squirrelwrangler:

Final draft will be on AO3. Very annoyed that the distance the River Sirion travels under the Andram says three leagues but elsewhere conflicting entries put it at nine leagues. Ties into Chapter Eight of Release from Bondage.

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• The Second: Three Leagues

Dying was like the river.

Ethir’s family lived below the Gates of Sirion, down in the willow forest where the River Sirion met the River Narog. Ethir knew rivers, knew how to swim in their strong currents, how to paddle a coracle one-handed while netting fish, how to pole a laden barge upstream and avoid sandbars and strainers, and how to predict how the courses shifted in their banks every year like a cat stretching before a nap.

The River Narog was like an aunt to Ethir, a proud old woman with a voice that could be gentle or cutting as she brought him gossip down from the north and bragged about her lake as she stretched out green and lovely beneath his boat. He would run his hand across the surface of her water and feel ghost-like fingers thread between them. Herons would watch him from the riverbanks as he paddled the round coracle northward. On the Narog he never felt alone, even in his one-person craft. The river sang to him, promising her constant love and bounty, and Ethir always felt safe upon her currents. As a boy he assisted his family in porting goods on barges up the Narog to the overland road that led to the Crossings of Taeglin. Trade goods came down in barrels from Doriath, and Ethir’s neighbors had kin that would take some of the trade-wares all the way down to the Mouth of Sirion and up the coast to Círdan’s settlements, but Ethir’s family stayed on the rivers, the Narog most of all. The small streams that were her many daughters had been playmates for Ethir, yet in time he grew bored of them. He followed the river north to the new city nestled on her bank and found his calling as a ranger of Nargothrond. Dipping his feet into her cool waters, he spoke to the river of his accomplishments with the bow and sword, of his companions and new king. He thanked her for the promise of safety as he tracked and slew orcs with the river at his back, knowing he could escape if needed be upon her currents, that she would drown his enemies if he called to her for aid. He spoke of seeing Lake Ivrin and how it had been just as clear and sparkling as the river promised. Musically she answered him in the splashes against the canyon walls, the burbles over smoothened stone, and the cries of her waterfowl. She carried his contentedness down to his kin in the willow-meads of Nan-Tathren so they would not worry.

Sirion was not family. Ethir mistrusted that river. It was wide and twisting, deep and deceptive, heavy with the waters of six other mighty rivers before joining the Narog. It carried the shadows and mists of the dark ancient forests the river had traversed and the sheer cliffs of two mountain ranges it divided. Secrets flowed through Sirion, twisting it twice into fens. It was a river that cared not to speak to Ethir, ignoring all elves that floated upon it. Its voice was too deep and layered to understand, plunging ever faster through Beleriand to reach the sea, its mouth empty but for the lonely sea-birds and a few sailors that dared its estuary. Ethir spent one summer with the March-wardens learning to ply the hidden ferries among the reeds of the Aelin-uial. Well-named had been that marshland, for even high noon hung muted by mists as to feel as dark and unwelcoming as twilight. A boy grown to manhood among twisting flood-meadows of the willow forests, still Ethir never felt secure in the Aelin-uial. He panicked often, would fall into the mere and flail his limbs as if he had never swam before, flinched at every croak of frog or hooting call of owl. Sound twisted along its branching currents, stilled into sinkholes and brackish pools, and ran swift and snake-like where least expected. In the Aelin-uial the River Sirion became like Nan Elmoth, ensnaring the unwary and wary alike. Only the roar of the falls to the south stayed constant in that bewitched place. Ethir approached the falls once, under the supervision of one of the king’s March-wardens, watching the great white plumes float up from where tons of water fell screaming into the earth and disappeared. The sound was dreadful. Close to the falls no other noise could compete against it, not even the horns of Ulmo. Only when the wind blew just right could Ethir see the black pit that swallowed the white spumes. Specially crafted barrels could survive that plunge and the underground caverns to reemerge at the Gates of Sirion, but few living things did, and no boat would chance it. Ethir returned to fens above the falls, learning how to navigate the marshes and walk across the half-submerged brown moss. A sense of abandonment hung damp across his skin, the callousness of a land that sang for no elf’s pleasure. It had been a miserable summer. Even at the start of the marshland where the River Aros joined the Sirion and began to spread into a land of mists and reeds, Ethir felt the bellow of the thundering waterfall. Memory reverberated terror in tempo with the falls. He never returned.

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