memory shot through him with an intensity he thought he had left behind in Mandos: the torch-lit clearing where he awaited in vain, and the wave of misery that had choked him when he understood that she was not coming. Startled, he blinked away ghost tears that came from another age and life.

And so he rode on, now in silence, his smile frozen in apprehension. Like a fleeting blur of moonlight they crossed silver-dappled meadows asleep under the moon. Swift and silent, Lintâl flew past quiet hills and solitary beech groves and plunged deeper into the forest.

As if cued in by his darkening mood, an angry wind slowly rose and dragged a wreck of clouds over the moon, blanketing the forest in deep shadows. A storm was brewing out of the sea; Finrod could hear the slow, deep rumble of thunder coming closer as the lightning-veined clouds sailed in like massive mountains. Soon rain drummed  steadily on the canopy. There were presences moving in the night, hurrying to their shelters –he sensed a distant wolf-howl, the green gleam of a wild cat’s stare, the scurry of furtive claws clambering old oak trees- as the rain became hail and the storm bellowed and roared and crashed against the forest ground. All of a sudden, he found he could not see the way anymore.

“Easy, easy now, Lintâl,” he crooned, battling frightened branches that lashed madly at them in a vain attempt at protecting budding new leaves from the merciless hailstones pelting in wrath from above. “We cannot be too far from the crossroad… go on, little-one, fear not.”

Finally, amidst the writhing trees, he glimpsed the outline of a hut and the ruddy light of a welcoming fire escaping through a narrow window. Too harried to feel surprised, he kneed his mare into the clearing where he had once awaited Amarië with growing despair. The hut had not been there then, nor the crumbling barn on which it leant heavily. 

                                                                    00oo00

“By your leave, oh, Wise One…” Dripping and soaking in sweat after tending to Lintâl, Finrod stepped into the hut and bowed before the stranger he instantly recognized as one the Powers; a Maia, he guessed, though his current embodied appearance reminded Finrod more of the Secondborn –tried by time- than of the eternal glory of the Powers of Valinor. And yet the mirth that simmered in the sparkling, too young eyes that were turned to him was definitely not something he was used to seeing among the lords of the Blessed Realm, not anymore.

“You are welcome, child…” the stranger chanted, laddling a wooden bowl with some steaming broth and handing it over. “Ah, you are one of the reborn?” he added after close scrutiny.

“Findarato son of Arafinwë at your service, lord.”

“Finrod the Faithfu!” the bushy brows shot up in undisguised surprise, then relaxed in an approving smile. “Your deeds have crossed the waters, Felagund.”

Finrod shifted awkwardly as he sat on the packed ground, holding on to the line that had helped him make peace with his past. “That was in another life…”

“All lives are one and the same…different branches of the same tree. And they all bear fruit, too. Take seat, now, son of Arafinwë, and tell me what brings you out on a night like this?”

Finrod sighed, extending his long legs and making himself comfortable against the wooden wall. “I rode from Tirion to Valmar under a starry sky, in search of my beloved Amarië the Fair, whom I have not seen since I was returned to the lands of the living…But then the storm came down on us and a fell wind awoke and the trees would hinder our path and I lost my way… I thought I knew these roads,” he murmured, still confused by how changed his surroundings were.

“Are you sure you are looking in the right place?”

Finrod snorted. “I knew these paths by heart in my youth…”

“Ah, but you are not young anymore, my friend,” the Wise One droned and then let escape an annoying chuckle. “You should know that, sometimes, what we are looking for is right behind our eyes…”

“Before, you mean,” Finrod retorted, and if he sounded a bit harsh, he put it down to the Wise One’s patronizing manner. He was lost in Valinor, he who had wandered the vast, unexplored lands of Middle-earth, and that Maia was close to mocking him!

“Before, and later, and forever…”

Finrod winced and took the spoon to his lips, to save himself from retorting. This Maia was definitely aggravating. “And what are you doing this far from Valmar, Wise One?” he inquired politely, hoping to draw the strange conversation away from his own business.

The Maia chuckled merrily. “Oh, you know!” he gestured around vaguely. “Sowing, seeding, planting… a bit of watering, a bit of trimming, a bit of whispering here and there…mainly watching over the new saplings.”

“You are going to be busy after tonight, then; few will escape unscathed,” Finrod said darkly, gesturing to the window. Outside, the wind still growled like the orcs of Sauron as they hunted Elves in the forests of Dorthonion after the dragon…Where did that come from? he frowned.  Memories from his previous life did not have the habit of coming to him unbidden, but rather at will… “I… I fear I drifted,” he hurried to apologize, noticing the obvious break in the conversation and the amused, fond glance the Maia had set on him. “I mean, the storm…”

“There will be losses,” the Maia acknolwedged, yet he did not seem too troubled by it. “But not everything will be lost, and the trees will be renewed again and again. The hour is late and none of us is going anywhere tonight…You can take the place by the fire, and there is a blanket over there.”

Not risking more strange exchanges with the eccentric Maia, Finrod simply nodded his thanks and then lay down on the appointed pile of twigs and leaves.  The occasional cracking of logs mixed with a soft drone that surely came from his host soon covered the growls of the wind and lulled him into sleep.

                                                               00oo00

Torches, drums, angry words… He waited alone in the clearing, hope failing as the night wore on, though no golden light came afterwards…No golden light but fire; fire and smoke and blood on the water, and on the quays, and on Fingon’s face and hands and sword…Fire of anger in Arafinwë’s eyes as he turned his back on them, and fiery burnts of the merciless Ice… The new sun burnt, too, and the dragon, and the battles in the north…

Finrod tossed and turned in his bed of twigs, trying to escape the dream. All through it the firewood crackled and hissed, and the stars shone cold above even as the poisoned fangs of the wolf rent through his chest. The venom burnt, and the dying elf twisted and cried in agony…

With a gasp and a sob he jerked awake, panting. Outside, the birds sang and the sun slanted her way into a new day.

The hut was empty and the odd Maia was gone, he found out after a quick glance. Gone too was his hard-earned calm.  “What was that?” he sighed, pushing his hair back from his face and closing his eyes briefly to conjure back the disturbing images of his dream.  He turned them over in his mind, curious. The memories were close and clear, as they had been in Mandos, and yet stingless, the pain dulled by a strange glimmer that outlined every scene until it all seemed unreal, something happened to someone else, a tale of old times. He could see himself there, as if from above, and barely hear a soft whisper that might have been his name.

With a deep sigh he summoned the serenity he had seldom lost -in one life or another- when confronted with events that were beyond his power to change or understand and forced himself back into the living world. Aware of the strange paths the fëa took at times on the way to healing, he carefully folded the memory away and made ready to start the day.

The sounds of dawn were soothing as he went about the cabin looking for some food; birds chirping goodmorning, a soft breeze gossiping among the leaves, the trees humming contentedly. “It never sounded in such harmony back in Middle-earth,” Finrod mused. And yet there was something else, a breathing pulse of hope and trust that beat in the very air. It tingled and thrummed all around in joyful anticipation, a feeling that nagged insistently at his mind.

On a carved bench by the door he found a parcel of food wrapped up in a soft piece of cloth, the kind Vairë’s weavers brought to life in their looms, and a slender walking stick. Like the sun drawing back the beaded courtain of a spring shower, understanding dawned on him. The hope and joy that tingled in the air could only belong to one elusive Maia. “Olórin!” he exclaimed, and then laughed, because he now knew that the Powers looked down benevolently on his errand.

“Morning, friend! Are your well-rested?” he greeted his mare as he stepped out into the clearing. “I fear you are not needed any further,” he added, showing the walking stick. With an unimpressed snort, Lintâl brushed his arm and almost pushed him away before returning her attention to the grass.

“I know, I know, I am not stalling!” Finrod laughed. Searching the parcel, he brought out a couple of wrinkled apples that he offered to his faithful mare. “Go back to Tirion now, beautiful–one. I must follow on foot. Who knows what will I find?”

But even as he spoke, he felt there was only one thing he could find at the end of his path: the thing he had been missing all the long years of his exile, the thing he had been looking for –no, left behind, the thing… wait, was that what the Maia meant last night? Sometimes what we are looking for is right behind our eyes… She had abandoned him, left him standing there, waiting, that terrible night in that same clearing; but in turn he had left her behind, too...

“Did she ever come here?” he asked the trees that had joined him in his mournful vigil back then. “Did you tell her that I cried, and begged, until there was nothing left for me but exile?”

The trees watched him in thoughtful silence. A merry chirrup coming from behind startled him almost out of his soft buckskin boots.

“Who are you?”

The small wren let go a chirpy tirade, then jumped nervously from branch to branch of the juniper bush, urging.

“I should follow you? Is that so?” Finrod arched a brow then shrugged, waved goodbye to his faithful mare, picked up the stick and the parcel with the food and started after the tiny, nervous fellow.

Over the hills they went, across dales and blooming groves and budding thickets, and always the little wren would fly ahead. When the sun was high in the sky, Finrod sat under the dangling, green-bronze flowers of a young oak, and ate.

On they marched again, to the south-east of Valmar and into the hilly country that stretched from the pastures of Yavanna to the very eaves of Oromë’s woods, the wren leading tirelessly and Finrod following.

Arien was close back home when the wren finally stopped on the lower branch of an elm and twittered softly, his little head jerking nervously to its right. A small creek sang down a narrow, tree-clad gully and bubbled eastwards past his feet. With a kind smile and a courteous bow, Finrod offered the last bit of his waybread to his gentle guide and took the steep, slippery, heavily forested path that ran up beside the stream. 

The clearing at the top allowed a wide view of the ragged, craggy terrain before him. The path shouldered a chain of hills; to his back, sea and sky darkened slowly to deep purple in the trail of Arien. Shadows were already slipping out of hiding back there in Middle-earth, he thought with a shiver.

But not here, he remembered with a smile as he saw something glinting on the grass ahead. Bending, he carefully lifted a thin, extremely light silver ring attached to a fine chain that ended in another ring, also attached to more links that tied it to another ring… Curious, he started following the strange trail, coiling the almost weightless, apparently endless chain in his hands as he went.

The string of rings was a voluminous roll when he finally caught sight of a hut tucked between the hills and the edge of a dense thicket of oaks. A silversmith’s hut, he soon discovered, finding the beginning –or the end- of the chain in the ample forge inside. And it belonged to an extremely skilled one, too, he noticed in awe as he examined scattered pieces of work: an eagle-shaped broch with eyes of emerald, the branched, arched candlesticks that rose up like vines, the crystal glasses with impossibly delicate filigree stems, the lacework bracelets that resembled gossamer…  

And yet his attention was drawn to the stone column that stood on one side of the chamber, close to the anvil, taunting. Sensing the challenge, Finrod took a couple of tentative steps while studying the carved pillar. The pedestal was a nest of threaded leaves and branches from which rose the entwined, slender bodies of two serpents, which parted briefly to embrace and rim a silver basin before meeting again face to face, one supporting, the other devouring a crown of flowers.

The sign of his father's House.

With a deep sense of foreboding, Finrod slowly came to stand by it and peered into the basin.

At first he thought it was a mirror, seeing his own face looking back at him. Leaning closer, he could see the backdrop of trees, and the fumes in the air. He was waiting in the clearing, in the very midst of his darkest hour, and then a messenger came and his world darkened. The clear liquid that filled the basin swirled and changed, and all of a sudden the images from last night’s dream started unfolding and melding while he watched, in awe, from above. Palaces and white piers; trumpets, towers, arrows, wide oceans full of tears... Flags, ragged sails, fairy boats, bloodied spears and swords, rolling green lands and distant visions,  underneath the starry skies; dragons, fires, armies, darkness… He saw himself trudging across the ice, hunting in Beleriand, standing in the deep caves, carving the vast halls of Nargothrond, asleep in his chambers, his face turned to the silvery starvault engraved on the ceiling…And all through it he could breathe the same sense of deep calm that had seen him through his life.

A shiver ran through his bent spine as the truth settled on him. Even before he saw his broken body laying amidst the filth in his own dungeon, dying, sightless eyes fixed on the ceiling and a slow smile spreading his tired features in death, he knew –he remembered- what he had seen in that last moment of unbearable suffering.

“Amarië!” he sobbed softly, as the vision trembled and dissolved into the weightless nothingness of Mandos.  

“Vaster than the starvault and more slow, unstoppable as the tide eating at a cliff-wall for ages, my love stretched and reached for you in the widest forests of Beleriand, in the deepest recesses of the earth, even in the wall-less halls of Mandos, and watched over you and held you safe –or at least in peace…”

Slowly he turned around. She stood by the door, craddling an armload of sticks, framed in the copper glow of the last embers of sunset and shrouded in the golden haze of her silky, unbound flaxen locks. Stunned and speechless, he took half a step to her, doubting she was real. The coil of silver rings fell clinking from his hands. Her eyes flew briefly to the chain then back to his.

“One for each sun-round that we were apart,” she whispered in a crystal voice that sounded almost amused. “I hoped that, in the end, it would lead you to me…”

“I thought that you had abandoned me,” he sighed brokenly. He lowered his eyes briefly, because all of a sudden she was too bright to look at. “I held on to memories, but all that time you were always with me…”

She nodded briefly, and her compassion flooded him like the tides of Belegaer. “And yet you would not know…”

Overwhelmed, Finrod fell to his knees and raised the chain before his eyes. “I should wear this and do your bidding in punishment…Let me bring you water, firewood, charcoal, tend the fire! Let me be the lesser of your servants, Amarië, until I pay for my blindness and my arrogance!” he cried, and there were tears and laughter on his face as he pleaded.  

Her deep blue eyes studied him through the golden veil of her hair, her head slightly tilted, her breathing even. Finrod waited in silence. At last she dropped the sticks and took a couple of steps until she stood by him.

“I prayed, and cried to the King of Arda:  Let me be with him! but he would not heed my plea..” she began in a soughing, soft voice that reminded him of the chanting falls of Narog.  “Then messengers came and spoke of blood and fire by the quays and the white ships, and I cried again: Let me be with him,  but to no avail…”

Finrod bowed his head, burdened by the sorrow that still echoed in her long-missed voice, ashamed that he had been the cause of such grief and had never thought of it. And on she droned, her long pale hand ghosting over his bent head; not touching –not yet.

“And then Mandos came and spoke of Doom, and I fell to my knees and would have forsaken my own fëa as I pleaded in agony to the One: Let me be with him!” And then the King lifted his bowed head, and looked at me with pity in his fathomless eyes and said: But you already are…"  Her long fingers caressed his chin and he obeyed their gentle urging, looking up to drown in her knowing glance. “And I knew it in my heart, that I would always be with you,” she whispered, her eyes sparkling with immeasurable joy.

And suddenly all his deeds of valour and his words of wisdom and his resolution before misfortune paled before her quiet strength and unacknowledged sacrifice and relentless vigil: Amarië, who had tamed the fire and bent it to her will. Amarië the Faithful, who had held on to him even beyond Doom… Amarië the Valiant, whose valour was not lesser than that of Haleth, or of Andreth or of Lúthien…

“I…” Forge her a ring of words, Finarfin had said. For the first time in his lives, Finrod found himself speechless. There were no words in the tongues of Elves or Powers to praise her worth, he feared. “I…” he looked at the chain of rings in his hands, and then looked deep inside and recognized the presence there, the source of his resolve and his endurance till the bitter end and beyond. “Are you sure that you looked in the right place? Sometimes what we are looking for is right behind our eyes…” And then he laughed, a clear laugh of surprised joy and looked her in the eye, awed, and then just shrugged. “I am yours,” he said simply, and the truth of it just washed over him to cover any other thing in the world.

“So am I,” she acknowledged, kneeling by his side. As she embraced him at long last, it seemed fitting to Finrod that somehow, they were now caught in a living ring, her arms around him, and his around her, like their fea had been all that time, even if unbeknownst to him.

And then she kissed him, and there were no more thoughts.

The End.

A/N: Thus ends "The Tail of the Ring," an apparently never-ending series of ficlets scattered in chapters 1,2,8,9,15&16 of these Droplets, a telling of the tale of the Ring of Barahir since it was passed down to Finrod by his father Finarfin in the shores of Araman.

With apologies to R.L Stevenson, Ursula Le GUin, The Water Boys and Prof. Tolkien.