𝖤𝖭𝖵𝖨𝖭𝖸𝖠𝖳𝖠𝖱

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   He presses the lancet to his forearm—the blood that slips from the vein is virulently red, red as the air. It runs over his wrist and Estel cups his hand to make a funnel of his palm, so that the river of his blood collects in the cup set on the ground below his arm. When the current slows, he presses the harmless flat of his knife to the skin beside the wound, applying pressure. More blood flows in the long silence that it takes for the cup to become nearly halfway full.

   He watches, and tries not to think of his father.

   “I was raised by immortals. Different than you, but just as strange to me. Every day I was changed, like a green shoot, but they were always the same—”

   They are alone and the fire has gone down to embers. The dark is new and blue in the young evening, and Estel finds her pale skin almost glowing. Blue, too, but a cast shade of turquoise like the water on a white sand beach. There is something very terrible about her, something terrible like the moon, so that she reminds of a place he dare not think of as home. Perhaps that is why the story comes out of him, warm and low, with the easy intonation of a remembered song.

   “I did not understand why they were so different when we seemed so much alike. My mother grew older. Her hair greyed, and the skin around her eyes grew thin. It frightened me, just as it frightened me to grow taller, when no one around us changed at all. It was not death that frightened me. It frightened me that I could not stay the same, that I could not understand or predict what I was becoming. I went to the elf who I secretly pretended was my father when I was at daydreams. He said to me: we are all part of the same Song. I suppose he meant that the same God made those lesser gods who made us both.”

   Estel glances up at her through a sharp shadow of dark lashes and smiles a little. Something boyish at the corner of his mouth. The tale is easy for him to tell, as though he told a story of another boy, a boy who wasn’t him. He does not recognize himself in it, even as he is in most danger of doing so when he is doing this. A knot at the base of his heart tells him that when he is doing this, when he is making medicine, he is who he was meant to be.

   “He was very wise—but more than I wanted his wisdom, I wanted him to love me like a son, so that I would not have to be so different.”

   Weakness is less palling when paired with another weakness. He offers her a little intimacy to make the intimacy of her vulnerability less naked, to cover it up with his own like a blanket. Estel stymies the flow of his blood suddenly by bending his wrist upward and then licks his own arm clean, knowing his mouth is cleaner than his shirt. He rocks back onto the balls of his feet to offer the cup of his own blood up to her.

   They say that all her kind are the servants of Sauron—but they say, too, that all men are cruel and full of greed. Here, in the quiet of the wood, when they are both now faintly drunk with lack of blood, it does not matter what scholars and poets and the sons of wise men say.

the found and the lost.

   𝖲𝖧𝖠𝖬𝖤 𝖢𝖱𝖤𝖲𝖳𝖲 𝖮𝖵𝖤𝖱 𝖧𝖨𝖬 𝖫𝖨𝖪𝖤 𝖠 𝖲𝖳𝖮𝖱𝖬. He would like to be an honest man. An honourable man. He has tried to be this man many times in his life. He has always failed. No poetry about the shifting nature of truth and lies can disguise the fact that Estel is a liar, a man who lies. A man who should not be trusted. It is not only Strider, or Longshanks, or Khô. It is not only a name. Estel's bright eyes flicker away from her, into the thick dark of the room, and his voice is whisper-quiet.  "Ki-âpsen ni.”

   Forgive me, he says. He apologizes in his mother's tongue, because then it is true—even if Orin cannot wholly understand it. Because that language, the language spoken long ago in the only home he has ever known, is the only language that exists in the moment, in the present, in the time that he also exists. They are the only words that explain Estel. The other words all belong to other people who are moving somewhere inside of him. They are inside of him, but they are not him. So, he asks for her forgiveness in Adûnaic—as his mother taught him.

   They are in a rented room, small and warm. Smelling of unwashed linen, of the unchanged rushes in the hall outside. Seated on the floor beside the bed, Estel is between her feet that are flat on the floor. Pressing the tension from her tired legs.

   She is not trying to make him feel ashamed—but that is what the truth does. It disarms and destroys, sheds light where there was none. It dismantles the comfortable darkness. The truth is a weapon, more violent than a knife, and he is trying not to wield it. Estel turns his face and presses his cheek against her naked leg. He can smell the richness of her body here, just beside the tender skin at the back of the bend of her knee.

   Eyes shut, Estel sinks his thumb into the divot-knot of muscles behind the bulb of her left ankle, kneading firm and smooth until he feels the curl of her toes ease. Just as he was once instructed by a milk-eyed bed servant who had been his teacher in another land. Another woman who had called him by another name. Lôkh, crooked. Crooked boy, beautiful boy. Boy who forgot his own name—

   But it is not an accident that they have both survived.

   He cannot bring himself to look Orin in the face. When they sleep beside one another in the night, he dreams of four open eyes swept behind a sad, blue wing. Estel never speaks of it. It would hurt her, to speak of it, as it hurts him to dream it. It hurts less than his dreams of himself. When he wakes she is always watching him. They make love again in the dark, and ease the awareness of another world out of their bodies with their hands.