I Ignored When They Said Run As Fast As You Can
Oh, how she had once laughed. With her brothers Findekáno and Turukáno she had sat around the campfire in the cool light of Telperion, listening to the tales of the outerlands. Of Elwë, the unbegotten king who had become ensnared and entranced in the enchanted woods of Melian. How foolish, she had thought him, unable or unwilling to break free of the magical tendrils that had captured him.
How had he not chosen to leave those woods, enchanted though they were? How had he chosen to stay with Melian, even when her keeping of him had been for her own gain, no consideration given for the desires of his own heart?
"He loved her." Nolofinwë's response was simple. "The heart works in mysterious ways, little Írissë," he would say, patting her dark head as Findekáno scoffed and Turukáno wrinkled his nose.
Not mine, she had thought. I could never …
And yet here she was. The very same forest, walking in a haze, unable to distinguish between dreams and reality.
The trees of Nan Elmoth bent around her. Darkness crept from her surroundings into her bones. Why had she ever left Gondolin? None could find her here.
Was Turukáno sat in despair upon his throne? What of Laurëfindil, Ecthelion and Egalmoth? Had they been punished for letting her slip their watch? She had not thought of the consequences of her actions. Truly, she had only wished to stretch her wings, to be free from her gilded cage; now she had simply replaced it with another.
White walls had become dense trees, through which, even the light of the sun could not pierce.
She staggered on, wading through the magic of the forest and her own despair.
When she first set her eyes on the child of darkness, she wondered how long it had been. Time seemed to pass differently in this forest, an hour stretching for millennia. His face was pale, starved of sunlight. His hair black as the eternal night that surrounded them.
She would come to know him as Eöl.
He was inescapable.
This was surely not what her father had meant when he had claimed love was unfathomable, smiling discreetly at her mother. Did she love him? What did it matter? They were bound now. A part of his mind resided in hers.
All she knew was that when her fingers fell through his ebony hair, it was not golden, glowing in the sunlight of a different forest thousands of lifetimes ago. Eöl's eyes were not fragments of the blue, blue sky as Tyelkormo's had been. Had Eöl's eyes ever seen the sky?
No, she decided.
And she would never see it again.