"Well! That should be the last of it,"
Surveying the clean, bare room before him with hands on hips, Ryndel at last allowed a tentative smile to bloom on his face. The better part of two months had passed since the refugees of Edhelion had finished the trek south to Celondim, and the empty room represented the very last of people's belongings restored to their new homes.
The Dourhands hadn't actually destroyed much of Edhelion at all, or at least the structure of it. The most damage sustained had been to the---
So they'd managed to get a lot out in the evacuation.
Celondim wasn't a large settlement by any stretch of the imagination, for all that it had endured since the rise of Lindon. Usually, it housed river-fishers and farmers, and those who preferred trees to the open land closer to the sea. Most Elves of the Ered Luin had lived farther west, in Mithlond proper, or north, in Edhelion.
Now, of course, that all had changed. The Elves of Edhelion still living numbered nearly two hundred, and the wounded in the scores. the hassle of building shelters, summoning healers from Mithlond, and squeezing three hundred Elves into a space ment for half that number had taken months and was still ongoing. Even Lord Círdan had ventured upriver to help figure out the logistics.
Ryndel wasn't exactly certain when the refugees had elected him their spokeperson alongside Dorongúr, but nonetheless he had been heavily involved in the process. He was a young Elf still, too young to have lived under Gil-galad's reign, much less Fingon's as had Dorongúr. Really, his only position of any note had been---
Unconciously, his hand drifts to his belt, where an unadorned longsword sits in its leather sheath, drawn only once since he had been gifted it. Dorongúr has told him it had been meant as a sort of graduation present for that Yule, now passed, when he should have lived twenty years as a student. As things had gone, autumn was still in flower when it had been pressed into fumbling hands by his master, accompanied by a swift smile and a soft push in the right direction.
On a whim, he draws it now. There are small runes engraved into the gleaming steel--- cirth rather than tengwar, the easier to engrave for an inexperienced craftsman. Though the sword itself had been forged by the best of Rivendell, Talagan had inscribed the words himself. A well-wish, a blessing, a farewell, a declaration of pride, or all. Or perhaps merely what his master thought of as poetic.
It is a fine blade, much like the one his master bore, which now sits snapped, perhaps, beneath twenty tons of solid stone. He sheaths it once more, and turns for the door.
