Prologue
"As Strider was speaking they watched his strange eager face, dimly lit in the red glow of the wood-fire. His eyes shone, and his voice was rich and deep."
A Knife In the Dark
The Fellowship of the Ring
She watched him closely as he stared into the fire. Sitting in a velvet lined chair placed on the left side of the large fireplace, hazel eyes watched the flames lick the slow burning wood and dance it's way upwards. A sudden pop sounded from the fire and he did not blink, did not move.
That's how she knew, though his eyes were fixed upon the fire, his mind had taken him elsewhere.
He was thinking about her again.
She could always tell when he thought of her because his face showed an outward longing for something that had been stolen from him years before.
His fingers moved slightly curling around the edge of the armrest. He seemed to concentrate on looking past the flames at something. It was absurd, of course, because nothing but stone lay past the burning wood.
She had lost him again. She worried for him because she knew it was not something she could save him from. There was no one she could fight. She could not help him because this was his fight. His alone. A battle of his own making inside himself that only he participated in and only he could win or loose at. A battle she had helplessly watched him struggle with for more than a decade. A war between himself and his guilt.
He began singing in a soft voice. A voice so soft she might not have caught it if not for the moving of his lips. He sang the melody so low she barely heard enough words to distinguish what it was he was singing. Her jaw tightened and she forced back tears as the familiar sad ballad hit her memory.
The song of the meeting of Beren, son of Barahir, and Luthien Tinuviel.
He had sang that song many times before and the reason was nearly always the same: He sang it for her. Because it was her favorite and he sang it to her many times before she had gone.
She knew this only because he had told her once. He did not speak of her often.
He had begun to sing louder and she could now make out the words more clearly.
"The leaves were long, the grass was green,
The hemlock - umbels tall and fair,
And in the glade a light was seen
Of stars in shadow shimmering,"
His own eyes became glassy as he sang the old song.
"Tinuviel was dancing there
To music of a pipe unseen
And light of stars was in her hair,
And in her raiment shimmering."
The tears that threatened her eyes fell and rolled down her smooth unblemished cheeks. She could not bare to watch him in his grief knowing there was nothing she could do or say to ease his pain.
She lifted her skirts and the Queen of Gondor left her husband in his library, to the guilt of his own making.
