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Belekevo, Kevo to his friends and also, upon his insistence, to his parents, teachers, royalty, and the Powers themselves, shaved another sliver of silver wood away from him with a sigh. He had been at work on the skeleton of a new swan-ship for what seemed like whole Ages of the World, and was in fact probably close to a Year of the Trees. It wasn’t that he hated the work--how could any Linda fail to rejoice in the honor of laboring on the Ships?--but that the work was… How to put this delicately? Not commensurate with the longing of his heart? Not the purpose toward which the One had inclined his hand? Unbelievably fucking dull. Sure, his Master and the other apprentices, those gray-robed mariner-craftsfolk with their sea-glass eyes and their penchant for songs which managed to combine deep reverence with rudeness to scorch a Vanya’s ears, could labor days upon days without rest, taking sustenance in the joy of their work. Kevo would happily impale himself on a mast if it meant looking up from the drafting table, from the endless braiding of and singing over ropes, from blasted mother-of-pearl inlays . Privately, Kevo suspected that shipwrights were just lightly salted Noldor. Not that Kevo had anything against Noldor! Some of his best friends were jewelsmiths! He had passed many an hour lobbing Cilintame’s finest works down the beach while she laughed and mocked his singing voice.
“You’re an embarrassment to your kindred, singing like that,” said Cilintame, who spent all her time in Alqualonde consulting with the shipwrights on the construction of harbor lighting, where she had become heart-siblings with Kevo, and could thus say these sorts of things without any real rancor.
“There’s a reason my mother-name has nothing to do with singing,” Kevo had said, unperturbed. His two older sisters both had music in some configuration in their names. Kevo’s mother had always said she’d made them from the same stuff, taking mostly after their father, and that Kevo was her experimental piece.
Cilintame had refrained from asking whether Belekevo was his mother-name or not; it was futile. Kevo didn’t much like to endure the constraint of naming, and only kept an element from a given name as a concession to the long memories of the Eldar and the care with which his name had been chosen. By... someone or other. Cilintame, who happily used her father-name as a reflection of their shared trade and passion of glassworking, suspected that the question of nature as opposed to expectation was a sore one for Kevo.
Kevo had apprenticed as soon as he came of age. It was what was expected of him, more or less. His mother was a shipwright of great renown, even now at work upon Olwë’s own vessel. She had celebrated his decision, but his father had looked grave. He often looked grave; it was a job requirement for a Telerin historian who specialized in mourning songs of the Great Journey. However, this was a specific gravity, one directed toward his youngest child.
“Listen well to your heart, my son. For in the tossings and churnings of discontented desire, oftentimes it is the Lord of Waters himself who speaks.”
Kevo was no stranger to discontented desire. When he could escape the workshop, he would often lug a light bench on the beach, where he would construct a tiny and lightweight canoe for himself alone. Then, he would paddle out into the gentle surf, turn toward the shore, and paddle as fast as he could until he had caught the break of the wave. He let the water push him all the way into the shore, and he spent hours on end seeking out the biggest swells to ride, until his hastily-crafted boat would crack on the shore.
“How can you treat the work of your hands so lightly, Kevo?” Luine asked, incredulous, upon seeing his careless shipcraft. “To build only to crash? Are you mad?”
Kevo had laughed, letting his fellow apprentice’s perplexity flow around him. “This little thing?” He gestured at the broken vessel. “It’s not my craft. It’s about the waves. It’s about the water, and the moving through water. It’s fucking sweet.”
But Luine hadn’t seemed to understand, and Kevo quickly tired of trying to explain. He kept his strange habit to himself, and only indulged it infrequently.
Idly, remembering, Kevo grasped a wood sliver that had dropped from his chisel and blew it from his hand. Light and broad, it caught a tumult in the air and spiraled back to the ground. Abruptly, he felt something indescribable, something that could only be a Calling. He’d heard others describe this; never very clearly, of course. It was, after all, indescribable. But not incomprehensible or unrecognizable, and Kevo did both.
“Huh,” Kevo said, tapping a bare foot against the floor of the workshop. “Lord Ulmo? That you?” No answer. Not even a helpful repeat stirring of the heart. He thought of Cilintame’s glowing praise for the Maker, how he actually bothered to instruct the Children in speech, and how much easier that made transmission of knowledge. His fondness for apprentices of all trades, and his habit of occasionally turning up to offer general encouragement.
“Lord Aulë? I’m listening. Look, sorry, but I really don’t think I’m one for the shaping of the bone of Arda, or your wife’s great trees… er, in general, anything. I mean, I like the rope-making okay, but that’s more Vairë’s thing… Um…” No answer. Probably not Aulë. “Okay, I felt something , so it’s got to be one of you. That wasn’t just a dream, right….”
He frowned. “Lord Irmo? Estë?” No moths or glowing mist. “Fuck. Lord Námo? Uh, I hope there’s no… Dooms or anything… Like, I’m not really the Doom kind of… fuck. Lady Nienna? Oromë? Nessa, Tulkas, Vána…” He was running out of Powers to invoke. “Okay, so Lord Manwë and the Star-Kindler, um, Mighty Ones among the Mighty, um… Listen, sorry about all the, uh, discord of heart? And the swearing and shit…. SHIT…” No response. Kevo could have cried in relief. He knew the Powers would never bring harm to the Children, but Manwë and Varda gave him both the Heebs and the Jeebs. He couldn’t say why, except that he was a reasonable person who possessed faculties of perception.
“Okay, so… So here’s the thing… That was definitely a Calling, except I don’t know to what, or from whom, or…. Whoever that was, please fucking tell me I’m not meant to fling wood shavings to the ground forever… Like, I know the heart’s desires can blur amidst grief or pride or pain, but I feel super confident that wood shavings aren’t, like, my heart’s true longing…”
A voice. Or, not quite a voice, more like a Truth or a Music, but Kevo was not one to fuss over the distinction. “Your heart is turned to tempest, to turbulence, to the wild waters.”
“Oh thank fuck! I mean, Lord, or… Lady? Listen, I can’t just keep addressing the concept of the Powers, y’know…”
“Learn my name and learn your calling. Kevo, wild heart, beware.” And Kevo knew that was the last he’d hear of that voice for a long time. Outside, Varda’s stars fractured and danced in the surf of the Great Sea.
Kevo left the service of the shipwrights before Laurelin waned again, and he set out to Find His Calling. He was ten feet from the front door of the workshop when he realized he had no idea how one was even supposed to go about that, so he joined in the proud lineage of panicky young adults and took off running for his parents’ house. He made it ten more feet before remembering that neither would be home, since his father was in Valmar for a singers’ circle and his mother was not to be expected anywhere near the city until she had finished her work on the main mast of her current project. Sisters? No, they were visiting their cousin. So he joined in that other proud lineage of directionless young adults and found himself wandering down the beach, feeling the cool smoothness of the jewels beneath his feet. He smiled, remembering how his eldest sister had always piled all the red jewels she could find in a cairn, how his father’s low heavy voice had taken on a lilt in the presence of the ocean’s music. How he had loved it when his mother would take him out into the surf and hold him in the path of a gently breaking wave, Kevo’s childish giggle of delight the most musical sound he ever made. How he could have slept in the rocking of the waves, even knowing the peril of it. Casting aside his apprentice’s robes, Kevo let his legs take him out into the surf.
He floated there for a long time, remembering his father’s songs of the great storms of the Journey, when the waves of Ossë would gather themselves up tall and terrible and crash into the shore with a joy like that of Tulkas in the battle-flood; when Manwë’s airs would turn metalgray and livid with tendrils of fire; when the Eldar remembered again that they were to the Powers, even Ossë the Lesser Power, as a droplet to the Sundering Sea. They remembered who he had served, once.
Such storms came never to the strands of Valinor. Here, all wildness answered to the frailty of the Children; Oromë’s beasts dulled their fangs, and the Earth-Queen tempered the poison of her creations. The sea rose but seldom, and then only to such heights as music could answer. Even as a child, there had been no peril for Kevo in the shallow waters of the coast.
It was calm. And Kevo was bored. Sighing, he waded back to the shore, and up away from the sea.
Ilcar did not look up from their writing desk, but Kevo know they had noticed he was there. As much as he wanted to greet them, he knew better than to distract Ilcar from a task. He stood in the doorway, fidgeting with his newly-twisted Vanyarin-style braids, until Ilcar looked up at last. They were smiling, but that didn’t mean much. They always smiled.
“Kevo! I’m glad to see you! What brings you here again to our fair inland city so soon?”
“Soon? Ilcar, it’s been a whole Year. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”
Ilcar was unperturbed, though they clearly hadn’t. “Oh, that explains why Norime’s been gone so often of late.” Ilcar’s wife, a champion runner, was currently favored to win the long-distance race held every Year jointly in honor of Tulkas, Nessa, and Oromë, the course of which ran from the woods of Oromë in the South to Tulkas’s feasthall in Valmar. Nessa, attired as a deer and as a woman as it pleased her, and often simultaneously, lead the pack and bellowed encouragements to the winded runners in her wake. The winner of the race would dance a principal role in Vána’s Spring Rites, which in turn heralded the flooding of the little rivers that leapt down from the mountains. Which was why Kevo was here. “I’ve made some adjustments to the vessels for greater maneuverability. Also, I changed the shape of the hull--they should be much easier to flip back over this time.”
Ilcar’s smile brightened, somehow. They had the whitest and broadest teeth Kevo had ever seen, striking against their dark skin and tightly-curled hair that gleamed characteristic Vanyarin gold. Kevo had heard no less that four compositions lauding the beauty of that smile. Norime’s was, understandably, extremely smug and not very subtle.
“And here I thought you’d abandoned shipcraft, my friend Teler. This is excellent news! Not that last Year wasn’t enjoyable, but…” But rather too much of it had been spent on the wrong side of the water surface, strapped into the long canoes most favorable for navigating the whitewater and flailing in attempt to right themselves.
“Not abandoned, just… not pursued. Besides, Cilintame wanted to learn some shipcraft, so I used the riverrunners for a demonstration of small-scale vessel construction. She has some wild ideas about making boats out of some kind of glass.”
“Noldor,” laughed Ilcar. “For every brilliant, world-changing art they create, there are ten absolutely hare-brained clunkers that wind them up in Estë’s care .”
“I wouldn’t write her off so easily. She seemed convinced that glass could be made strong enough for a boat, and she’s been right about this stuff before.”
Ilcar shrugged. “Well, for now I’ll trust to the Earthqueen’s materials. Now, I was thinking, we’ve always put in further downstream, but what if….”
After leaving Alqualondë, Kevo had stayed with Cilintame for a while, until she was busy with her new wife and her newer child and Kevo sensed his cue to get out of her hair. He’d kicked around in Tirion for a bit, but it was always loud and brightly colored and people were perpetually asking him about his craft and looking faintly disappointed when he didn’t have one. He’d considered taking service with Oromë, but he’d never been one to work closely with beasts. They were fine from a distance, he was sure. Nessa had taken one look at him and laughed, then bounded away in the form of an elk. So that was… something.
He’d wandered into Valmar on the grounds that Tulkas seemed like he knew how to have a good time, and maybe Kevo could hang around him long enough to stumble upon his Calling. Kevo had never been drawn to fighting or sport, but the partying and wild dancing seemed alright. Turned out that the partying and wild dancing were completely inseparable to fighting and sport in the halls of Tulkas, and so Kevo had found himself back again on the margin of the water, watching the ornate Vanyarin riverboats and fleet little canoes cruise along, until he could no longer bear the inactivity and had thrown together a vessel of his own. It was surprisingly hard to provoke the Vanyarin river pilots into racing, and still rarer for one to best him. So rare as to have only happened once, and mostly by chance. And that was how he had met Ilcar, who described themself as a River Scribe of Valmar and dabbled in waterway cartography and topography when they weren’t creating scrolls of poetry in exquisite brush-writing.
Ilcar hadn’t gloated, though, just smiled wider and asked if Kevo wouldn’t teach them that thing he’d done at the second bend, that turn where… yes, that one!
It was Ilcar who told Kevo about Vána’s floods. “They’re truly something to behold--a riot of silver foam and crashing water. You can almost see in them the wilderness of that Middle-Earth our ancestors forsook.”
Kevo’s eyes widened. “Ilcar. Let’s canoe them.”
He was expecting some resistance from his light-hearted friend, but Ilcar had immediately agreed and set to work on planning the best possible route through the floodwaters. And they had returned every Valian Spring since, laughing together as they plunged over waterfalls and wove through gardens of treacherous rock. Kevo nursed a growing suspicion that his Calling lay in pursuit of the Body over Mind and Hand. Amid the foam and roar of Vána’s renewal, he felt part of the world and bound up in its life in a way he never had in the workshop, never had in Olwë’s court, never had while winding logical proofs around each other in their self-contained purity. Vána’s floods were barely contained at all; in their tumult, his spirit was at peace.
But they came once a year.
“What, Child?” said Vána, forget-me-nots blooming between her teeth and fern fronds swaying among the strands of her hair, “You want me to flood the rivers when there is no need or readiness?” Kevo had barely convinced himself to seek an audience with Vána, she of Spring and Renewal, and had almost run from her the moment she manifested before him. One thing they had forgotten in the bliss of Aman--birth, and rebirth above all, is never comfortable. Spring Herself was bloody with afterbirth, her raiment stained with pollen and gore. Kevo realized too late he was about to be scolded for his request. You could just say no, he thought, grumbling.
“To overwhelm the waters of Ulmo, to subject the Earth-Queen’s children to unseasonable deluge, to flout at the appointed rhythm of seasons set and governed by Lady Varda and Lord Manwë….” Kevo dropped his eyes and wondered how many more of her siblings Vána would find it necessary to mention. “...is the work of the World Marrer! Aye, it was his work at the first! Do not forget the turning of Ossë. You would ask such rebellion of one of the Greater Powers? If you did not speak in ignorance, I would suspect you corrupted yourself!”
“Okay, so I’m hearing a no.” Kevo began to edge away from Vána, who was beginning to glow and sprout antlers. “Just an honest question, Lady of Spring. Besides, Melkor’s chill now, right? Like he’s just in Mandos, hanging out? Like, it’s all good. I’m not into, like, Marring shit… stuff… I dunno, man, I just want to figure out what the hell the One was thinking when He made me, y’know?”
Vana frowned, her glow dimming and her antlers losing a few prongs. “What do you mean, Child? You are a scion of the Third Theme, a--” Kevo cut in, talking over one of the Powers that shaped the world, and whose music even now resounded strange and distant in the hearts of the Eldar.
“Nah, like, me specifically. ‘Cause, okay, here’s the thing. Um. So my good friend, Cilintame? Real cool chick, Noldorin as they come, know what I mean? She has her Craft. When she’s in her studio, melting down the white sands into the firststuffs of Arda, molding her small portion of the world even as Aulë her teacher molds the whole globe of Eä, breathing into it shape and beauty and a curious strength. Not that the world is, like, spherical; that would be wild. But, uh. That. It’s her calling, her soul, that which she was… made for. To make.”
Vána’s tokens of Spring had cooled back down to flowers and eggshells, which suited Kevo just fine. She listened, her young and graven face showing nothing.
“Then my friend Ilcar, right? Oh, by the way, they said to say hi. They’re a devotee of yours, on occasion. At least they’ve written some poems about you, and they’re pretty flattering. Might want to check them out, send them a dream vision or two. They live… well, they’re a Vanya, you can figure it out. Anyway, they have this Calling too. A River-Poet, a scribe of the little leaping waters. Together, we delight in your floods, but when the tumult subsides, they have other works to take up again. And I… mostly, these days, I just loiter around Valmar, y’know, looking for something to….” ‘Do’ and ‘Be’ would work equally well here, so Kevo let the silence carry them both.
Vána looked the softest Kevo had seen her, all tender new leaves and the breaking of the frost. She got it. Kevo could have cried with relief. “I see. There is nothing to which your soul answers. It would be for me as if the Spring were swallowed up. And it is in my floods you come nearest to your own heart, but it can only ever be for a time. Rebirth persists, and so my domain is perpetual; the white waters, which are yours, must subside.”
Kevo nodded fervently. “It’s the pits, my dude.” It had been a Noldo who has invented registers of formality, rather predictably. Except, their additions only reached upward from polite. It had taken a Teler, several Years later, to form the ones that narrowed ever further downward to perfect familiarity. Then the Vanyar had added some more, laterally, as it were, whose proper use requires Ages of study, and which had consequently fallen out of favor everywhere but some of the more abstracted neighborhoods in Valmar. Kevo, not normally one much concerned with the subtleties of Speech, had adopted the Telerin Familiar Dialects with great enthusiasm.
(It would be Years before familiarity of speech would be used as a calculated insult, and then mostly by the Exiles. Telerin Familiarity fell out of favor while the grief overwhelmed it.)
“The absolute fuckin’ pits.” Kevo slumped down, feeling ferns brush against his ankles. It was like a caress; it was a caress. He was crying into Vána’s chest, and his tears made wild trails down his cheeks.
“I will speak with my siblings, little Foamsinger. Mayhap the Powers of the World can open the world to you. I will speak especially with Ulmo, for I perceive that it is to the waters your heart is given, even if they are not mine.”
“Thank you, Renewer,” Kevo said, sniffling into her… clothing? It was probably clothing. It was also the wet wool of a newborn lamb, if that were a pleasant thing to have on your face.
“Of course, child. For do you not know? You are one of mine. Your nature answers to me, in the strange free imperfect way of the Children. I do not mean to make you out a Maia! Although, if the One were to give you the fate of the Lesser Powers, you know where to find me.”
“In every new song,” Kevo said, clutching tighter.
“And every new verse of the Oldest Song,” Vána agreed, brushing his hair back.
“I don’t know where to go, now,” Kevo admitted, stepping back and rearranging his soggy clothing.
“You do.”
The Sea. Waves churned in the innermost of his being; he saw them now, heard every crash and curl. How had he ever doubted?
“I will go with you, Child. Let us talk of the waters, and we will part ways at the coast.”
If any of the other apprentices thought it strange to see their old colleague Kevo return to the Swanhaven chatting amicably with Bana of the Balar, they kept their comments to themselves. They were good friends, for all that they hadn’t understood Kevo’s discontent while he labored among them. And it was nice to hear good ol’ Lindalambe again. The Goldolambe and the Quenya of the Vaniai were pretty, sure, but. You can’t replace your cradle-tongue.
Kevo spent a while back among them, even offering to sand down the finished timbers--a task he’d always hated, but which was mindless enough that he could keep up a conversation. He asked after spouses and children, friends and collaborations, whether or not Olue was ever going to approve the newly-proposed auxiliary boathouse and whether he would leave its construction to the Goldoi.
“Talk to the purpose, hano!” said Luine, watching Kevo slowly devolve into a mass of twitching nervous energy. “Spit it out!”
“I think I need to talk to Ossë!” Kevo replied, yelling mostly out of peer pressure.
“Then go talk to Ossë! I know you don’t give a care about my rigging diagrams! You never have! That’s fine! Go chat up a Maia and stop wasting my time!”
Dazed and grateful, Kevo let his feet draw him back to the shore. The North Shore, called the Ruby-Strand for the preponderance of red stones in the mass of Noldorin gift-jewels strewn along it, had always been Kevo’s favorite beach. The water, perfectly clear and just a little bit cool, showed how the seabed sloped gently out into the open water, with no sudden drop-offs or treacherous reefs for miles off shore. Right around the bend of the coast lay the deep-water harbors wherein were anchored the Swanships.
A gull landed on Kevo’s shoulder, calmly undoing his Vanyarin braids with its beak. Kevo made no attempt to stop it, and, when his hair fell loose around his shoulders again and the gull had departed, Kevo waded again out into the Sea. Little fishes nibbled at his feet, and he laughed, ticklish. Tiny waves lapped at his knees, wetting the hem of his skirt. He knotted the fabric higher up his thighs, not relishing the prospect of walking around in soggy clothes.
“Um. Hey. Ossë?” Kevo wasn’t expecting an answer. He couldn’t have told you why. Seaweed drifted across his leg, and it was soft hair fanning out over a vast blue bed. “Okay, Uinen, then. Will you take a message?” There was a stirring, and a shoal of minnows swarmed cyclonic around Kevo, creating a tiny whirlpool of which he was at the center. The seawater shrank away from his skin; seaweed tangled and coiled around his legs. He was caught, but he was not afraid. “So you are listening. Ossë! I have important matters to discuss! Well. They’re… they’re important to me . Uinen, bro, will you get him to manifest? Please?” The shoal of minnows turned sarcastically (somehow, despite being a quantity of fish) and darted away. The seaweed loosened its grip almost imperceptibly.
“You know not what you seek, Child,” said Uinen’s voice, flat as doldrums and heavy with algae. “What you will bring upon him.”
“No, I really actually don’t. Which is kinda the point of talking it out.” For a moment, the air reeked of rotting kelp and bleached coral, terribly still and close. That nothingness terrified him more than tumult ever had.
“Fine. I will speak to him. But do not look to me to restrain him, should he wake to wrath. Upon your own head and life be it.” And the breeze returned, driving away the choking smell. And then it was a wind, and then a strong wind, and the waves rose up around Kevo’s chest. His heart, now dashed with foam, felt light, and he was unafraid. And out of the foam rose Ossë, clothed in the form he often took in his dealings with the Children. From the waist up we was attired like one of the Elloi, bare-chested and pale brown. But from the waist down, he gleamed green with iridescent scales and delicate fan-like fins that seemed to blur into the water itself.
“Ossë! Spalasto! Well met.”
“Foamsinger,” acknowledged Ossë. “Thou comest in folly, for thou seemest to think by thy word alone to sway me to thy will, cost as it may, who art a Child and a youth of the Children; who knowst terror nor grief. Thou wouldst do well to fear me more, who, thou knowest, once broke my wrath upon such as you.”
“I, like, haven’t even said anything, though.” Kevo pointed out, ringing seawater out of his shirt.
“I know thy intention, who wert so soon parted from the company of Vána and from the rush of her floods. Thou wouldst have me raise my master’s seas again, restless Child. Thou wouldst know fear, though thou wert blest from birth to be free of it.”
“Why are you talking like that? You sound like Cilintame’s grandma. Also you said that already, dude. Do you want me to be afraid? Cause. Like. I’m not. I’m asking you to raise the seas. Why would I fear what I ask?”
Ossë’s eyes blazed. “Are you playing dumb? Young you may be; surely you were told of my nature. Of my unfaithfulness and repentance. Of the mark that service to the Marrer left on me, and the wildness that shall ever be mine to temper if I am to serve the Lord of Waters and not the Lord of Darkness. And you have the… the gall to ask this of me? No. Be gone from these waters, or be thrown from them. I will not raise the waves again for the amusement of an Incarnate! I will not batter Aulë’s coasts and the gems of his people, will not darken the airs of Manwë, will not beat breakers over the music of my Lord. You try me sorely, child of the One.”
Kevo held out his hands, exasperated. “So what, I can’t even ask? Look, all I know is that my… my Calling, my purpose, lies somehow with you. Don’t ask me how. I don’t have the foggiest notion. I don’t even know why I need your storms, only that I do. Maybe your nature is…”
A warning noise that may have come from Ossë’s fana or from the ocean itself--not that it made much difference--rang in Kevo’s ears. “Presumptuous, impertinent, wild …”
“Okay literally cool your jets, Lord of Seaspray. I’m not trying to insult you! I’m not… I’m not trying to throw your past in your face, okay? I’ve just… I’ve heard stories. Mostly from Middle-Earth, from the Great Journey, of… of you. My father is a gifted Singer; I saw the storms you made. I saw the water boil and leap and destroy and I was not afraid, Ossë! Believe me, I don’t know why. I saw what you did. What you can still do. And I cried when Dad finished the song because I wanted to go back. Can you believe I’m just now realizing this? He would comfort me and tell me I was safe, that you weren’t like that anymore, and that was exactly what I didn’t want to hear. I wanted to see that… that power, and that poetry, and the dancing geometric perfection of those waves that would tear me apart… I wanted to live it. ” Kevo shrugged, deflating with a sad laugh. “And you’ll threaten and bluff and posture, but even know, you’re livid, and you’re denying your own nature. You won’t let yourself be what you were meant to be, what you chose, because you are more afraid than I am. ” Kevo kicked his feet free of the seaweed, which dissolved into the foam. “I guess I’ll just look for another Calling, huh? Go back to Valmar. Be safe. My people have a saying about ships and harbors, you know. [1]” And with that, Kevo turned back to the shore and was gone.
The waves sank back to ripples around Ossë, who gathered the seas around him like a shroud, or an embrace, to watch the Child depart his domain. Uinen alone knew his tears from the saltwater.
[1] This was true, technically, except in the matter of pluralization. A post-Darkening study by a linguist from the Lindalambe Institute for Telerin Word-Science would reveal upwards of eighty separate Telerin proverbs relating to both ships and harbors, with several dozen further variants whose meanings duplicated those of their more common counterparts. Kevo, as usual, only paid attention to and subsequently remembered the one he really liked. Ossë figured this out from context.
Kevo did return to Valmar, but he could not have been said to be safe in any but the broadest sense afforded by tenancy in the Blessed Realm. He avoided all his old haunts, unwilling to discuss his encounter with Ossë, and even less willing to think on what it had meant. So he hiked the remote paths that wove through the Pelori, turning up on Ilcar’s doorstep at all hours with his hair frozen in places and tattoos etched into his skin by a Vanyarin mystic he’d run across and who had told him his fate was strange. The image she had engraved on him was abstract, consisting of fluid lines and eddies that tumbled from his shoulders to his calves in a blur of blue ink.
“Fascinating,” Ilcar said, not bothering to feign surprise at their old friend’s erratic calling habits. “Looks like one of that Rúmil fellow’s fluid motion diagrams, almost. Or Eastern Avarrin ceramic motifs. Also kind of like whoever did that had been partaking of Vána’s Ceremonial Fungus. What was this mountain sage’s name, pray tell?”
Kevo shrugged. “Never asked.”
Ilcar flashed their Smile. “There’s my Kevo. Come in, and tell me the designs of your heart.”
Kevo drifted through the doorway and perched on the first surface he encountered, which happened to be Ilcar’s desk.“Nothing to tell, really. Ossë kinda ran me off, so, like. I’m back?”
“My wife is napping on the veranda, so it can’t be Vána’s Season yet.”
Kevo grunted.
“I mean to say your behavior of late is uncharacteristic.”
“So?” Kevo said, squinting. “There’s no law against being erratic.”
“How fortunate for Kevo of the Teleri.”
Kevo grunted again, disgruntled. He lay down across the desk, displacing a stack of towels and a brightly colored bird, which flapped at him. “I really thought I’d figured it out. My Calling, y’know? I figured out it was Ossë I needed to find. Vána thought it was Ossë. But what does that foamy bastard do? Half-asses threats of violence against me and makes excuses for why it’s better that he deny his nature because he might hurt me . Wildly fucking contradictory, right? Fuckin… goddamn [2] Maia!”
Ilcar nodded sympathetically but without understanding. Their experiences with the Ainur were generally limited to those of the Powers considered easiest to talk to, such as Manwë and Nienna, who, while certainly not comfortable conversational partners, were at least capable of expressing themselves without destroying portions of coastline. “Mayhap he knows little even of his own mind, and fears his unknowing,” Ilcar offered, slipping subconsciously into the neo-Parmaquesta spoken by the Bright Young Things who studied under Elemmírë at the Vanyarin Poetic Concatenation [3].
Kevo scoffed, but it was a general scoff, and not one aimed at Ilcar. “He helped create the world or whatever. Surely he’s had time to think it over.”
Ilcar smiled, sadly but no less blinding. “Yes, but he’s been through rather a lot since then, hasn’t he?”
“Yeah, I guess…. But he repented Melkor’s service, right? What is there to be confused about now? He knew the right thing to do, and he did it. Problem solved.”
“And is a kiln fired the same vessel it was before, though it keep its shape?”
Kevo lifted his head from the desk to stare Ilcar down. “I know that’s rhetorical, but I literally have no idea how ceramics work.”
“The answer is both yes and no.”
Kevo fixed them with a baleful look. “Thanks for the clarification. I understand.”
“You’re being deliberately obtuse. It’s the same vessel with the same shape, but, having passed through the fire, its substance is altered. It is the same shape, but not the same thing.”
“That…. makes sense?” It didn’t, but Kevo didn’t want to hear about ceramics anymore, and didn’t see what any of this had to do with Ossë being in a snit.
llcar’s smile faded, a rare and troubling sight. “Sometimes I fear the Holy Ones have given us bliss at the cost of Wisdom. There are too many things we have already forgotten. Our world grows so shallow without pain to delve it…” The piety of the Vanyar was not wholly myth, it was true, but for Ilcar, who had been born on the Great Journey and known the terror of the Treeless Dark, doubts remained.
Kevo tapped his fingers against the desk, and the bird echoed the motion with its beak. “I’m going back to the mountains,” he announced, sitting up and sliding to his feet in one motion. “Will you…”
Ilcar knew what he was about to ask, and was already shaking their head. “This is your wandering to undertake. I have a song to finish; you can hear it when you return.”
Kevo nodded once, embraced his friend, and set off again for the heights.
Before, he had stayed on the paths, even if they were only tracks of mountain goats and snow leopards. Now, he passed even those, climbing hand over hand the steepest slopes he could reach until he was numb with cold and sore of heart. He took no food, but breathed in the wispy air and took sustenance from the work of the Elder King. Here, so far from the Treelight, Baradis’s stars shone faint in the dim blue vault of heaven. Kevo let the winds scourge him, let the rocks abrade his skin; here, now, as high as he could stand to climb, the way down seemed so treacherous, so natural, so inevitable. The Blessed Realm was safe from evil, but Kevo was an Incarnate, and the shock of this fall would unmake his body should he falter. He was only now beginning to understand what that meant. “Lord Námo wouldn’t hold me long, would he?” But he had no answer. Nobody he knew had ever died, and the Returned Dead of the Great Journey did not speak to the mouthy runaway apprentice of Alqualondë.
It seemed like so much effort to climb all the way back down. He almost wanted to stay, to let Manwë fetch his ice-gnawed hröa from the heights and bear it to Lórien, where at least he could rest.
But Cilintame’s daughter was down there. And his father was down there, drawing joy out of long grief with his voice, and his sisters added harmonies to Ulmo’s Great Theme, and his mother labored for the king she held in reverence, and Ilcar, who had known he would return. Ossë, who needed him to return.
Ilcar. The Springflood. The waterfalls and whirlpools and treacherous steep flight. He cast about for something, anything, that might do, reanimated by purpose. The treeline hovered far below him; all he could find was a broad, flat stone.
Kevo had never had much skill in Song. He could shape neither mind nor material with his voice alone; at best, he could heat a kettle or hold a fire. But his options were limited, and, here, so close to the Upper Airs, with the Star-Kindler’s light mingling with that of the Trees, even his halting voice would suffice to alter Arda. The stone, long and flat, became lighter, less brittle, and smoother. Kevo could not have told you what he was doing, only that the stone was answering need and not knowledge. The result was like a riverrunner without sides and with no keel to speak of, but with a faint remnant of bow and stern curving up from the plane of the thing. After a moment of contemplation, he strapped his feet onto the board. At least, here, he wouldn’t run the risk of capsizing and being trapped underwater.
Without much further thought--and really, what would further thought have accomplished--Kevo launched himself down the mountain, half sickening drop and half ascending flight, a wake of snow kicking up behind him. His balance held; it wasn’t so different, he thought, from surf-paddling or flood-riding. Except, here, the mountain did not move.
Snow, white like foam, light like leaping water--and he Saw at his feet and behind him a great green glass mountain, folding over itself even as it rushed away underneath him, pursuing him and bearing him up, until the foam crashed down around him, and he was standing on a path at the foot of the peak he had just descended, looking on the thread of flattened snow that marked his path. It would not call him forever, this he knew--but now it called him back up, to seek out the refinement of what he had wrought.
[2] A Quenya word translating literally to Ainu-forsaken, which certainly did not apply here. Kevo must be forgiven for his lack of imprecatory arsenal against the Holy Ones, as he did not yet have access to centuries of post-Exilic Noldorin innovation in that area.
[3] Ilcar found the majority of them insufferable but liked their works enough to attend their readings regularly. They seldom stayed afterward for the melonbread and pomegranate cordial.
By the end of the fifth climb, Kevo’s strength was flagging, and he refrained from tying the board to his feet. Instead, he cast his gaze at the white-crowned heads of the Pelóri, each one an exquisite tooth bared against the memory of fear. The Powers fled Fear, it seemed to Kevo, more than they fled that which begat it. As if terror was unholy. Kevo knew better. Kevo, of the Children and a youth of the Children, would accept no such limitation to Joy. To fear the overwhelming and to love it, to seek it out, was the highest Holiness he knew.
“My craft,” Kevo breathed, the words accompanied by clouds of mist. “My material is Fear; my technique is Motion; my Craft is… is…”
“Transformation,” Manwë answered, coming to light on a crag beside Kevo in the form of a falcon--one of the sort that climbed high into the sky and then darted downward, tucking in its wings, and falling of its own volition through the wide empty air. “Acceptance. Reclamation. You, who have known no tumult, who need never know it, hath sought it out… Know you whence came the snow?”
Kevo would have said “the clouds”, but he sensed that this was not actually the correct answer and for once in his life didn’t actually feel like being contrary for the sheer hell of it. “Not from you, Lord of the Air; it doesn’t really seem like something you’d cook up. For sure. It’s kind of… Well, unkind , really.”
Manwë, in his bird form, did not laugh, but the set of his head was distinctly delighted. “You are right. It is not mine; at least, not in full. It is of the air, and of Ulmo’s waters, and it is of my brother’s.”
“Melkor,” Kevo said, wide-eyed.
“Yes, that brother. He who broke the world, and who, in that breaking, could not but create. His is the cold that spins the ice into its delicate shapes; his is the heat that flings waters into the air to fall again and renew the ground. His was to make; he turned it to undoing. But he could not ever unmake his own self [4]; that is, to transform. ”
Kevo’s eyes narrowed, but not in skepticism--merely confusion. “And what does this have to do with… with me? With my Craft?”
“You strike nearer in your own thought that you realize, Child. My brother loosed fear on the world, on the Children. It was to him a tool of war; fear was meant to paralyze, to undo, to negate. But you,”--here Manwë seemed to grow, from a slender falcon to a broad-winged seabird-- “You, Children, you, Kevo of the Lindai , have not let fear master you, who may be overmastered so easily. You look into pain and exhaustion and the unmaking of the body, and--and-- laugh [ 5] . You turn un-life into life itself. Indomitable, unaccountable, flinging yourself into fire that would melt you, into ice that would turn flesh to stone--you[6] are the Third Theme, Kevo, the theme that heals the broken world. And I do believe there is one to who your faith is healing indeed. I will not command; nay, nor will I counsel in this matter, save to say that, should you return to Ossë, you will not be turned away again.”
Kevo bristled, and it wasn’t the cold. “Wait, hold up, Elder King. Are you trying to tell me that my whole purpose for existing is to… is to help Ossë get over the whole Melkor thing? Cause… with all due respect, Elder King, fuck that. Cause once I’m done with him, then what? What’s my calling then? You can’t be telling me Eru Ilúvatar would create me just to serve as a guilt sponge for some mopey Ainu! The fucking nerve, honestly, thinking that--”
“Perhaps I misspoke,” said Manwë with the air of someone who had never considered that a possibility and was only reluctantly starting now. “You are not for Ossë, but with him. You speak truly; guilt follows him even in long repentance. But his healing is not your Work. His healing is the start of your[7] Work.” Manwë was a kite, now, light and sharp with a tail like a wake. “Make your choice, or make your peace, Child. I will not keep you.” And Manwë was gone, without so much as a takeoff for a farewell.
“So all the Ainur, not just Ossë, are rude little sons-of-bitches, I guess.” He received no dispute from the air or rock, and, sighing, began the knots in preparation for one more descent of the mountain.
[4] There are some things even the Elder King could not foresee. Or, perhaps, did not want to.
[5] Kevo did not know how rare it was to find Manwë stumbling over his speech. If he had, he wouldn’t have minded; sometimes the unthinkable happened, and that was just, like, chill, y’know?
[6] A Telerin pronoun that meant both “you specifically” and “all of you”, but with the understanding that any modifiers were true of the addressee in particular in some special way. It was at this point in the conversation that Kevo realized they’d been speaking Lindarin, which was much appreciated and would surely make Ilcar smile when he told them.
[7] A pronoun taken from Goldorin, used with regard to possession of a shared work that could not have existed without the will and nature of both parties equally. Goldorin pronouns of artistic collaboration were extensive, hyperspecific, and, given who had invented them, extremely contextually useful. Cilintame, for example, used this particular pronoun when talking about conceiving her child with her wife-- a common practice among Goldorin parents.
7a) At least call us Noldor in the footnotes, Ilcar! Maker’s Hammer, you’re not even Telerin!
7b) I’m also not Goldorin. Let me have my fun.
Kevo returned to Ilcar's dwelling with snow and mountain grit clinging to every fold of his garments. It was a testament to Ilcar's easygoing nature that they allowed Kevo to melt on the hearth rug, which had been a present from a departed aunt and which they had personally carried across the Great Sea. Kevo remarked that it seemed kind of dingy, and that maybe they should clean it, and that wasn't he helping by getting it wet? Sometimes Ilcar remembered just how young Kevo was, how his thought never turned to strife. How it was almost unthinkable that wrath could ever fall upon him. And maybe, Ilcar thought, this was why the Powers had taken such pains to shelter the Eldar, though it meant the lessening of Wisdom. There was great peace in a creature who refused to fear you, and saw only clumsy love in your missteps. The Powers, whether they knew it in their long implacable thought or no, had made a whole mass of Kevos, reckless and foolhardy and easy--so very, very easy--to love.
A shadow fell on Ilcar's heart at that. They had never been much of one for Seer-ing, but they had some Sight, and they knew that the un-Wisdom of these beautiful new sorrowless ones would come to ruin and grief, in the end. The Great Journey was not the only road the Eldar would walk apart and fracture upon.
So Ilcar smiled and packed Kevo some Waybread and bundled him out the door, because if any child made the Marring and the Fencing worth it, it was Kevo, and he was best left to his own devices.
Kevo's clumsy Song was beginning to unravel, and bits of his snow-board were turning back to rock. There was no way he would be able to replicate what he'd done: the only way was to rush it to Cilintame and hope she could recreate whatever material Kevo's need had manifested. Never before had the road from Valmar to Tirion seemed so long and slow. Gulping down his pride, Kevo approached the least haughty-looking mare grazing in a herd by the road, mild and content under the protection of one of Oromë's folk.
"Hey there… mare… friend… um. I'm really kinda strapped for time, and, see, you have literally twice the legs I do…" Kevo didn't remember if you were supposed to flatter horses before partnering with them, and he suspected the Herd-Maia was laughing at him.
"I just super need to get to Tirion before this Song sloughs off. I can… probably find some… oats?" The Maia was definitely laughing, and Kevo turned to her. "Don't be like that, I'm desperate here!"
The Maia snickered, for all the world sounding like a horse as she did. "If you're in a hurry, little Thistle over there isn't going to cut it. She doesn't like being rushed. You'll want…" the Maia gestured to a lean bay mare grazing at the edge of the herd, "her". At the Maia's word, the mare raised her head, snorting like a bellows. Her coat gleamed. Her hooves gleamed. Her eyes burned.
"Vinegar, you have a rider. He's in a rush. You know what to do." Vinegar surveyed Kevo and seemed to find everything in order. She stood in front of him, not terribly tall but muscled like Tulkas's showier Maiar and sporting a look like one of those same Maiar about to lay you flat for the sheer joy of hitting things. But she made no move to kick. "She likes you," the Maia said, sounding surprised. "I think you impressed her somehow. Good job. She bit Tilion once."
Seeing Kevo's look, she continued. "And yes, she knows you don't like horses. I think she means to change your mind."
About half a mile down the road, Kevo had to admit that, yes, it was possible he liked horses, or at least Vinegar. She was not a petty creature, and she seemed to enjoy Going Very Fast for its own sake. Respectable. Kevo wasn't urging her on at all, and she was holding a delightful canter with occasional spurts of gallop on straight stretches. If she bucked here and there, well, it was more for flair than any real desire to unseat Kevo, and she never threw in any of the really twisty ones. All in all, an excellent horse. Completely impossible to stop, as Kevo discovered about a third of the way down the road when he got a hankering for some Maple Sugar Lembas, but there'd be time to stop in Tirion.
Obstacles in the road were infrequent, and also irrelevant. Vinegar leapt over laden carts and whole traveling parties with a contemptuous whinny. If she didn't like the road, she left the road. But they were still headed straight for Tirion, so Kevo saw no reason to intervene. She never upset so much as a single jug.
By the time they reached Tirion, Kevo had thoroughly revised his opinion on all things equine. "Hey Vinnie, I've got some stuff to do now, but we should keep in touch. That was sick. " Vinegar flicked her tail and stood a little taller. She cocked an ear, and Kevo knew enough now to realize that meant "sure, bro" and also "thanks for not trying to slow my roll like some kind of tame little pony".
"Respect," said Kevo, and held out a piece of Lembas. "It's really good. Mostly grain." Vinegar took it, chewed it twice, and then trotted off, presumably back to the herd to tell stories of the Elda who had stayed on her back all the way from Valmar to Tirion.
Vinegar had deposited Kevo at the gates of Tirion, and it was a few more minutes before he arrived at Cilintame's workshop. Mercifully, she was already there, working on what looked like a water vessel. Nothing spectacular; more a warmup than a Working for a glassblower as skilled as her.
"Oh thank fuck," Kevo said, half-stumbling through the door. "Tell me what this is." He laid the board, now more than half reverted to rock, on her workbench.
Cilintame didn't waste time on pointless questions or greetings, which Kevo appreciated. "You Sang this, I assume? Wow, didn't know you had it in you… " She pulled out a round glass on a chain and looked through it. "I don't recognize this material. Which means it probably doesn't exist in Tirion. But it does look familiar. It's… hm, what need did this answer to?"
"Getting down a mountain really fast on snow." Another section of Song unraveled back to stone. "It was really light and smooth. And strong enough to handle turns and shocks."
Cilintame was already placing the board under one of the machines she used to examine impurities in gemstones. "It almost looks like glass. But also sort of like… what is that?"
Kevo was distinctly out of his depth. "I dunno… Song?"
Cilintame managed to convey negation without looking up from her eyepiece or making any sound. "Sung materials are still physical. They're still the stuff of Eä. And, as such, they can be recreated. I'm going to be a while in studying this. I think I need to get a Preserver in here to hold the last of this Song in place… Kevo, it's lovely to see you, but I sense you have places to be. And I have. So much work to do." In typical Noldorin fashion that phrase--"I have so much work to do"--was accompanied by barely-contained glee. "I'm going to figure out how to make this stuff. It's… Kevo, it's like nothing else. I think you may have found me a Mark to make upon Craft! I could kiss you! Go talk to Ossë. That's why you're passing through, right? I'll find you when I have this ready."
And Kevo found himself bundled out the door, plied with yet more Lembas, and back on the road to the Rubystrand. In an unprecedented turn, he found himself planning ahead as he walked. He was so close to convincing Ossë to raise the seas--he could feel it. But what then? He couldn't very well swim up those mountains of water he knew only in Song…
...but he could swim down them. The mountains of Aulë were kind enough--why not Ossë's? But not himself alone. He'd need something to carry him, something like the board. Something like a river runner. Something like the tiny light boats he'd built to ride the surf. Something like nothing in Valinor, yet.
For the first time since he'd visited his mother there as a child, Kevo found himself excited to enter the workshop. No schematics, no frowning masters, no precedent. Change came but slowly upon the Eldar; now, Kevo goaded it on, inertia overmastered by necessity, by Nature straining for release. This vessel would need no sides, no rudder, the barest suggestion of a keel. It would narrow at the front and back, with the barest upward curve serving for a prow. Lightweight, buoyant wood would form the hull. He could see it with the clarity of Memory, pouring down a great upheaval of sea like the water itself, borne on by the terrible force of Ossë’s joy, a minuteness of fear without trembling, the closest of harmonies. And the Stormlord, laughing, not in the memory of evil but in the delight of movement.
Scarcely had the last coat of varnish dried on the Foamrider when Kevo hefted it onto his shoulder and took off, laughing, for the Rubystrand. He didn’t stop to pause at the water’s edge. Minnows danced around his feet, an honor guard, with Music in the flash of light over their scales. Out past the tiny breakers, past the easy slope of the shoreline, to the foot of the land, where the seafloor dropped off abruptly into the depths. He paddled by hand, laying on the Foamrider, triangulating by intuition his progress. And, there, drifting on the still water above the lip of the abyss, Kevo stood up.
“You sent me that Knowing. I know it. That day in the workshop, it was you. You! I know you’re afraid. Well, I have the more reason to fear, and here I am! Let me show you what we can do, you and I!” Kevo was shouting by now, voice rippling out over the flatness. “Ossë, lord of the Great Waves! Keeper of the tumult of Renewal! Raise thou thy master’s seas as thou didst when first thou found thy wrath gone out into the stuff of Eä! Raise your mountains! IT’S GONNA BE FUCKING EPIC!”
For a moment, the waters lay still, and Kevo held his breath. Then, the faintest of dimples on the glassy surface, rising to ripples, then to hills. The breeze stiffened to wind; on the horizon, clouds darkened and burst. In the lightning, the shape of a great Albatross, wings cradling the horizon in friendship with Ulmo. From the darkness below, the ringing of horns.
“Very well, Kevo. You will have your storm,” came a voice, and it was the beating of surf against a harbor wall, the hiss of spray against the rocks, the crack of a hull, the snapping of a great mast--It was Ossë’s voice, terrible in storm, struck through with wildness. “My Lords allow it,” he said, in wonder and in delight. “For you, they allow it, un-looked-for.”
Kevo laughed and laughed and shrieked in delight, feeling the waves build taller and more powerful beneath his board. But here, in the deep water, they would not break. Not yet. Mountains rolled away, untroubled and steady. Kevo nearly burst from the anticipation.
A new voice; Ulmo, who rarely bothered to speak in language, and whose voice was an ocean current, bearing life across the width and breadth of Arda, and a great wave rushing into to meet the land. “They will break with the most force here at the join between land and open sea, when they build to the height of the water’s depth. Have a care. My hand is upon you, but I will not forestall my servant in this. Now is the time to seek the shallows, if you wish.”
“Never,” swore Kevo, and bowed his head to the Lord of Waters. “I will be at Ossë’s mercy, not his lord’s.”
“Ossë knows no mercy,” Ulmo said, inexorable voice tinged with fondness and with warning.
“He very much does,” Kevo insisted. “He received it, didn’t he? He lives in mercy! He knows it best of all of you!”
And Ulmo, with a great spray of foam and the sharp crack of a broad tail, vanished back into the depths. Manwë’s albatross form faded into the stormclouds. And Kevo was there alone in the tumult with Ossë, servant for a time of the World Breaker, and it felt right.
When the first wave broke against the shallows, Kevo was ready. He paddled with the force he and Ilcar used to pull their vessels back in line at the bottoms of waterfalls, only, this time, the waterfall was the whole world. Kevo paddled across the crest of the wave as the trough yawned beneath, and then, with a single motion, Kevo was standing and his board was dropping across the face of the wave.
It was like riding the river floods and sliding down the Pelóri, and it was something else entirely. It was a hundred thousand floods of Spring; it was the Pelóri toppling themselves behind you as you fled. It was Vinegar leaping over paltry obstacles such as entire laden carts, the bunch and release of her muscles and her ear-splitting whinny, and force enough to crush a carriage into kindling. It was Kevo’s glass-clarity and the hand of Ossë raised in a fluid fist, and it was a dance between the forest and the fire, the snow and the avalanche, the World and their Children. Deadly peril, and knifepoint joy.
Kevo reached the foot of the wave and paddled crosswise into another crest just in time for the first wave to collapse over its foundation in a riot of spray and a great thunder. Without pausing to think, Kevo paddled into the next wave, adjusting his stance and angle with only the wisdom of the body under great duress; no thoughts had the space to filter into words. There was only the water, and the drop, and watching the next pile itself to the height of Ossë’s temper.
After a time, Kevo gained a sense for which swells would make the best rides, and which ones should be paddled out behind. Several times, the collapse of a wave caught him off guard, and he was left clinging frantically to the Foamrider , hurrying to scramble back on board before another wave took the place of Kevo’s bane. And every time, the waves did not abate, but seemed to increase in power and ferocity, as if Ossë was trying to shake Kevo off. Or, maybe, this was the shape of his wildness, and he was as caught in wordless ease of perfect effort as Kevo, free for the first time in Ages to follow his nature.
Another wave, not the biggest Kevo had endured; this one seemed to gather itself faster than the others, and, halfway down its face, Kevo realized it was breaking faster, too. The Foamrider leapt forward from beneath him, skittering out of reach, and Kevo toppled backward into the wave. The water swallowed him.
When vision returned, Kevo found himself drifting in the shallows, the Foamrider nowhere to be seen. Minnows darted around him--holding him up, Kevo realized. He groaned, and coughed, and then, seeing the red glow of the Rubystrand, laughed.
“OSSË! Come here, you wild thing! Come and face me!” Kevo brushed a piece of kelp out of his hair, wincing as a hitherto unnoticed bruise made itself known. Well, bruises. Well, there were… some patches of skin that weren’t bruised, at least.
“What do you mean to say to him,” Uinen said, flat as Yavanna’s floodplains. “He does not need your rebuke. He knows what he has wrought.”
“Wait, is he moping because he knocked my lights out and almost drowned me?”
Uinen was not in a form that included recognizable eyes, but Kevo recognized that tone of Look. “Among other things, yes. I fear you will only upset him. I will send a message.”
“Nuh-uh, Lady. Will all respect to you--thanks for the minnows, by the way--I need to speak with Ossë.”
“Very well,” said Uinen. “On your own head be this. Again. Have a care for your head, Child.”
Kevo floated, occasionally treading water, utterly spent and staring in reverie through Manwé’s airs to the Outer Heavens. “Aiya, Súlimo,” Kevo sighed, splashing for the sheer joy of moving through water.
“Kevo,” began Ossë’s voice--not the buoyant, high tumble of his voice in the storm, but a flat and subdued murmur that sounded natural for his wife and nothing of the sort for him. “I--”
“If you’re about to apologize, don’t! Seriously! That was wild! That was incredible! That was… I’ve never felt that… motion, that force, that…”
“That is my nature,” Ossë said. “And my nature nearly destroyed you. This is why I am forbidden from--”
“But you weren’t forbidden this time! I saw Lord Manwë and everything. He helped stir the storm, right?”
“Well, yes--”
“And I specifically asked for this, right? Multiple times, with full knowledge of my peril?”
“You did, but--”
“And did not the Allfather grant us Children a part in the shaping of this world, be that shaping as it may not the least part?”
“So it was Sung--”
“And are not these tattoos I got from that Vanyarin mystic cool as the ice of the Helcaraxe--”
“They do suit you--”
“And didn’t she tell me I had a strange fate?”
“That I did not know. It is out of my domain.”
“Well, she did. So here I am. This is our Music, you and I.”
The water rippled with Ossë’s mirth, barely contained. “You have some nerve, Child, speaking as you have to one of the Holy Ones. Declaring the confluence of our natures.”
Kevo shrugged, which set off another round of coughing. His voice raspy with saltwater, he continued, “what do I have to fear from you?”
“This!” Ossë thundered, forming a misty shape and pointing at Kevo. “You, injured, half-drowned, your fëa moments from fleeing the wrack of your hröa… I will not explain death to you!”
“Yeah, I mean, I’m in a bad way, comparatively speaking. Hröa-wise, that is. But that’s alright. Cause you showed me mercy.”
“WHAT!? Ossë thundered, careful flatness vanishing into froth. “Mercy? MERCY! You call this mercy! Child of Eru, most foolish child of Eru, Kevo of the Quendi, what do you mean by this word mercy? ”
“That you didn’t hold back. That you trusted me to love you for all your wildness. That you didn’t make me goad you. You know. Sparing someone, be it pain or the numb Void that takes its place in the fëa and sets it to rotting.” Kevo gestured vaguely. “Mercy.”
“You… still love me?” Ossë said, trembling. “WHAT?”
“You kidding? I’m of half a mind to paddle back out right now!”
“Fool! You Incarnate, frail, duality of a Child of the One! You’ll die!”
“Well I know that. That’s why it’s only half a mind. But. Ossë. Of course I love you. I’m… how did Vána put it… part of your domain. Just as you are part of hers, I think.”
“Renewal? The wild Ossë, answerable to Vána?” Ossë said, incredulous. “Is your mind broken with your body?”
“He’s right,” cut in Uinen, from among a raft of seabirds. “Look at what your waves have done to the shore.”
“Oh, now I have to apologize to Aulë again… He always looks so disappointed…” And, indeed, the Rubystrand was altered, its contours rough and eaten, shifted by the remnants of the stormswell breaking on the shore. But upon the water…
“The shallow seas are my domain, husband. Your tumults stir up the life of the open waters, your lord’s domain, and mix that richness with the life of the sea-strand. New life, husband. Renewal. ”
“But the Rubystrand…”
“Cilintame will understand,” Kevo reasoned. “Noldor don’t fuss about things like that. They’ll have loremasters out in no time, studying… I dunno, changes in plant life and sea bird behavior. Re-faceting gems.”
“They do love a good geological survey, the Deep-Elves,” Uinen agreed.
“Ossë,” Kevo cut in, suddenly urgent. “You are lord of Storms. This land is safe. Let us make it fun [8] . ”
[8] A Telerin word meaning, variously, “enjoyable”, “light-hearted”, “buoyant”, and “restorative”.
And they did, for a time. Amanyar of all kindreds came to the Rubystrand and surrounding beaches to witness the Awakening of Ossë. From high cliffs, newly carven by the great swells, the less adventurous onlookers felt the sharp spray and crack of Ossë’s joy, indistinguishable to the unobservant from wrath. They came to watch the sea rise, and to watch Kevo and his friends pour down the face of the waves like so many drops flung free from the crests, laughing and dancing on their board-vessels and driving each other on to more and more complex and difficult maneuvers.
Most were Teleri, drawn easily by Kevo’s open invitation to partake of the Seajoy. Ingwion visited, with a host of his people, to sing of the waves (and, in one perpetually smiling Vanya’s case, to challenge Kevo to a series of escalating dares that required intervention from Olue and Ingwion themselves).
Cilintame of the Noldor devised for these festivals a new material, just as promised: woven-glass, light and strong and ideal for the Foamriders’ board-vessels. Her innovations in board-craft, and the help of the great swans of Alqualonde, brought new skill and possibilities to the art of wave-riding. Prince Fingon himself commissioned a vessel from her, and his valor in the stormswells was very great.
And when the Darkness came, and Ossë’s old forsaken master showed himself a craven, and the Rubystrand stained blood-brown, Kevo of the Lindar danced alone in the palm of Ossë’s wrath, and their great swells drowned many of the exiles in their flight.
“Beside the sea, where the Noldor slew
The Foamriders, and stealing drew
Their white ships…”