#celeborn: yeah so she saw me enacting the literal definition of butthurt

[celeborn-of-doriath]

C l o s e d for @ga1adriel

A HAZE OF POLLEN HUNG IN THE SUN LIKE POWDERED GOLD and there was nothing else at all in that high world where leaves rode over his face like veils, their veins framing green where the light shone against them. The summer rains had brought up the grasses and      the wild flowers ran in a riot of colors     as far as the eye could see. In the deep glens of Doriath's forests dwelt some primordial sense that hummed of mystery and music so that he felt he could nearly hear the resonance of the universe at its creation.

In Menegroth his servants would plait his hair and adorn it with      obsidian beads,     dress him in robes layered one upon the other until the myriad tissue-fine silks at his throat bled an ombre like fog traced into the velveteen indigo of nightfall.      PRINCE OF DORIATH ー he would sit in his king's hall and cast his judgments, raise armies, apportion blame and absolve it, and every moment he would long to be here, racing through the treetops, where every branch knew the weight of his foot.

These trees had known him since his birth, and he them. A thousand upon a thousand times he had launched himself through this canopy with all the confidence of a man who had known these paths before even the first rising of the sun and would know them still at the last. But the flash of light which caught his eye had come from below, sparking and glittering like a hot coal in a copper brazier, and the next thing he knew was air and the      SUDDEN SENSATION OF PLUNGING DOWNWARD.

The next sensation was a good deal     less pleasant,      for the Prince of the Sindar collided solidly with a branch, which tossed him quite rudely to another, and then he was spinning, scratching for purchase, and wondering what Thingol would say at his funeral. He would never know if it was the tree who saved him or he who managed to save himself, but whatever the case, he at last gripped a branch with enough force to nearly pull his arm from its socket and      UNCEREMONIOUSLY HIT THE GROUND.

It would have been a splendid thing had he managed to look even half the prince that he was, but dressed only in simple gray, having made a decidedly inelegant entrance, with only the liquid moonlight of his long silver hair to mark him as royalty, he could only mouth wordlessly at the Noldorin maiden dancing in the field of flowers before him. ( Very well ー it was not only because she was startlingly beautiful that he could not speak, but also because he had knocked the wind out of himself in his tumble. )

ー She    G L O W E D.

Not only her hair, but     all of her.      He had seen Noldor before of course, when Finrod Felagund and his sister had come to live in Doriath... or perhaps this was the sister. He found himself wishing he had paid more attention to matters of state and less to weapons and war.

❝ You... ❞     he jabbed a finger in her direction as if he were singling out a soldier, but then retracted the offending digit upon realization that one probably ought not point at a lady in such a manner,     ❝ ...are you aware that you glow? ❞     He managed to croak, still half-starved for air, and then doubled over to unleash a string of profanities of the absolute lowest degree, wrought in obscenity with as much artistry as any jewelsmith might treat gold or any mason his marble. With a hiss of pain, he collapsed back into the flowers, every limb aching, and closed his eyes, hoping that when next he opened them he might find she had      MERELY BEEN A FIGMENT OF HIS IMAGINATION.