First Meeting
Many years had now gone since the Orc attack which had orphaned Beril and Mirwë, and forced their tribe to move to another place. However, their tribe was only one of several smaller tribes not really belonging to any of the larger clans of Elves—Vanyar, Noldor and Teleri as their names were to be known later.
Three young Elves, who were to play important roles for their respective clan together in the future, were already friends at this point of youth.
"Finiel, mind your steps so you will not fall down… Olwë, Elmo, please remain still for a little while!" Elwë called from where he was on the ground, trying to keep an eye on his two adventurous younger brothers at the same time, his silver hair flying around his head as he stressfully tried to keep the two elflings around. The golden-haired Elf beside him, looked up in annoyance from his task of braiding the three snare lines together, given that he just had gotten an old branch landing straight on his head.
"Let them run around here, so we can fix this hunting trap. The Elders will be displeased if we cannot manage to catch some animals of the deer herds," Ingwë commented in a dry voice, removing his loosened hair from his eyes in order to see better. Movements in the tree above them revealed that the only She-elf among them seemed to be laughing.
"Do not worry, Elwë, I will try and spot them from here," Finiel promised as she looked down, her thick black hair falling over her shoulder in the braid she had.
~X~X~X~X~X~X~
Having already hurried away to find something else to play with, Olwë and Elmo caught sign of a brightly honey-coloured butterfly ahead of them.
"Lets try and catch that one! Big brother may like to see it!" little Elmo shrieked in excitement, Olwë already trying to do so since he had the same idea. Trying to catch the butterfly was not that easy, given that they were rather young and the butterfly flying above them.
"Try to be more quiet…"
Finally, the butterfly landed on a fallen tree trunk in front of a minor steppe just outside the small forest. The two brothers tried to catch it when a movement was seen in the high grass. And not just one, or anything that could be a friendly animal either. A neigh revealed it to be a horse, but it was no sound of the herd. And something was moving above the grass as well.
"That is…."
Suddenly a group of orcs revealed themselves.
"AAAAAAAAAH!"
They had barely started to run back into the forest, when the group of orcs came after them. Elves who ended up astray from their kin were the easiest to catch, and especially Elflings due to their small size.
"Brother! Brother!"
Back in the glade, Elwë had just taken a step back to check so the trap was well hidden, when he and Ingwë suddenly got each one of his younger brother in the back. Given by the high speed Olwë and Elmo had been running in an attempt to escape the orcs, all four ended up landing into the trapping pit.
"Ouch! Ok, that was not funny, you two! You just wasted half a day's work to build and cover the pit…" Elwë started in his scolding, however, he was interrupted by the panicked Elmo clinging to his leather tunic while almost yelling:
"THEY WANT TO EAT US!"
"What!?" Ingwë wondered, getting up on his feet and peeked over the edge, only to see the large group of orcs. Finiel, having jumped down on the ground at the screaming, knew that they were in seriously big trouble right now. She could not count on defeating all the orcs alone, and with her friends trapped in the pit she could not get enough time to get help. Apparently, Ingwë was of a similar mind since he blew hard in the hunting horn to call the attention of the other hunting groups.
"Finiel, watch out!" Elwë cried as an orc nearly speared her, Finiel was no warrior in heart or mind, she knew how to defend herself but had never fought against orcs in a situation like this one. In fact, as she took a step back in order to get better aim for her spear, Finiel was unfortunate enough to get her left foot caught in a snare and found herself unable to move freely, and if she bent down to free herself, it would only give the orcs a better chance to kill her. She was actually so unprepared on the snare that she ended up tripping backwards in front of the trapping pits with her friends just as a orc raised a large axe, made from an animal head with its teeth still intact, to behead her.
"FINIEL!"
Suddenly, just as she thought her life to be over, a new shadow fell over them from the trees and the orc found itself forcefully kicked back with a powerful kick on the face and a unknown spear landing in the throat of another orc as a new elf landed on the ground in front of Finiel. She saw a glimpse of something shining bright in the starlight coming from the sky, but thought it may the weapons. The orcs trying to attack, only to be either killed or injured by the sharpened bone daggers the stranger had in the hands.
"Watch out! Behind you!" Finiel tried to warn the unknown elf, which caused one orc to only be successful in grabbing hold of the hood as it earned a deadly stab in the stomach. With the hood pulled off, the stranger was, even in the middle of battle, a bronze-gold male elf with stunning silver hair set up in a high ponytail and two smaller hair loops behind his ears. As he turned around for a moment to pull back a new arrow on his bow, a pair of silver eyes met the grey of Finiel. Not losing his focus on the battle for a moment, the arrow went flying past Elwë's head in the trapping pit to land in the throat of a orc behind him.
"Watch it with those arrows! You could have hit one of us instead!" Elwë shouted, somewhat shocked over how the situation had turned so fast. The stranger did not answer. Pulling out two extra bone daggers he had on his back, he finished off the final orcs with a skill revealing that it was far from his first hunt or killing of those horrible beings. In fact, he even took time to free Finiel from the snare around her foot by tossing a dagger into the ground on the snare. Though it seemed like he had no plan to stay, given how was quick to jump back into the tree branches after taking back his arrows. He vanished before any of them could beg him to wait.
"Who was that?" Ingwë asked in confusion, where he was trying to climb up from the trapping pit, just in time as the hunting party arrived to the scene.
~X~X~X~X~X~X~
Miriwë jumped along the tree branches far above the ground. His tribe was going to be pleased over the news that he had killed more orcs, the lesser that remained of those horrible monsters the better. The sound of hoofs revealed that his chestnut-coloured mare had found him as well. She galloped below him, neighing at him as if saying that she would rather have him on her back.
"Yes, Suldal, it is time to return home to the camp," Miriwë responded before jumping down from a branch. The mare jumped over a fallen tree, making him land perfectly on her back before she galloped further away.
The camp was not too far away, hidden in a naturally big glade between several oak trees, protected by a wall built of larger tree branches which had fallen down in storms, with sharpened stones and blueberry torn bushes added in between the branches. The two guards at the single entrance spotted his silver hair soon enough.
"Miriwë is back, lady Beril!"
Riding into the centre of the camp and dismounting, Miriwë first checked Suldal for possible injuries before ensuring that she could return to the small herd of semi-domestic horses which lived outside the camp.
"So, brother, having fun on the hunt?" Beril asked with a thin smile on her lips as she walked over to him, the siblings hugging each other.
"Yes, I thank you much for allowing me some time for hunting, dear sister. I feel less restless now in my body."
Beril nodded, knowing that Miriwë had an inner fever in his blood to get rid of orcs when he could, haunted as they both were by the memory of how their parents had died.
"Oh yes, as long as you are able of returning safe and sound back to us. Now, I believe that you are needed in the weaving hut, you did promise that you would show something about the woad plants you had tested around."
Miriwë smiled, happy to show more of what he had found out and invented. A couple of years after coming of age, he had figured out how to weave clothes by wool and plant fibers. The felt textile made of matting, condensing and pressing fibers together had been a huge success in the hot summer months, when the air was warmer than in winter when they needed the animal furs to clothing to survive the cold. Though error and some failures, Miriwë had later created a weighted loom which he had used to spin the plant fibers into a tread. The weighted loom had eventually given him inspiration to create a warp-weighted loom on which he could weave clothes on with the thread.
Walking over to the weaving hut, Miriwë greeted the Elves already sitting there and working.
"Hello, everyone. Ready to be shown how we can make our clothes even more colourful than before?" he greeted with a smile, seeing that they had obeyed his request to cut the leaves of the woad plant and form them into balls, which had been left to dry. Sitting down with crossed legs, Miriwë crushed one such woad ball into a powder in a small clay bowl with a smooth stone, then added said powder into a bigger pot.
"Okay, why is the urine needed for this?" someone asked.
Ignoring the question, Miriwë added some lime and then moved around in the pot with a stick so that it would mix into a sediment. Once it had become stiff, they picked up the pieces to grind it into a powder again. Again they were using urine, heating it up in a large pot over an open fire outside and then carefully adding the woad powder into it. Then, adding some wool threads into it and stirring, the wool thread changed colour into blue when they picked it up in the air by a stick.
"My, look at this…!"
~X~X~X~X~X~X~
At the same time, some of the elders of the bigger clans were scolding Finiel, Ingwë, and Elwë for having left the hunting party against the given orders to remain close.
"You three do realize how close you were to actually dying today, right?! All because of that you left the hunting party!" Tata, the second of the three Elf-fathers and first leader of the Noldor, almost screamed in fury, hands raised in the air as he walked back and forth, the bone pearls in his carefully braided hair making the smaller braids flying around his head in pace with his movements.
"If anything could have gone even worse, you could have been dead or worse! Elwë, you were tasked with showing your younger brothers how to do a simple snare, how hard was that to do?!"
"We have learnt our error, Chieftain…." Finiel responded in a low voice, kneeling in front of him with her head bowed down. The scolding felt like a verbal slap in the face for the three friends, and they could only blame themselves for not following the given orders in the first face. As if the scolding was not enough, they were not allowed to have their share of the evening meal this day and not allowed to leave camp for the next five days.
Once the scolding was finally over, they were allowed to leave to whatever chores they had.
"Great, this day really become NOT as planned. So much for the hope of helping out in the hunt today…" Ingwë commented as they walked past the long line of huts and tents. Elwë nodded in agreement, neither one of the three friends were in a good mood but they had a quiet agreement that Olwë and Elmo had gotten enough punishment in that they would suffer from nightmares about the orcs for the coming nights.
"Pardon if I make it sound stupid, but I would have liked that handsome stranger to at least give us his name so we could thank him for saving our lives if we ever meet him again…"
Finiel herself did not seem to notice how she especially spoke of the mysterious stranger as handsome, but Ingwë did see how Elwë changed his facial expression for a short moment at her words, his grey eyes almost showing a hint of jealousy. He had realized a long time ago that Elwë had a rather serious crush on their shared female friend and it was almost painful to watch how slow-witted Finiel was to his attempt to show his feelings for her. Ingwë could count on his fingers the times Elwë had given Finiel a gift and she had mistaken it for something else.
"I need to return to my family hut before my parents will be even more angry with me over what happened today, because I failed to watch my little brothers properly. My ears still hurt from the boxing mother gave me before in her anger…" Elwë spoke before hurrying away, not once seeing in Finiel. No wonder, Ingwë thought for himself, unrequited feelings were like a thorn in the heart. Being the only one of the three who was married at the moment, he had some better understanding of romance than the other two. He and Finiel did the same, bidding each other a good day before returning home to their home huts.
~X~X~X~X~X~X~
Author's note: Finiel is the female Finwë in this story, just like Miriwë is the genderbent Miriel. Elwë is Thingol's original name, which I think he may have changed upon becoming King of Doriath. Suldal is a Sindarin horse name meaning Wind Foot. Tata was the second of the three Elf-fathers who awoke at Cuiviénen, becoming the first known leader of the Noldor. And yes, in this AU young Thingol have a serious one-sided crush on Finiel… come on, anyone who reads the Silmarillion knows that canon male!Finwë and Thingol were very good friends, why not transform that friendship into something else for a AU story?