#atandil

Absolutely speechless at this commission from @mandhos of the berry fight from These Echoes We Have Left! I’m in awe at the details here and how perfectly they captured the scene. 😍😍😍 Thank you so much for this!!

From this excerpt:

They rolled back into the trillium and Balan scrambled atop him at last, pinning his arms to the ground and grinning down at him in triumph. “Bested,” he gasped, laughing still as he caught his breath and tightened his grip about the other’s wrists, eyes glinting. “Loose thine hand, I’ll have my vengeance.

But the other lay frozen, a sea of gold splayed about his head, and his eyes were fixed on Balan’s, unblinking. And again, as amid the dancing at Tol Sirion, Balan knew he might have him if he wished. The king lay at his mercy here within the trillium and violets, marked with the grass’ long shadows falling sharp against the golden light. He would yield. Balan could bend down now and press his lips to the other’s, stained bright with the berries’ dye, and no resistance would meet him. He could slip a hand behind his neck and draw him in, taste the tart fruit upon the other’s mouth and feel him fall away beneath his touch. And he had been dizzy with the knowledge of his own power.

“Open your hand,” he had said again, in his own tongue now, and obediently Nóm’s fingers parted. The airna’akran glistened in the sunlight, bright as blood against his skin. They had been crushed in the struggle, but held at least somewhat intact, and Balan shifted up slowly to gather them in his mouth. “There is a saying amongst my people—the nectar of justice is as honey upon the tongue.” His lips brushed the other’s palm and amusement rumbled through his voice. “But these you’ve left me are tart as gooseberries.” A trickle of juice had run down along the wrist and he set his lips to this in turn, little bothering to disguise the kiss as he lingered, the other’s pulse pounding against his mouth. It pounded too against his palms where they held Nóm’s arms pinned in the grass beside his head, and Balan hesitated for a moment, then let his lips brush along the other’s forearm as he drew back to meet the grey eyes once more. “A creature of flesh after all, ghomenno?”

“Never anything other.” Nóm’s voice had been scarcely a breath, shivering as it drifted up to meet him.

Thanks to @from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras for tagging me to share a a WIP snippet. So from the next installment of Atandil:

When Nóm had once attempted to explain this affinity of souls, Balan presumed it was simply that one moved through life with two sets of senses, those innate to the self and those innate to the other they joined. But the actuality of it was something quite different from his anticipation. He did not perceive in double, at least not in the way he conceived of it. This was a chord, not a duet. An added note to the existing senses, a deeper resonance within his own. It was the silk of Nóm’s skin that Balan felt as his lips traveled down to the other’s hips, but there was an elation singing within it, a shivering brightness that arose, he knew somewhere within himself, from the tickle of his beard against that selfsame flesh. And he knew too that it was as much the warmth of his own hunger for this as it was the other’s thrill at the touch of his mouth that called up the sharp gasp, or caused the Nómin's strange, half-holy swears to slip in ragged whispers from the king’s lips. Is this how it’s meant to be? He had murmured the question at some point in the night, Nóm’s head pillowed upon his shoulder with one hand casually tracing patterns along Balan’s chest. The half-felt sense of the other’s perception hummed within him as Nóm’s fingers trailed through the coarse hair and Balan nudged that feeling toward the other’s mind. Or would it be more distinct wert thou joined with one of thine own kind? In truth, I know not. Nóm had drawn one finger along his breastbone with a smile, up over his neck, hovered at the summit of the chin. I’ve never wedded another. He had walked his fingers to Balan’s mouth and traced the bottom lip from end to end, and Balan had shivered with the mingled sensation. But I am happy, I am content. Art thou not?

Thanks to @thelordofgifs for the tag! Here's a bit from the the upcoming Atandil 26:

Finrod’s laugh rippled out again as Balan’s gaze drifted back to him, wide-eyed and cautious as though still half-convinced he had not truly wakened. “You look at me as though I am a phantom,” he quipped, shifting to Taliska and arching a brow in feigned complaint. “Aye, so you are—phantom, spirit, apparition…” Balan regained his voice at last, a strange giddiness rising through him with the torrent of joy, and he pushed up onto one elbow, prodding the other doubtfully in the chest. “You seem solid enough.” “Naught but flesh and blood, my love.” Finrod grinned up at him from the rumpled nest of pillows. “The fact of which I should be glad to remind you, have you forgotten it already.” It was Balan who laughed now and slipped his hand beneath the other’s neck, turning so that he rested against him and looked down into his face; and as suspected he found the king attired in the same manner as he. A blaze of fire joined the giddiness in his veins and he leaned down to brush a kiss against the waiting lips. He had meant to follow it with a jest, some wry responding quip about feigning inattention that he might be granted the lesson, but all such thoughts fled at the touch of the other’s skin. There had been a boundary before, defined edges where Balan ceased and Nóm began—disregarded of course and more often crossed than preserved, but the demarcation had nonetheless existed. Now it was like plunging beneath a river where any movement was wrapped within the current, or where two halves of clay were smoothed till the seams were indistinguishable amidst the whole. He had been overwhelmed by it, he recalled, shaking and dizzy in the small hours of the night when each touch had carried with it the harmony of the other’s senses, every joy had rung out with his lover’s jubilance, echoing one to the other and compounding like voices through a canyon till he had lost all bearing save the grasp of the other’s arms. They encircled him again now and, as in that first discovery, his heart pounded as though it would burst. Dizzy, he wrapped himself around the anchor of Nóm’s body; and dizzy, he kissed the parted lips, the brow, the lids of his eyes and the sharp line of his cheekbone, sun-painted with the lattice’s pattern in the morning light.

Rating: T Relationships: Finrod/Bëor, Finrod & Original Character(s) Word Count: 12k

"Thou hast set a fracture within me already, canst thou see it not? Broken along the line of my own self. It is the soul’s bond that would be our unmaking, thou sayest—yet thou it was who named us lovers in soul, who holds me still in that bond while denying its effect. I shall rend already at the parting. Wilt thou not?"

Absolutely in love with this commission from @nimphelos of my favorite guys! The richness of Finrod’s robe, his smile, the movement of the whole piece, the Valacirca 🥹, BALAN’S TUNIC !!!😍😍😍 I adore everything about this!!! Thank you so much!