Quickly, then, to a side entrance, slipping in -

"To the throne room?"

(There's fighting within, too, it sounds like.)

"Yeah."

She nods and leads Luthien there, deftly navigating her wife around any fights.

(She doesn't want Luthien to have to see this. Any of this.)

The throne room is in disarray when they get there.

Thingol's dead, body sprawled in front of the throne, blood splattered around him. There's several others dead, as well - two dwarves, a handful of elves, mostly guards. (Luthien recognizes them, of course, though she'd never been as close to her father's guards as to the border guards.)

Oh no.

She moves closer, trying to figure out what happened.

Thingol appears to have been killed by a blow from someone shorter than him, though the exact weapon is hard to determine at a glance. The elves also seem to have mostly been killed by dwarves, though one of them might've been killed by another elf - the only dead court elf who isn't one of the guards, someone Luthien recognizes from time's he's tried to reconcile arguments.

Mygwainor's a step behind Luthien, though she's looking at the scene more tiredly than analytically.

Still, she nudges aside one of the dwarven bodies to reveal a complicatedly and gorgeously wrought necklace he'd dropped and then fallen over, apparently dying while scrambling for a weapon. 

"Oh, that- stupid, stubborn idiot!"

Hug.

"...We should try to stop the fighting."

"Rally the guards or something." Deep breath.

She turns decisively away from the corpse. "Let's go."

"I can try to project your voice here," she says, "If we get everyone to stop, we can sort out and rally people before we get attacked externally; this interior fight will only weaken our position."

"Do you- know the layout well enough?"

"Yes."

Luthien starts singing. Calm and sadness, peace and regret. The laying-down of arms and forgiveness. It's an elegy for her father as much as anything else.

She makes sure it reaches every corner of the city, spreads beyond to any knots of fighting, anyone who's already left. 

The distant sounds of fighting cease. 

She lets the song trail off slowly, ending on a long sustained high note.

She takes Luthien's hand. 

"Let's get defense and medical response organized," she says, softly. "Sauron's unlikely to attack immediately; I'd say our largest priority right now is actually avoiding a war with the dwarves..."

"Yeah."

To that, then. 

There are more injured than dead, at least. Everyone's still upset, but... They can prevent further violence for now. 

Mygwainor takes the lead on a lot of discussions with and medical care to the dwarves who survived, though Luthien's needed for some of it. 

She locks the Silmaril in a metal chest. 

She gets shaken apologies, the start of peace, of deescalation.

She hasn't slept in over twenty four hours, too busy on damage control, on peace, on preventing the twisting, shuddering timeline from destroying Doriath early, when the world buckles and gives. 

It was inevitable with events happening this far out of order. 

Fate finds Luthien as the world is unraveling (she's the only one who can see it doing so) and takes one final, grieving look at her wife's face before she's dumped back into the silence between Songs.

The first thing Luthien recognizes is her father's face.

She starts crying.

It's hard to tell apart sadness from anger or other upset in a baby. Her parents must think she's much fussier this time around.

She eventually learns to stop prodding at the tender soreness where the marriage bond almost isn't. She lived without it for much longer than she lived with it but-

It helps when she relearns to walk on her own. To take back that bit of autonomy. She grows into a serious, solemn child. She practices singing, and gets stuck with the after-name Tinuviel. When she's able to get away on her own, she works on her swordcraft. That was the way of fighting her Mygwainor liked most.

She pushes her father to treat with the dwarves as an equal state, when they're discovered. Maybe that will help.

It's when she's out in the forest alone one day that she feels the marriage bond blossom again. She grabs her bag and begins heading west immediately. (She's always packed as if she were leaving, on these excursions, ever since Beren.)

She can get a ship all the way to Aman, if she wants.

By the time she's reached the shore - well, marriage bonds are dim if there's any great distance, so she can't really feel much detail about her wife. 

But Mygwainor doesn't seem to have moved closer on her own. 

That's all right. Luthien is going to her.

Aman is pretty! It's also brighter than Beleriand, much more so. The people have an odd, fierce light in their eyes, and they're all quite nice.

Everyone knows Melkor was recently released from bondage. It's on everyone's tongue. 

That does mean she can fairly easily learn exactly where in Aman Melkor is, though, rather than having to use the bond to triangulate - she's living outside of Tirion, among the Noldor.

(The language here is different, of course, but a few people have trickled over since Sindarin came into use and can be her interpreters - or people react fairly well to her using osanwe to communicate.)

That's convenient.

Not that she won't make an effort to learn Quenya as she goes, but. She has other things on her mind. She moves steadily towards Tirion and her beloved.

(She doesn't try to contact her over osanwe. It's... maybe superstitious of her, but she wants to see her wife with her own eyes.)

She's able to find her wife very easily, especially this close. 

But -

The woman her bond insists is her wife, whose very presence announces Vala, wears a different raiment than Beren had.

That's not too unusual for a Vala, of course. 

She's alone in a small estate separated from any others - she makes people nervous, apparently - and she answers the door for Luthien with a frown and a furrow in her brow.

"Mygwainor."

"Do you- remember me?"