Part I: Of Maeglin

Glîn


Twilight falls on the open ocean. The swells begin to churn like liberated beasts, galloping along the plain of water. A small ship weaves deftly through the rising waves. Glorfindel awakens on his narrow cot. He lies supine, eyes blinking sleepily as they search the ceiling by starlight.

He had been dreaming just now, what had it been? Flames again. All around, trapping him, engulfing him, and that fire had a face, and the face was fear itself. There had been crying. Crumbling stone. Death.

Yet within that dream there had been another dream, a good dream… a waterfall in the moonlight. A secret place, a place of beauty and freedom.

He lets the brewing storm rock him, lets the waves quiet him, until his breathing slows. There is something soothing about the storm now, after all the years at sea. He knows how to reef the mainsail, lash the wheel leeward and sail into the wind. And thereafter the high winds, once the most dreaded of fears of the open water, carry you faithfully into the dawn.

Glorfindel rises from his cot, which creaks softly. He picks up his folded linen shirt, buries his face deep into the fabric and inhales. Clean enough. He pulls it over his head, steps into his breeches, and shrugs on a heavy coat.

He reaches back to the nape of his neck to gather his blond hair into its familiar braid, but where once there were elegant locks, he finds only skin. Five years ago, it had become entangled somehow in the ropes and hooks. The wind probably would have beheaded him if his sharp-witted shipmate, Curundil, had not cut off the entire tangled gold mess right then with his fishing knife. The sensation of being without it was still unfamiliar… what is five years to almost a millenia?

He walks onto the deck, still massaging his closely shorn scalp, as the conflagration of his dreams slowly fades in his mind. His shipmates have started work already, coiling and uncoiling rope, furling sail.

"Here!" a young mortal man calls, and turning sharply to the noise, Glorfindel is just quick enough to catch the rope tossed to him.

The swells are even larger now, some of them rising up to the level of the deck. The ship has started to pitch. They work hard and quickly, but are steady and sure in their movements. Curundil catches Glorfindel's eye.

"i Elin glîn," he remarks. Glorfindel responds with a glance to the heavens. Indeed, the stars are unusually bright tonight, even as the dark clouds roll over them. Their thin, white streaks of light trickle through the fog, mystical and lovely. Glîn.

The work done, the storm growing, Glorfindel and the crew retreat once more to their quarters. The ship is not tossing now, but gently listing once more. They fall asleep against the roar of the sea, all except for Glorfindel, who opens his door to catch a final glance at the stars.

How they do gleam in that infinite darkness. He squints at them, trying to conjure back that pleasant, but long-forgotten scene in his past, and they gaze back, illuminating his own blue eyes. In them Glorfindel sees the one he seeks, the reason he turned his back on the shores of the Undying Lands to follow the water.

"By the light of Elentári," he whispers across the now-empty deck, "I shall find you yet."