A/N: Good day, all, and thanks for reviewing. There are one or two reviews I'd like to make a comment on, and I'd like to do it here, so I can speak for myself for all to read. The reviewers in question will be sent an email, too, out of respect.
Dear SnarkyReviewer: Well, like I also said in the A/N after that first chapter, I am aware that the introduction of Ceirin as a basic premise to this story smells like a Mary Sue. But be fair, if you're going to condemn her, do it based on the whole story. If it's Mary Sue's you want to flame, you have bigger fish to fry. And yes, I know that we've seen the fairy thing before. I can't help it that other people thought of it too. At least I'm being honest about it and telling you whose take on the theme I'm copping, with a twist. In short, if you're going to deny me your cookie, read it all, else I don't want it anyway. And by the way, 'creativity, what creativity?'? As someone who is the author of 0 stories (and for some reason I didn't even need to look you up to know that) I think you could at least show some respect to those of us who do give it a go. If you don't like it, just say so, don't get personal.
Dear Kel6: Too bad that, like SnarkyReviewer, you only read the first chapter. Thank you, though, for putting in such an effort. The Thranduil thing will be fixed. I was watching the movie again last night, and I caught on that he was indeed not there, so I was intending to fix it anyway, but thanks for pointing it out. I won't be taking any other character out just to get back to the nine-nine equation. Frankly, I don't think that equation is very important. Sorry if you disagree. I know that there are no fairies in Middle Earth, and my apologies to Tolkien if this messes up his meticulous planning. But that's what happens when you play in somebody else's sandbox. You'll be building some sandcastles in places the original owner hadn't planned to build them, or they'd already be there. If you have a problem with that, don't read fanfiction. Maybe you'll end up moving around quite a lot of sand. Do you think that's arrogant? Maybe so. But keep in mind that it's only the sandbox. We cannot touch the cathedral that Tolkien has built, nor would we want to if we could. I can indeed tell chimps and humans apart. The telling apart of a modern man and a Neanderthal – take it from me – is considerably trickier, and the physical difference between fairies and elves is actually even smaller than that. Stick a Neanderthal in a suit and hat and put him on a bus and all people would think they were seeing was a really ugly guy. Expectation influences perception enormously. We wouldn't expect to see a Neanderthal on a bus any more than Legolas was expecting to see a fairy walking around in Rivendell. Keep in mind that Ceirin was raised by elves and was dressed like one. Aside from ears and height, there was nothing marking her out as a fairy. It's already been shown that Ceirin has the sort of haircut that easily conceals the ears. Maybe I should have pointed out clearly that they were at that time actually concealed. I might as well, since I'm going back into chapter 1 anyway. I've never read the books in English, only in Dutch (I know, sacrilege, but I can't help it. The English versions aren't available around my neck of the woods.) so I don't know what happens to contractions in there because they don't exist in Dutch, but in the movies the Hobbits definitely use them. I may here and there have had Legolas and Aragorn use them too. If that apparently bothers the reader so much, I'll fix it. As for the rest of my speech being too modern, hey, if I could talk like Tolkien I wouldn't be scribbling fanfiction, would I? Okay, maybe 'melodrama' and 'reversed psychology' are terms the elves wouldn't have used, but they would definitely have been familiar with the ideas, whatever they called them. After a few thousand years of life experience, you're bound to catch on to the quirks of the mind. Tolkien himself sometimes has his characters use terms that are not innate to their universe and culture. For example, at the appearance of the Balrog, Boromir calls this 'devilry', even while we can be pretty sure that there's no such thing as Christianity in Middle Earth. Tolkien was, imo, simply giving the idea the best name he could think of. Indeed, Ceirin can't fight. The Hobbits are hardly worth their salt with a sword in their hand either, are they. But as Elrond mused, there are other ways she could make herself useful. I appreciate that Elrond is the final authority, but I don't have him down as having such a lust for power as to press his point of view home when Frodo and Gandalf seem prepared to give her a chance. They back her up, just like they did Merry and Pippin, and I think it would have been out of character for Elrond to contest that, even if he could. As for the female thing, well why couldn't there be a girl in the Fellowship? Their latrines are a gazillion square miles of woods, plains, and mountains and their bathtub is a meandering river whenever they can find one. I should think that's shareable. Like I said, this will also be emailed to you. I'd be honoured if you replied and perhaps read the other 7 chapters too.
Dear Laer4572: Yeah, I know that wouldn't have been a good thing. There is of course considerably more of a point to her being out of it, as you will find in upcoming chapters, but it is a lucky thing. I'd be pleased to hear why you think she's a good addition, and maybe in what ways she isn't. Could be something there I could work with.
Chapter 8
The next morning at daybreak, Ceirin was the first to wake up. The sun was still too low on the horizon to shed any substantial light among the giants of Caras Galadhon, but a slow, diffuse illumination crept around like mist and teased her eyes open. The soft support of fluffy pillows had become a rare luxury and she stirred gently to relish the feeling, pushed sensitive bare feet into the pillows for that almost sensual tickle.
She noticed that her right hand, extended lazily above her head, rested on somebody's shoulder. Craning her neck to see who it was, she saw Legolas' pale golden hair on a pillow just a few inches away. They lay head to head, she facing east, he facing west. In a reflex, she pulled back the hand and blinked at it. Funny, she thought, that he'd tolerated it, for no doubt he'd known it was there.
She was awake now anyway, and no question of being able to go back to sleep, so she got up, careful not to disturb anyone, and padded off on bare feet.
Breakfast was already dished up all over the place, like supper the night before. Ceirin assumed that either these elves were even more light-footed than the ones in Rivendell, or some nifty telekinesis had been going on. Or, perhaps, she'd slept sounder than a solid brick. With a dish of her favorite morsels in hand, she walked around aimlessly, observed her sleeping friends, found a jug of water and a mirror between two enormous bulging roots.
She put the dish down and kneeled in front of the mirror. Her hair was an awful mess; most of it hung in one long pointy lock over her forehead and between her eyes and the rest of it stuck up haphazardly like a ceiling mop. An unfortunate consequence of having gone to bed with damp hair. A frizzy patch on either side of her head was all that was left of the braids. She dipped fingers in the jug of water and began wetting her hair to smooth it down. When it was finally somewhat presentable, she studied her ears in the mirror. With no lobes to speak of and about as long as the span between her thumb and index finger, she'd always thought them the ugliest ears ever. The notion struck her that maybe all they needed was to be shown for what they were, fairy's ears. She remembered how Amabel had worn her hair. There had been something asymmetrical about it, something eccentric that would have just looked stupid if it hadn't been balanced out by the ears. Actually, aside from some issues of neatness, tangles and length, it had looked more or less like her own mop before taming. She set to work again, combed her bangs into a thick bouncing lock on her forehead and gave the rest an upward twist.
As she sat turning her head from side to side to evaluate the effect (after all, member of the Fellowship or no member of the Fellowship, being twenty and female meant that hair was a potential topic of importance) she spied the reflection of Galadriel in the mirror. The elf was eyeing her with some amusement from the other side of the clearing among the trees. Ceirin's stomach did a flip-flop and she took a deep breath before turning around.
"They're still asleep," she said in a whisper, stating the obvious, while she approached Galadriel. Still some good ten feet away and out of earshot of the others, she stopped suddenly, tilted her head as if trying to get a new angle on what she was seeing. There was something odd about the elf as she stood there, something about the light surrounding her. It wasn't the same careful, calculated brilliance of ethereal glow as she had seen the evening before. This light was different, still white yet somehow colorful with it, more natural.
"What do you see?" Galadriel asked, smiling as though she already knew the answer.
"I don't quite know," said Ceirin. She was playing with focusing and unfocusing her vision and studying how this intensified the colorfulness of the glow. A purple orb seemed to be floating above the elf's head, and descending down her face, neck and torso were what looked like vortexes of light in different colors, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. "I don't know," she said again. "What am I seeing?"
"There is no name for what you see," said Galadriel. "None that I know. And I would not know what it means if it had not been clarified to me, a very long time ago."
"You can see it too?"
"I can. I was taught. Surrounding all living things is a field of forces. It is the field of mentality, emotionality and spirituality. All can be taught to see it. Only to fairies does this gift come naturally."
"I've never seen it before."
"One needs to be balanced within to observe the balance without."
Ceirin grinned impishly. "Then you must be helping me right now, because I don't feel very balanced at all."
"Fairy sight cannot be helped. It is not in its nature. In many ways you are not balanced. I know this. I can see it. But on one crucial point are your emotions shifting towards greater and better balance, and that is the point of who you are. You are learning the essential lesson of self-acceptance, and thereby you are ridding yourself of an illusion."
"Oddly, that makes sense," said Ceirin, recalling Amabel's lesson in vivid detail. A question suddenly came knocking on the door of her mind. It had missed its bus before, as in Ceirin's mind questions did on a regular basis. "Who taught you this?" she asked impulsively.
"One whose name I have not uttered in three thousand years and I shall not now. But my heart tells me that you shall meet him yourself before long. A spirit without shadow, conviction without doubt, enlightenment without reason, guilty only of ingenuousness. As dangerous as a child with a sword. You will meet him, and you will know."
"When? When will I meet this… spirit… fairy?"
"I cannot say. I have no answers to your questions, only food for more questions."
Ceirin smiled warmly and folded her hands. "You have already told me more than I thought you could possibly know. But why didn't you tell me last night?"
"That would have been as foolish as telling a fish about air. How could you have understood what you had not seen?"
"Appreciated," grinned Ceirin, then, mischievously: "I don't suppose there's any more information you'd like to share?"
"No information, but a gift," said Galadriel, reaching into a fold of her dress and holding something out to Ceirin, concealed within her hand. "Once upon a time, elves and fairies could speak one another's language and see through one another's eyes. Since then, our paths have separated and diverged and now, the chasm between us is too deep and too wide to be bridged by understanding. But gifts once exchanged hands. This was given to me by the one of whom I spoke, and I believe that it is time for this gift to be passed on once again."
She opened her fingers, and in her hand lay a small nugget of turquoise, irregularly shaped and with a silver fitting on the thinnest end. It didn't look like much, could have been mistaken for any old pebble on the ground if not for the color.
"A stone of power and protection," said Galadriel. "The color of the sky that would be your home. I believe this was meant for you."
Ceirin picked the stone up off Galadriel's hand, as careful as if she thought it might crumble, and held it up to the light. She half expected something extraordinary to happen and fought back a brief flash of disappointment when nothing did.
"Beware of things of grand and exceptional beauty, for the truest power lies elsewhere," smiled Galadriel. "I would have seen to a chain to complete the gift, but a more appropriate means to wear it resides in your pocket, does it not?"
Ceirin blinked at her and pulled the ribbon from her pocket. "You mean this?"
Galadriel didn't reply but gestured for her to thread the stone onto the ribbon and put it on. Ceirin did so. She tied the ribbon behind her neck, ran her fingers along it and clutched the stone for a moment. "How did you know I had this?" she asked, frowning.
"No fairy is sent into the world without the blessing of her mother and father," Galadriel replied. "Woven into the fabric of that ribbon are one hair of your mother's head and one hair of your father's."
Ceirin just gaped at her, speechless. With a lopsided grin, Galadriel reached out, put one finger under her chin and pushed it back into its anatomically justified position. Then, leaving Ceirin to ponder this unexpected last morsel of knowledge, she turned around and walked away.
Ceirin debated with herself whether she should keep her new acquisition a secret from the others. For no particular reason, if not the same instinct that drives children to keep collections of things that have value only to them hidden away in boxes under their beds. Chance decided the matter for her. As she was bending forward to place a parcel of Lembas in one of the boats, the stone dropped out of her collar. Merry and Pippin happened to be reclining in that boat, rubbing their stomachs and looking a bit green around the gills. Ceirin decided to keep an eye on them in case they were coming down with something. Merry saw the nugget of turquoise dangling from her neck.
"That's pretty," he said. "Where did you find that?"
She glanced at Legolas who happened to be just about to place some Lembas in the same boat. What the heck, she decided, and explained.
Merry and Pippin were a bit confused by the explanation. "Right, but where exactly did it come from then? Oh, never mind." But it was Legolas' reaction that surprised her.
"I am happy for you," he said, flashing a smile.
Ceirin grinned to herself all the way into the boat.
No one said anything about the new hair-do, predictably, all of them being male. Ceirin liked the way the forelock danced around with every move, but it got annoying after a while in the boat, where looking straight ahead was rather a necessary condition for being able to row straight ahead. Her mood was not helped along by the thought of a whole lot of water underneath her. It unnerved her, rather than being frightening, in the same way as a whole lot of earth above her did. She was vaguely aware that this didn't seem like the normal order of things. Earth beneath, air above, water around and fire within, that's how it should be. She was contemplating getting out and flying, but knew perfectly well how Aragorn would feel about that sort of attention-attracting, so she stayed right where she was.
She shared a boat with Legolas and Gimli, which evened out the load to three per boat, and she and the elf took turns rowing, out of a sort of self-evident courteousness rather than actual concern for the other getting tired. This meant that half the time she had nothing better to do than sit and look, and there was plenty to fascinate her. Trees and plants, being living things per definition, shed a light of their own. She played with the focus of her vision and the angle of the sunlight to try and get the best looks at the intriguing new world of life forces. To Ceirin's delight, this gift didn't seem likely to suffer the same fate as whatever it had been that had helped her localize and join her friends. If anything, she was getting better at seeing in this new way. And the best part of it all was that no Amabel had helped her.
But something was worrying her. While the life force of all the trees in the woods they were rowing past seemed to flow together and form one great field, this field was now and then interrupted. Like moths through a focused bundle of light, shadows flitted here and there, invisible among the trees, but standing out for fairy sight like ink blots on paper. And then there was the feeling, a bone-deep hum that crept up and down her spine and made her hackles rise. Something was terribly wrong. Whenever she traded a quick glance with Legolas, she could see on his face that he was aware of it too, whatever the form in which he saw or felt it.