A/N: Exploring the similarities between my two favourite Elven minstrels again. Here's hoping everyone finds it pretty easy to work out who's who.
This fic is for Haeru, who encouraged me to start writing again (although I'm not sure what she's going to think of this...). :)
For the Love of Light
The Sea roared quietly as one came treading along the shingle, moving softly, but not softly enough to deceive the ears of he who sat upon the sands. His grey eyes were turned to the grey of the skies, as they had been for many Ages.
There was guilt in those eyes, which still held the tattered remnants of a long-dead light; a light long-sought for and now inescapable, though hated beyond the dark that circled on the edges of the nightmare-dream of reality.
"Forgive me," he said when he heard the other approaching, not thinking of the times he had whispered those words, sobbed them, screamed them to an unrelenting night... With never an answer. And even now he did not know why he spoke them, who he spoke them to.
The other, whose eyes were shadowed with the memories of light that had been, but that had fled long ago, raised a hand to the face of the guilty, closing the blind eyes, smoothing the tear-stained cheeks; forgiving, though he new he did not deserve to.
"She is gone," whispered the guilty. His eyes ran anew with salt-sorrow; he felt the other press his own face close, felt the hands upon his own disfigured hands; felt the eyes of the other look upon the raw, burned flesh that would not heal. The hands, the other hands, they were the hands of a harper, as his had been before he heard the death-song of arrows, the battle-music of sword grating upon sword. He buried his face into the others hair; felt it about him like silken stands of a night breeze. And he could smell the night in it, and the woods under starlight, and rain hung upon new leaves in a pale morning; and it overrode the salt smell that was now all that he knew, and reminded him of... of...
But when he came to taste, there was nothing but the salt of the others tears.
"She was beautiful," he murmured. "And she is gone. She was the most beautiful jewel ever seen, and I cast her away. And I did it all. All for her; for the love of light."
He felt the other stir, sit up, look upon him pityingly; this blind, witless stranger, ever in search of a light he cannot find, does not even know whether he wishes to find, always trying to forget.
"I know," said the other, and when he spoke he seemed nearer than he was at first imagined to be, and his voice was that of a minstrel, and one heard before, long ago, and it was not pity, but the voice of one who knew...
And then he knew, and drank deep of the others salt tears, tasting in them a grief like his own; born of a light and yet steeped in the darkness of betrayal and memories and sins unatonable, though all others forget and remember not. And he knew; he knew the pain of a music lost, a music that fled with the light and does not return.
Beneath them, drowned deep, lay the two jewels, their light dimmed by the murk of unknown waters, unseen by the two who sat upon the shore, waiting for the End of Days.
But the Sea roared on; and her song was endless and unforgiving.