Hi, I'm back. Sorry it took so long.
I do not own the world or character J. R. R. Tolkien created, though you won't find too many such named characters here, the places however in the grand scheme of things are definitely his. Lathwinn, Celuant, and Sarnin and Lathwinn's brothers, however, are mine.
He watched from where his chest emerged from the canopy of a tree as the scene played out before him, brows drawn down over his grey eyes. The moon did not shine, and even the stars were dimmed by a thin veil of cloud. The early spring thaw had brought misting showers over the land making it mud in which the deer's hoof sank and even the lightest footed beast left clear prints.
The dark night figures on two feet, bulky and dark in appearance moved through reeds grown up to their chest as they headed for the trees. The ellon continued to watch from his perch in silence. His scowl growing darker.
Then the figures began to jolt as straight shafts with broken tips sliced through the grass and into their chests and bellies. They grabbed the shafts and pulled, but only the ends of the sticks appeared. Then more slender frames danced into view where the grass had bent slightly away from the bulks of the dark figures. Pale starlight shone off pale skin and the less pale blades of deer antler they held. The latter sliced through the dark masses who struck back, but the slighter figures danced away from them into the grass again.
"What do you think?"
Celuant turned his narrowed eyes to the figure as tall as him. Denethor grinned at him. "Are they ready?"
Celuant looked back to watch some of the bulky figures fall. A laugh broke out from one of them utterly destroying the illusion. He knew the bark, the rumbling, the crack of an orc laugh. The melody and music of this one echoing out of a bulk of wickerwork covered in mud and dry grass showed him what he and the green elf beside him knew already. "To face each other in these 'games' of theirs of course. To face real orcs invading your woodlands, no."
Denethor frowned as even more giants of straw and dirt toppled over. "These are exercises made up by Lathwinn herself to train my people for just that event."
"And she has done, and they have done, just as well as they might with the tallest and strongest wearing such replacements for orc flesh, but you have no such replacements for orc armor nor orc blade, nor their other weapons of orc bow and chain."
"We have bows and use them often, however, the exercise would be over too soon …"
"Your bows and arrows and aim are your best defense against invaders I have seen from you, but when you run out of arrows, you are doomed for the hosts of the northern garrison of our enemy are great. You will not withstand them like this."
Denethor turned an intense gaze upon, his lips pressed together, for a moment. Then asked "Will not your own people stop them, Celuant?"
He kept his gaze on the finishing exercise below and to the north in the tall grass where elves without helmet or armor picked up their fellow elves stripping off theirs of mud covering interwoven brambles and grass from last year. Then he replied, "You are my people."
The darker haired and scarred elf jumped down a limb before stopping and speaking over his shoulder to the Green elves' king again. "And no … the Noldo will not save you. When the enemy unleashes the might he's built up for years … they will be stripped away themselves like leaves from a branch in a bitter wind … and your people will have to defend themselves …"
. . .
Celuant was wondering by the remarkably well-held together banks of one of Ossiriand's many swollen rivers when a bright voice asked behind him, "What is this I hear of you disparaging my training exercises?"
He looked back over his shoulder to see the grin of Lathwinn aimed at him a bit of mud still staining her cheek. He knew it must have been rubbed there by a near-blow to her cheek by a mud-covered hand for she was always the leader of the resisting force in her put-together plays and her brothers always among her testers, the oldest ones at least.
He shrugged at her. "I merely speak the truth, you are not ready for a 'true' invasion, my lady, neither you nor your people."
She continued to smile at him. "Yet you stay with us."
He shrugged again. "Where else would I go?"
She set aside a "orc-mask" of mud he had been carrying for what reason he could not guess beyond it being a joke, that was often the excuse for many things green elves did he had found living with them. She took one long stride, as long as her shorter legs could make to stand much closer to him, close enough she had to look up into his face. "Denethor says you called yourself one of us."
He shrugged again. "What else can I be?"
She put a finger to her chin and her brow creased slightly. "You do not act very like us."
"I will never be cheerful, Lady."
Lathwinn sighed and let her hands fall and held them behind her. "Now that is a shame, especially for all my aunt has done to try to make you otherwise."
"Putting together a home for me with things I like is a kindness I cannot forget anymore than I can your kin and you bringing me here, but it is hard to settle in and grow content when you know the land sustaining you will be destroyed."
Lathwinn tilted her head as she studied him her grin finally falling away though her slightly creased brow and pursed lips looked more puzzled than afraid. "Then why do you stay?"
"All Arda will burn, Green elleth, and I fear I cannot cross the sea not without first going through the halls anyway."
Lathwinn gave a slight smile. "It seems not so long ago we convinced you to stay a little while before doing that."
"It has been only a little while among elves, though the creatures you protect might call it otherwise. Indeed, I still cannot fathom why your kin love them so much when their lifespans are so fleeting."
She laughed, though there was a slight cracking in the sound that spoke of pain to him. "I cannot fathom how you and my aunt can love stones that need nothing to drink, or eat, or breathe to be sustained, but simply wear away."
He gave her a slight smile of his own. "Well, that is one thing your aunt and I agree upon at least." He gave a slight bow before continuing. "And now, if I may continue my walk, Lady of the wood."
She gave a slight bow back and turned and walked away. He stared after her a moment before turning. And then another figure stepped out before him. Unlike her niece, she wore a dress of pale green and wore her hair entirely down as she was wont to do when not traveling or tending to some sick or wounded beast, or strange elf."
"Good evening Celuant."
He raised his chin in greeting briefly. "Greetings, Sarnin."
"What is it you seek to find here?"
"I am on my way to the canyon to seek rocks of some profit to me."
"May I come with you, for that is what I seek as well."
"If you insist."
They walked together for some time, Celuant aware of how the elleth gazed at his face. After some time, she finally asked, "What kind of stones do you seek in the canyon and how do you expect them to profit you?"
"I was rather hoping to find something that might interest you."
"Me?"
"To repay you somewhat for all that you have done for me."
"You do not have to repay me, Celuant."
"As you keep saying, but it keeps my occupied as well to do something of the like for you, and is a small way of repaying a debt I do indeed owe you in the only way I can."
She paused and finally looked away from him and to their shared path as they came to the stream. He waded out in it before her. She spoke behind him, "Celuant."
He turned back to see her seated on a large stone mostly dry, but with its root in the water. Even her toes had not yet broken the surface of the stream he saw. She gazed after him. "Do you really think you can never be happy here?"
He made his voice as hard, and thus, he hoped, as convincing as possible. "I do not expect, Lady, to be happy anywhere."
She winced. He hurried on, "But I will say, you and your people, have, for now, made me far less miserable than I ever expected to be again."
She gave a weak smile. Upon seeing it, he hurried on to a turn in the canyon so he could be beyond her sight. Some time after that, he gave a soundless sigh of relief.
When in their presence, it was like a slight itch, he could not scratch, to realize how happy they wanted him to be, like them, and be as miserable as he was. To be away from them though, he was soon realizing once more in the darkness of this canyon its wall cutting him off even from the breath of the forest beyond where they lived, was also torture. Here his own dark thoughts swallowed him. He must admit, he was not good company even to himself. This caused Sarnin's fixation on him to baffle him all the more.
These were, however, slight troubles if troubles they could be called at all. He knew true torture. He knew starvation and thirst. He had known neither here. And it bothered him less he might know them again, than that destruction would come to this land at last.
He hoped and thought he had good reason to believe these people would never know capture like he had. It was one reason he would not have make them armor even if he'd been able to. They were fighters, as the animals they cared for were. In the hands of enemies, they would claw, and bite, and kick and aggravate monsters into killing them outright.
His own armor and perhaps some command they had already been given had protected his life from the orcs who'd taken him, till he was in their fortress. He never wanted to go back there again, nor see any of these people in like bondage. Still it annoyed them they'd put up such a feeble fight when war finally came. Their bright spirits deserved more than that. They ought to make Morgoth remember the day he took their land and lives from him. He thought the Noldo in the north would at least accomplish that and it irked him they would if his own people could not.
His foot touched something and the feel of it caused him to look down. He tilted his head and reached down. He plucked the stone from the riverbed and studied it. How smooth, how hard, how dark this stone was.
He turned it over and over in his hands as memories began to reform in his mind. "Obsidian, the stone of the fiery mountains." He had found it often in his wanderings while searching for metals instead.
If he recalled correctly, it could be shaped with tools and without flame. He climbed out of the waters, knelt down on the bank, where the stars shone down, and began to experiment with it. The results pleased him very much indeed.
God Bless
ScribeofHeroes