Thanks @blue-to-blue for the tag! Here's the opening snippet from "dawn-stillness", aka nerdanelfic.
As with everything I'm writing nowadays, this takes place in the world of the incomparable @chthonion's Your shadow rising to meet you (specifically The Harrowing, chapter 9).
The day that Nerdanel’s sons return is a strange one. She has been reminiscing with Findaráto, him whom her sons once called cousin, who goes now by the name Finrod Felagund; together they have been waiting for poor Tyelperinquar, her only and beloved grandchild, who has been spirit-sick in the months since his own Returning. The Halfling will be coming with him (Findaráto says they prefer “hobbit”; she will try to remember).
Findaráto does not want to speculate with her on who has Returned that would summon both Tyelpe and the Ringbearer, who never shared an Age of Arda until now. This is a reticence beyond a simple dislike for gossip. He has a suspicion, and he does not like what he suspects, and she does not ask. She has learned that he has wisdom, her nephew, and no small amount of foresight, and perhaps something inside of her does not want to know.
She has left a window cracked so that they hear Tyelpe's approach, and when they do it is quickly clear that there are too many horses by far. Nerdanel stands, raising a hand to Findaráto to show she will go first. He, wide-eyed, seems to feel as she does: that something is happening, something monumental.
She goes outside as they are dismounting. Tyelpe is in the lead, and he is the only one – oh, he and the Halfling – not wearing the staid gray of the Returned.
“Grandmother,” he says, his tone apologetic, and he goes on to say a few other things that seem both obvious and incongruous, but those words disappear along with her breath when the tallest of the Returned carefully takes down his hood with one hand, because –
– that is Maitimo, her Maitimo, tall and strong and beautiful –
– and then she sees the twins, and then Atarinkë, and –
It is like giving birth. She is strong and wounded and terrified and furious, shaking and making sounds only her heart knows, and they are all gathering around her, one-and-two, Maitimo and Makalaurë – oh, Makalaurë – and then three-four-five and six-seven, Ambarussa are crying, their arms around her and one another, and she feels the tentative brush of their minds, feels the solidity of the way they are woven together like the trunk of a great Tree, feels the sorrow and the joy and the piercing pain and the fear and opens the crooked gate of her own mind to them, to all of them, pouring out light that would make their father proud. Tyelpe is there too, in amidst the muddle as he had been as a child, and she asks, Tyelpe, how and sees the look over his shoulder, and realizes – there were more than nine horses.
Still standing well back from the house are two strangers. One of them has hair like copper and tree-kissed flame.
The other is her husband.
No-pressure tags for: @chthonion, @tense-gemstone, @lissomelace, @starspray, and my dear @baladric, and anyone else who wants an excuse to post a snippet.
