View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
Thirty-six days after the rising of the Sun there's another light in the sky.
It's blue.
They've finished laying the foundations of their new camp on the south side of the lake; they're still sleeping under the open sky, but in an another month that won't be necessary either. The walls are sturdy. Maglor is beginning to feel like a waterbug on the open ocean - not drowning, as long as he keeps moving, but achingly aware that this stretches out ahead of him for far longer than he can possibly endure it.
"This is unlike the Valar," Curufin says.
"They noticed the Sun and the Moon were a blow to the Enemy, now they're doing variants," Celegorm offers, comfortably, his eyes narrowed at the cold blue spheres. "Varda never struck me as incompetent, exactly."
"There's no plausible mechanism that would generate light in that wavelength. It's not starlight. It's not like the Sun or the Moon, it's not like the Trees, it does not match what I know of the ancient magics that lit the world before the Valar and the Enemy first warred -"
"And how much do you know of that, really?" Celegorm says, but impatiently, already disinterested in the conversation. There's a new light in the sky. Some of the plants will wither, some will thrive. The orcs will cringe in Angband, the cousins will perch in embittered, brittle hostility on the north shore of the lake. The dead will not return to life. The world has only seen thirty-six sunrises and already they tire him.
"..smaller than the Sun and Moon, too, and moving faster - much, much faster, or else it's much, much smaller." Curufin frowned. "I don't like this."
The blue light is getting brighter, or maybe just appears so against the setting sun. It's also - Curufin is right - moving.
"Cáno," Celegorm says, and Maglor startles out of his reverie. His fingers, which have been skittering across the surface of their table, fall still. "Want me to go and take a look at it?"
"Yes," Maglor says.
By the time he's assembled a party on horseback, night has fallen and the light is both brighter and closer. Much faster and much smaller, Celegorm judges, and rapidly sinking out of the sky. Maybe this is something new after all.
