A/N: I'm not going to say who it is, but I think it's pretty obvious... ;)

Lovers

I am here.

For long years you have been calling me, and now I have come.

What is that you say?

You think I did not heed you? That my ears were shut to your heart- rending cries that echoed in my dreams and trembled through my every waking moment?

My love, you are wrong.

Now here I stand before you, come at last, with nothing in my hands but a single ill-gotten jewel.

What is that you say?

You desire it?

Is that what you sing to me with your voice of false silk? You want this, the only thing I have in all the world? The one thing that means everything, anything, to me? That which I have pursued over leagues of land and sea and time?

You are a demanding lover indeed.

The Moriquendi tell of you, speaking in whispers as if they are afraid you will hear. They say you are a cruel seducer, luring innocents to you, bewitching them with your siren song.

I laughed when first I heard such a tale.

I cannot laugh anymore.

I am no innocent. Why am I here?

You have lovers enough: those who sit by your side and lament the loss of your fair song when they leave; those who write verses to your beauty in a self-deceiving pretence of love; those who hear your mystifying voice even though they have never seen you, and so weep at the passing of one unknown to them.

And I have a wife.

Are you angry at my rejection? Is that why you rage and scream and tear at your wild hair and wind your howling cries through the sighing air that has heard it all before; all your fits and tantrums of a lover scorned, and the lonely wails of all those you have cast out before your feet to suffer and die?

Yet I have nowhere else to go, and your voice is so soft, possessive, enchanting, full of promises to be kept forever. I am caught within your green-weed nets, woven of a spell of salt-air and jewelled sand and helpless longing.

You want it still?

I look to it, shining, glittering, melting the unbearable darkness to unbearable light.

For too long have I ignored you, refusing your calls, drowning them out with half-songs to the world's lesser splendours.

I will give you it as a lover's gift. You will wear it as my beloved, and the two things I find most beautiful will be as one.

You sing lower, coaxing, loosening my death-grip, telling me of our never- ending love.

Before I realise, it is free from my blackened grasp. It flies through the air, arcing a flare through the night-sky like a falling star, a stab of light in a pool of nothingness, dropping quickly to your waiting hands.

But you do not bind it about your brow to wear as I wished. You pull it to you, down into the dark distant depths where none shall ever see it or find it or know of its existence. And then you laugh, your mocking cries resounding about the cliffs, carried and voiced by the screeching and mewing of your myriad handmaidens, and I fall to my knees and curse you and strike you, but you flee from my blows, chuckling softly in a betrayer's triumph.

But, my love, you are wrong to think that you have tricked me.

For we are lovers still, and shall be forever, as long as your bear my lover's gift, however deep you try to bury it in your shifting sands and clinging weeds and dank airless waters.

You will continue with your sweet singing and seducing of innocents, ruining lives and breaking hearts.

And I?

I will wander by your side, making sad songs to your cruel beauty and terrible love, as only a lover can, singing in pain and regret beside your waves.