Night edges towards morning, but seems only blacker for what will come. Trees are here, as they are everywhere in the Wood, yet naked branches veil the heavens not at all, and reach instead like hungry black hands that lust to pluck the stars from the sky. The moon is shocked, peeking shyly from behind a small streak of silver-lined cloud.

Shh! Shh! Shh! the leaves warn rhythmically, as Caelwen swings her feet through them. Her head is tilted, and eyes are squinting dubiously up at the sky, as if she is uncertain that Elbereth would be so generous as to make the stars real. Her lips tug down at the corners.


Two great emotions collide here in this small clearing; like great galaxies slamming into each other, stars sliding past stars and being pulled imperceptibly off course until the whole explodes into a new thing. For where Caelwen walks in doubt, her expression one of somberness and thought; Lothdaimoth sits in a veritable halo of joy. The leaves that in full light of day are copper and rust and brilliant orange lay shadowed around him. His head also is tipped back, long black hair spilling unfettered down to the ground; but in his eyes, the very stars themselves dance in glory. In the very center of a small clear space he sits, and what moonlight there is mingles with starshine; pours down and bathes him in a cool silvery glow.


Ah, the stars. So brilliant, so entrancing-- light upon light between light, and in the spaces where there is no light, one might imagine the eyes of the Ainur peering down, full voices blooming in a song that began almost before thought did. Still one little elf watches them through eyes narrowed in challange, 'Comfort me,' Caelwen seems to dare them. 'See if your spell can touch me tonight!'

The leaves crunch closer to the joyful edhel, and suddenly complain in a great rush when she falls to her knees beside him. She twists as she lays down on her back, resting her head in his lap, and the impudent stars make mirrors of her eyes, which then widen-- perhaps she does heed their song now.


Lothdaimoth doesn't move, still somehow he seems to conform himself to the shape of a head now resting on his thighs. After a moment, one hand lifts and two fingers trace along her hairline. "Look," he says dreamily. "Cannot you see them dance?"


"Mm," Caelwen says at first, conveying rebellion in a single tone, as her feet work beneath leaves and her hands tuck over her belly. Her expression eases at his touch, and her eyes widen further, until a sigh carries words along a breath, "Aye, belegil-nin."


And at last something in her tone sinks further than the unheeding surface of his mind. Dark eyes drop from the heavens, still filled with the light and song of the distant stars. "What is it?" His fingers keep up their ceaseless soft stroking; from one temple to the next and up across hair before lifting to begin again.


Eyelids half-droop, yet now that Caelwen has given her blessing to the stars she cannot glance away, not fully. "So many go West," she whispers, soft secret. "I am glad for them, yet I do not want to go." Now her eyes slip to his, bedazzled gaze meeting another. "How long ere the Wood is empty enough that all must abandon it, even Lord and Lady? Ah, I wish I were born earlier." Her fingers lift, one touches his elbow.


"Aye..." Lothdaimoth's whisper drifts across the leaves. For a moment, a thin thread of an ancient longing dampens the great uprising swell of joy that has borne him along. "I have heard this... and there is in me a desire to see the realms beyond the sea." He is silent for a while, a silence that seems part of the world around him, and when he speaks again, it is not a breaking of the quiet, but a fulfilling of it. "I am not yet weary of our home."


Caelwen's head shifts, just slightly closer to his belly as her hand drops. "I would go with you, meldanya-nin," she tells him, low and certain. Her eyes drift back to the stars, and a breeze, attempting to bring the chill of autumn and failing that, tangles her sash with oak and yew leaves. "I saw Narthelion yesterday and he thought that I might go as well. I wonder if he sees me as sad a great deal." The corners of her mouth consider smiling. "He must not see me around you enough, aye?"


A low chuckle mingles with the breeze. "It seems not..." Wandering fingers drift - down hollow of temple to curve of cheekbone and corner of not-quite smiling mouth. "Are you sad, beloved?"


"Aye, a little," she admits, anxious gaze turning to him, as if she is uncertain what his reaction might be. "Rather-- it is a bit meloncholy, is it not?" She turns, slight and swift, to kiss his fingers. "I wish Golfingund could see us marry. Although..." her voice turns musing. "It would not make him happy. And mayhap he is happy now. If he is upon Valinor's shores by now."


"Is it?" Lothdaimoth muses. "I had not thought.. I suppose it may be. But we will see them again, some day. And what is there in that to bring sorrow?" Bending low, almost impossibly low, he brushes a kiss on her forehead and straightens again.


"Nay, that does not make me sad, beloved." Caelwen's hand cups and brushes his cheek as he kisses her, fingers trailing from his jaw after. "But that I might be forced to go, or there will be so few here that it will be unsafe, and we might have to wait too long to have a child. Someday, I mean..." Her words dwindle away, and her teeth catch at her lip.


Lothdaimoth's smile widens and the light of the stars caught in his eyes grows brighter. "Someday..." he murmurs in echo. "A child. We have time yet. Time and more." Her other concerns seem lost beneath this greater thought. And Arda itself seems to hold her breath, the breeze ceasing for a moment to trouble the browned and withered leaves.


Caelwen's head does not move at all, yet seems to duck slightly as a deep flush darkens star-painted skin. She watches him, with all the rapt attention that she gave the stars a moment ago, and a smile curls into expression in an echo seen rather than heard.

Time passes as she studies him, a bit of it, smile waxing large beneath her shy eyes. "Aiya!" she says at last. "I cannot believe this is my old friend, my Lothdaimoth. What good fortune I have!"


The hush around them grows, even the silence between the stars is not so deep. And a thin wavering glow emanates from the couple in the clearing. "You were so determined." A quiet voice seeps into the silver darkness. A small child climbs a tree, a frown of intense concentration wrinkling her forehead.


The world holds her breath, as the firstborn shed their dim brilliance in a way that one day might be a memory here. "But you were kind to me," counters a second voice, as a larger hand catches the smaller and a child is pulled upwards. Memories walk slower than hours until a blush from the horizon would dim these star-born creatures, yet they still linger, these two at least.