Some keywords: Himring, very light angst, kind of a character study, gratuitous description of ordinary atmospheric phenomena
A/N: This fic is kind of a companion piece to 'Midwinter in Himring' though this is more introspective, so strictly speaking nothing happens, apart from the sun rising and Maedhros thinking about stuff.
Promise of morning
Maedhros walks up the narrow spiral staircase in the dark, the stone steps familiar enough after a century that he doesn't need light to find his way from his bedroom to the topmost tower room.
He made the tallest tower in Himring his abode so that he can watch the north, but the highest room has a window to every direction. He can watch the sunsets as well as sunrises if he so wishes and he often does, especially in the summer.
Summer nights here in the north of the world are a beautiful thing.
It is not quite summer yet but it is spring. The days are chilly but already full of light, and there is a measure of light even at night should the sky be clear of clouds, and it is tonight.
Maedhros goes to the northern window first, as always, to make sure that there is no unexpected movement on the wide plains of Lothlann. He has guards set at all times, of course, and riders patrolling the plains, but he always finds his eyes drawn north regardless of actual need.
Satisfied that the only movement as far as his eyes can see in the dim light is the swaying of tall grass in the quiet night wind, he turns next to the south to check on the courtyard of the citadel of Himring. At this late hour, it is lit with a few torches and empty but for the guards standing alert at their posts.
Pleased with his own realm too, Maedhros is free to glance east and west, to indulge in soft darkness and soft light. For it is the nature of northern springs and summers that the nights are both dark and light, not even delicately balanced between the two but encompassing both at the same time. The truly dark time is short and already over for tonight.
Now only the eastern sky is the colour of dark sapphires, the shade soft and intense at the same, and glittering with silver: a crescent moon and a thousand stars, bright against the darkness. The silver on blue reminds Maedhros of his uncle Fingolfin and, inevitably, Fingon, though Fingon always preferred gold over silver, in his hair and elsewhere.
The starry sky is beautiful to Maedhros as it is to all elves, but it is the juxtaposition with the light in the east that makes it breathtaking. He moves to the eastern window to study the glow at the horizon that promises that summer is coming though the cold days could make one lose hope of warmth ever arriving.
It is the glow of sunset that never fades away completely during summer nights, instead growing and turning into a sunrise, the light brightening gently, slowly, claiming more and more of the blue sky to itself, until suddenly it is morning.
It is two hours still left until that moment, by Maedhros' estimate, yet there are already birds singing, as loud and joyful as if the world were all filled with light. He has an unspoken fondness for these night-singing birds, his only company apart from the stars during the late hours he spends in his tower. Because of this he learnt their names from the Sindar, though of course they would sing just as beautifully nameless.
He enjoys the company of the birds but being alone doesn't really bother Maedhros, as long as is it is his choice, not forced on him. And he will choose, every time, sitting on the lone stone bench in the tower room and gazing at the plains and skies over soaking his sheets in sweat as his dreams take him to memories of a place much darker than any night in Himring could be.
He remembers the first-ever sunrise, just barely. He had thought it was a new kind of torture, or a trick to plunge him deeper into despair, or that perhaps the Halls of Mandos weren't full of grey shadows as he had been told but a place with burning, blinding light instead.
Every sunrise after that first one has been a promise: the darkness will not last. He chooses to believe the promise, for a given amount of trust anyway, and to enjoy the starlight too. It is in his soul to do so, after all. The love of the stars has been imprinted in every one of the Eldar, people of the stars, ever since their ancestors first woke in starlight on the shore of the Cuiviénen.
As the night marches on Maedhros sees the stars fade, or perhaps they are conquered, absorbed by the light of sunrise that creeps across the world to bathe it all in a golden glow, pale at first, then bright, then changing from golden to colourless yet growing ever brighter.
Though he cannot remember them all, he muses that every sunrise and sunset is a little different, variations on a theme rather than the never-changing repetition of the mingling of the lights in Valinor. Today's sunrise is a few long clouds like bright stripes across the sky and more pink than gold, staining the light grey walls of Himring a fierce shade for a moment.
Maedhros watches the sun rise, and he listens to more and more birds join to the glorious morning chorus, and he hears the courtyard below him slowly coming to life, the guard changing and the lowliest servants already bustling about.
When the first ray of sunlight hits his face he rises from the bench and stretches to banish the cold that has settled in his limbs. Then he leaves the tower, going down the narrow staircase to begin his day, having rested his spirit at least if not his body.
A/N: This fic was born out of insomnia and tiptoeing through the old farmhouse of my in-laws-to-be at three AM a couple of weeks ago, seeing a dark sky filled with stars through western windows and the glow of sunset-turned-sunrise in the east. Living in a northern country has its good moments; I'm looking forward to the twilight nights of summer.