Forlindon, present time, afternoon
Earcalie watched the newly born foal tentatively take his first steps around his mother. The little one was just half a day old, but already lively and demanding. She smiled, feeling a sudden pang of nostalgia thinking of her own parents far away on the other side of the sea.
"Tell me about Arnen?" she asked Histealdo.
"Hm?" he raised an eyebrow. "That's a sudden question". She shrugged. "You mentioned it earlier, I want to know about the time you traveled there. You never talked about it, and neither did ammë and atya"
"Because nothing noteworthy happened, and your parents did not join on the journey. But fine..." he scratched his head. "Let's see... it was during the time King Elendil settled in Middle-earth following the sinking of Numenor. Here, he and his sons founded what people call now the Realms in Exile. His son Isildur decided to settle near the Black Land and had plans to build a line of defense that could threaten Sauron. So, Gil-galad assigned him an escort from his guards in addition to the Numenoreans to act as guides south. I was among them. Now, the southern lands newly dubbed "Gondor" were beautiful, sunny and rich but Arnen..." he stopped and sighed.
"Arnen was something else. It was renamed Ithilien when Isildur took it as his territory"
"Because there is a great view of the moon?"
Histealdo laughed "Nothing of the sort. Simply as counterpart of Anorien, the territory of Isildur's brother Anárion. Sun land and Moon land. As I was saying... that strip of land was... idyllic. As if a small piece of the woods of Orome found its place in this marred land. Isolated and protected by two mountain ranges in the east and north, open in the south to the moist and salty winds of the sea. This allowed for a rich variety of flora to grow... imagine such variety as cedar trees, cypresses, tamarisks and the great barks of ilexes, ash and oaks, tiny flowers, lilies and scented roses, coexisting one next to each other"
Earcalie listened raptured, picturing the words in her head as a painting where each tree was a dot of color, a scrambled rainbow in a sea of green
"Edible plants of many kinds, olive trees, junipers and the tall, majestic culumalda, rose blossomed myrtles... "
"We have a myrtle in our courtyard" she interrupted. "Yes, and where do you think it comes from? To be precise though, the myrtle in the courtyard comes from the seed of the myrtle sapling I brought back from Arnen long ago and it became your mother's favorite. It is but a distant descendant" The elleth blinked. "You never told me!"
"You never asked where it comes from"
"Well... because it has always been there. So Arnen has a similar climate to Lindon?"
"It had... and I say had because it's been an age since I visited that place. I have no idea what it looks like now, hopefully mostly the same. Darkness is strong, but I think, that when such great beauty exists somewhere, even the strongest malice cannot fully defile it"
She nodded, thoughts of the dream she had churning in her head. "Satisfied? Or was that too boring of a story for you, that you have gone silent"
"Oh shush... I was just thinking about what it would be like now, that's all". She rose from the rock she was sitting on, "I'd like to... journey there myself, someday"
her uncle looked at her and tilted his head. "Maybe... but remember that our time in Arda is--"
"Oh please don't talk about sailing, THAT is boring" she went to brush twigs off of the foal's delicate hide. Sailing this and sailing that, she was convinced that after a certain age, all her kind became a broken lute not able to talk about anything else. And she wasn't ready for it. Not yet.
ammë and atya: mother and father in quenya
culumalda: orange tree in quenya
