---

Image credit: Alan Lee and Paul Lasaine

“The Silent Archive”

The halls beneath Caras Galadhon were seldom trod these days. Ceneshar’s footfalls echoed in the stillness as he passed beneath the carved branches of silvered mallorn-wood. Dust hung motionless in the air. Here, beneath the golden city, the past was shelved and bound, scrolls, ledgers, fragments of song, and the long, brittle pages of those who had left no other mark but ink. Once, these passages had been filled with quiet voices, lore-keepers murmuring in Sindarin, scribes bent over amber-lit scrolls, but no more. Now, time itself was the only archivist that remained, gentle and remorseless.

He paused before a sealed case, its glass veiled by time and disuse. A faded sigil on the clasp: Elenath undómë, the Stars in Twilight. A private seal. One he himself had once authorised. His brow furrowed. He could not remember when.

With a soft word, the lock came away. The scent of old parchment drifted up, earthy, brittle, touched faintly with salt and the ghost of lavender. He drew out the bundle.

Green thread. Not gold, nor silver, but green—wild, stubborn, growing things. His throat tightened. He remembered it now. Naridalis had handed it to him with ink-stained fingers and a look of studied seriousness, the kind she had learned from mimicking her elders, but beneath it, that fire always burning. She must have been barely into her first century.

“So you don’t forget what I see,” she’d said, as if the thought of her father forgetting anything was absurd.

He opened the journal. The journal was hers, not a diary, but a collection of copied verses, sketches of trees and ruins, and fragments of letters never sent. Notes on wandering stars. The first page bore a tracing of her own hand, her child’s hand, long before he had let her carry a bow or stand in council.

The first pages were simple: pressed leaves, annotated with a child’s precise hand; sketches of birds she had given names to, and verses copied from ancient lays, though often she changed the endings. Where others ended in sorrow, she made them hopeful, or else unfinished.

A tracing of her hand appeared early on, ringed with tiny runes.

‘This is the shape of me. I will grow beyond it.’

He frowned. His instinct was to scoff; it was the indulgent nonsense of youth, half-poetry, half defiance. Yet something in the words pricked at him. He had not seen it then. He had nodded politely, offered praise without interest. He had never truly read these pages.

Leafing onward, he found fragments written later, notes from beyond the woods, copied from tongues he had never taught her. Westron. Khuzdul glyphs, barely legible. A phrase in the Black Speech, scrawled then scratched out. More pages bore the same green thread, tied in loops or used to stitch torn parchment. It had been her way of marking ideas that were not yet finished.

A familiar anger began to stir. Foolishness. Recklessness. Arrogance.

The girl had not known what she toyed with. The world beyond the golden boughs was not hers to fix. He had told her that. Time and again.

He turned another page. A note, penned in haste:

"The land beyond the Golden Wood is broken, and yet I love it. The trees there do not sing—but they endure. That is enough. That is something worth learning."

He let the journal fall to his lap.

His lips curled, not in a smile, but something more complicated. His anger flickered, hollowed out by something quieter. Something he was loath to name.

She had been restless from the first. He saw that now, as if each page were a mirror cast backward into a past he had refused to examine. Her yearning had been bright and sharp, like light on glass. He had mistaken it for childish rebellion. He had called it youthful folly, indulged it without believing it dangerous.

He had not seen the roots of it.

And why? Because he had not wanted to. Because he had been too proud, too certain in the strength of his own beliefs.

His hand tightened on the journal. He could not call her back. Could not rewrite the words she had left him, words he had not read until it was far too late.

He turned the last page.

There, beneath a poem unfinished, was a line he had never seen. The ink was old but legible, its handwriting shakier than the rest:

“If you come looking for me, do not come as my keeper. Come as one who has learned how to let go.”

He closed the book slowly, the green thread coiling like a vine between his fingers.

Stubborn. Always. That was their bond. That was the fire that ran in both their veins, and perhaps what would always set them apart.

For the first time in centuries, Ceneshar bowed his head, not in defeat, but in grief that no longer sought a target. He no longer knew if he was mourning her absence… or his own blindness.

Tomorrow, perhaps, he would go to the Galadriel.

Tonight though... he would not sleep.

---

Image credit: Alan Lee and Paul Lasaine

“The Ashen Record”

The soft golden hush of Lothlórien above had no dominion here. Beneath the roots of the trees, in stone corridors forgotten even by many lore-keepers, Ceneshar moved like a shade among the shelves. Dust choked the air. His lone lamp cast long shadows that twitched across carvings older than kingdoms. He had long lost track of time.

The vault was sealed not by lock, but by word and silence. Even to speak of the lower record chambers in the Silent Archive required permission from Celeborn's court, permission Ceneshar, even as Loreward of the Archive itself, had never sought. But he was of the old blood, and the stone itself remembered this. That, and the name he whispered to the threshold, had opened the way.

He passed rows of scrolls wrapped in blackened silk, tomes bound in ironwood and serpent-leather. Here lay the buried doubts of the Eldar; secrets unearthed during the long wars and buried again, lest they corrupt. And there, wrapped in seals of grey wax and marked with a rune he had only seen once before in an obscure margin, it waited.

The Ashen Record.

He cracked the seal.

The pages within were not mere parchment, but thin sheets of bark, etched with silvery ink that pulsed faintly under the lamplight. The Quenya was antique and cold, distant even to his mind. It spoke not of worship, nor allegiance, but study…. a dispassionate, methodical analysis of Morgoth's craft: the breaking of minds, the shaping of wills, the forging of enduring hatred.

“Not for power,” the Record began, “but for armament of the spirit.”

Its author was unnamed. Yet Ceneshar began to recognise patterns, phrases from other forgotten fragments, ideas that echoed the earliest disputations of Valinor. Some of these writings predated the rise of Sauron himself.

One tale arrested him.

A captive, an Avari woman taken in the First Age, had been bound not with chains, but with song. Her captors sang day and night in shifts, a discordant melody composed to unravel the self. Her own name was never spoken, only replaced, over days, then weeks, then years, until she could no longer recall who she had been. In time, she was made to sing the melody herself, believing it was her will that shaped it. The Record noted, coldly, that she eventually died with a smile, whispering praises to a darkness she had once feared.

Ceneshar’s hand trembled as he read. He felt the bile of horror rise in him, yet alongside it, something else: awe.

The precision. The patience. The understanding of song not as art or praise, but as a weapon, a leash.

He turned the page.

Diagrams followed, of thought-binding. Ciphers that mimicked the voice of command. The theory of shadows, not as absence of light, but as a presence in itself.

He felt none of the corruption in reading this that he had always warned others of. Only... possibility.

The last page bore a single question, written in a smaller, sharper hand:

‘What will you trade to protect what you love?’

He stared at it for a long time.

Then, slowly, reverently, Ceneshar rewrapped the Record. He did not return it to the shelf.

He walked back into the light of Lothlórien, clutching the Record beneath his robe. Above, the mallorn leaves glowed gold in the sunlight. But Ceneshar's gaze was turned inward now, towards a road newly opened, a road he had sworn never to tread.

And yet, the forest said nothing.

---

Image credit: Alan Lee and Paul Lasaine

“In The Presence Of Quiet Tyrants”

The council chamber beneath the great mallorn throne was hushed, as always. Light poured in dappled and soft through woven golden branches. The air itself seemed curated, still, harmonious, watched.

Ceneshar stood at the edge of the assembly, his hands clasped behind his back. He said little. Celeborn presided from his curved seat of carved silverwood, his voice ever calm, tempered, immovable. Galadriel did not attend. She no longer did, unless the stars themselves bent to request it.

Word had come from the northern marches, smoke without fire, a wolf-pack driven mad and torn to pieces by something unseen, scouts who returned speaking in circles. Whispers of disturbances on the East Road. The seers spoke of ripples, old evil stirring, paths untravelled now stirred by dark winds.

"Not war," said Celeborn, ever measured. "But unrest. A troubled tide in the thoughts of the world."

Ceneshar remained still, yet beneath the folds of his robe, his jaw tensed.

The council moved on, methodically, predictably. Discussions of river trade, of sentry rotations, of tree-sickness near the Nimrodel. Celeborn guided each voice in turn, never raising his own. Always that perfect centre. Always the diplomat. Always the one with the last word.

Ceneshar's gaze drifted, not to the speakers, but to Celeborn's pale hands, resting like woven vines on the arm of his throne.

Hands that direct. Not build. Not break. Only guide... shape... as Morgoth once shaped... but with a gentler song.

The thought was heretical. Even poisonous.

Yet it formed, complete, unbidden. A seed from the Ashen Record, perhaps, or from older grievances that had taken root long ago.

When Celeborn dismissed the council, Ceneshar did not remain to speak. He offered only a slight bow and drifted out into the glades, where the golden hue of Lothlórien turned slowly to the regular colours of spring.

He walked far that day; unusual for him in these times. Past the telain of the western sentries. Past the stream-fed groves where no bird sang. The wind was dry and soft, but there was tension beneath it. Lothlórien was listening. He could feel it.

He came upon the stag not far from the border lands. It was dying, its flank scored by wounds that did not bleed, blackened and split. Its eyes were rolled white, its antlers buried halfway in the dirt where it had fallen to its knees.

Ceneshar knelt beside it and laid a hand to its brow. The creature shivered and stilled, its spirit departing in silence.

But the marks it bore...

They were no hunter’s work. Nor any beast’s. The burns were precise, like brandings, yet placed in patterns he recognised. He had seen them before. In diagrams beneath the earth. In the margins of the Ashen Record.

He rose, his breath catching.

Is this it, then? he wondered. Is the shadow no longer confined to the East? Has it grown roots here, among the golden leaves? Has Sauron’s fall counted for nothing. Darkness still lingers in the world.

He looked back toward Caras Galadhon. The towers gleamed, serene and proud. Ignorant of this changing world. The forest whispered nothing back.

And still, he would not go to Galadriel.

Even now, with dread creeping into his marrow, he resisted. He remembered her silence when his wife fell. The way she had taken counsel with the Dúnedain and sent aid to a fellowship of Men. Always the balance, always the long plan. Never the grief. Never the cost.

And Celeborn, ever her echo. A warden in truth. A king in all but name. And he... Ceneshar... ever the guest at the feast of power. Ever ancient, but never at the centre.

He returned to the city, not in haste but in silence. He spoke to no one. That night, beneath the hush of lantern-light in his private chamber, he spread ink and parchment across his desk and began to write, not to Galadriel, but about her. About what had been lost. About the mirror she kept veiled beneath the golden boughs.

And when the quill faltered in his hand, he looked out through the lattice of his talan and whispered, not to be heard, but because the words had weight and wanted release:

“Would she show me... if I asked?”

The Mirror of Ages.

He had dismissed it before. A child’s seeking-glass. A relic of vanity and dream. But if he would not trust the stars, and the books had gone dry, then there was only one way to look, to look into the stream of possibilities, and see what the world would not say aloud to him.

He did not sleep that night. Nor the night after.

And the wound in the stag’s side haunted him, not for what it meant, but for where it pointed.

Towards the East.

And towards a shadow that might already have passed through his heart.

---

Image credit: Alan Lee and Paul Lasaine

“The Wound That Does Not Bleed”

The lamplight in Ceneshar’s chamber did not flicker, though he had not moved in hours. The pages of the Ashen Record lay open before him, unread now, though still heavy with consequence. He had studied them long into the night and past it. They lay etched upon his mind, more enduring than the ancient bark upon which they had been written.

His hands were folded. His gaze was not upon the book, nor upon the gentle fall of golden leaves just beyond his window, but turned inward, deep, troubled.

He had not slept.

Not for the first time, he wondered whether the price of silence was worth the safety it had bought. The centuries of restraint, the measured words, the cautious alliances, it had kept him alive, kept him near the court, but also far from power.

Celeborn and Galadriel, so resplendent in their wisdom, so beloved, had moved the course of Lothlórien like hands shaping river clay.

He had stood beside them, yes. But always a half step back.

It had not always been so.

Ceneshar rose from his seat and crossed to a tall, narrow shelf. Upon it rested a small orb of glass, cupped in gold, filled with a fine dust from the far north of Dorthonion. He touched it lightly, and the image of a pine tree bloomed in its heart, pulsing with remembered moonlight. He turned away before it could root old pain too deeply.

He thought of Naridalis.

It had come upon him like a chill on the wind, an intuition first, then a knowing. His daughter was changed. She was not lost, not yet, but touched by something... darker than she realised. Galadriel had said nothing outright, but her warning had been clear enough.

Ceneshar had bristled at the reminder.

Galadriel, so quick to offer counsel, so slow to share truth.

She had turned her mirror to the fates of Men, had given aid to the Fellowship of the Ring, had permitted strangers and peril alike into the heart of their realm. And in the end, it had worked. Middle-earth was saved. The shadow of Sauron broken.

But not without cost.

And not without betrayal. He had never forgotten the bargain struck with mortal kings, alliances that had claimed the life of his beloved wife. No, he did not speak of it, not even now. But he had not forgiven.

Yet he could not deny the mirror's power.

He paced. Slowly, step by step. The idea formed not as temptation, but as strategy. If he were to know Naridalis’ fate... if he were to truly understand what caused her to intersect this shadow, and what she might yet become because of it... the Mirror of Galadriel could show him.

He had never asked to look within it.

He had always considered it vanity.

But now, he considered it necessity.

To seek it, though, would mean humbling himself. To ask Galadriel would be to re-enter the weave of her will, a place he had long avoided. He distrusted the quiet guidance of her gaze, the weight of her knowing.

But this was about his daughter.

His hand brushed the Ashen Record again, not to open it, but to feel the shape of it through its wrappings. A question stirred in his thoughts: Was it the knowledge he had found in the Record that had opened this path to him... or had it simply removed his fear of asking?

He turned toward the eastern balconies, where the silver shadows lay long beneath the morning sun.

He would not beg.

But he would ask.

And if Galadriel refused him, well, he had other roads now. Roads he had once vowed never to tread.

The wound did not bleed. But it ached all the same.

---

Image credit: Alan Lee and Paul Lasaine

“The Mirror of Ages”

The night was silvered and still beneath the boughs of Caras Galadhon. No birds sang in Lórien now; the forest had fallen into a hush that no wind disturbed, as though the very trees were listening, but Ceneshar could not escape the clamour within his own mind. The weight of his past, the steady fracture of his daughter’s departure from him, these thoughts pressed upon him until they became a storm. The lore-keeper, the ever-guarded figure of stoic wisdom, had been shattered beneath his own eyes. He knew that the only way to learn more and to begin healing this wound was to look, truly look, into the mirror that had once guided the fates of Lothlórien, the Mirror of Galadriel.

He had not asked for her help. Not directly, not yet. But he knew she would come. Galadriel had always known when the breaking point had arrived. It had been the same when his wife had died, when his daughter had come to him for answers and found none. And now, when Naridalis was in danger, lost, perhaps, to forces that could swallow her whole, he was ready to see.

The grove was empty when he reached the mirror, the air heavy with fresh pollen and old power. No one came here any longer. Not since the war, not since the world had changed. But Ceneshar, steeped in the coldness of history and loss, felt no tremor of doubt. He simply stepped forward, his boots scraping faintly on the floor.

Before him stood the Mirror, its surface dark and rippling, as if the reflection was not a reflection at all, but a portal, a threshold to something much darker. It seemed to beckon him, even now, as if to promise him the answers he had long sought.

He had come to seek his daughter—his Naridalis. But what he found instead was something far worse.

Galadriel stood in the doorway, as silent as always. Perhaps it was his imagination, but her usual light seemed… dimmer to him now. She did not speak immediately. There was no need. Ceneshar could feel the weight of her gaze, sharp and knowing, and he resented it. She would not ask him to look. He would do it on his own, because the duty of a father, no, the need to look, was his alone.

“Will you see, then?” Galadriel asked, her voice low, even, with a tone that suggested she had always known he would.

“I must,” Ceneshar replied, his voice thick with something unspoken.

“The world is breaking still... and I must know where she stands in it.”

The words burned his throat. It was his duty, yes, but deep down, the terror of seeing his daughter lost to the world... it clawed at him, despite his stubborn resolve. Yes, he planned for Naridalis to been a tool; a useful one… but that was not all she was to him. Not by far. His heart beat fast, almost in protest. Yet the moment was inevitable.

Galadriel studied him. Perhaps she saw what already stirred in his heart. Her eyes softened, but only briefly. “Then you must be prepared for what you may find. For you will find it alone…”

Ceneshar’s hand, stiff as the rock of his own heart, reached toward the mirror. The water was cool beneath his touch, the ripples spreading outward as if the very surface of the world trembled. He fetched the pale and poured the silver water into the mirror, as he knew to do.

Galadriel inclined her head and stepped back, retreating to the shadowed edge of the grove. She did not vanish outright as she might once have done... instead, she simply turned and left him.

Alone.

The ripples deepened… then a smooth surface broke across the basin….. and image began to take shape, slow at first, like a whisp of smoke coiling from the depths. When Galadriel had departed Ceneshar finally peered over the rim of the basin and looked within….. And then...

Visions broke across it…. jagged, glimmering, like light falling through shattered crystal.

He saw the smoke of Orodruin, the Eye, flaring in its final fury, and the Tower collapsing. He saw the banners of Gondor raised high. And Men… always Men.

Their pride. Their hunger. Their will to rule the world of light and shadow both.

And in a great cry of triumph, they rose, the war ended.

But to Ceneshar, the war had not ended. Not truly.

He saw his wife, not her face, never that, for memory refused him, but the shape of her hand, pale as moonlight, falling from view. And he saw Men’s swords drawn. He could not remember the moment, only the grief.

It was Men who had failed.

It was always Men.

He saw Galadriel and Celeborn, giving counsel to the Fellowship, lighting torches for others to carry. Their wisdom had let the world burn for its own good. So they said.

Then he saw her... Naridalis, defiant, bright-eyed, slipping away from Lothlórien in silence, leaving no farewell. At the time, he had thought it merely rebellion. Youth. Grief unspoken.

But now...

Now the Mirror turned, and deeper waters opened.

He saw the world south and east of the Misty Mountains. Beyond the Golden Wood. He saw roads ruined and villages left broken, the aftermath of war….. and yet… fires rekindled in far off forgotten hills, and dark figures that still moved about…. not organised, not yet, but watching. Waiting. Growing again.

And then, her….

No name, no face, just a presence, a flicker of a shadow beneath stars, a Herald dressed in black leather armour, cloaked shadow beyond mere garment, and bearing a black bird-shaped mask, with curved beak, polished to a dull sheen…. and silence.

Ceneshar leaned closer.

What is she…?

A woman it seemed, going eastward, silent but certain. He heard echoes of different voices saying... saying…. Deorla…. Her figure flickered between forest and fen, through the blasted fields of Cardolan, over the high bones of Rhudaur. Always moving, always away. But the land remembered her.

He saw crows scattering from bloodied trees... fishermen dragging half-burned corpses from the riverbanks of the Greyflood... the bodies of deserters, once warriors, now twisted beneath cairns of stone or left to rot beneath the sun. All as Galadriel had described… these were visions of the past… the damage in her tracks was not wanton, but it was deliberate. Like a surgeon’s cut. Precision laced with fury.

The Mirror deepened. It drank the light and gave back shadow.

Now he saw not the trail, but the roots beneath it. ((read Deorla's excellent story here))

A basin in Enedwaith. No fire, no comfort. Deorla knelt in the cold. And then, unbidden, her past spilled into the surface like blood into clear water. The child without a name. Shackled. Born of Mordor’s forges, where cruelty was a language and silence a virtue. He saw her bare feet on blackened ground... saw her lift the blade to the boy’s throat... saw the cheers when the blood ran warm. She had learned young that obedience was life, and that compassion was death.

And she had risen. A shadow in the hall of the Black Tower. A blade shaped in secret. Sauron’s whisperer, his saboteur, his flame in the dark. Not a brute like the Uruks, not a sorcerer like the Nine, but a herald cloaked in flesh, trained to kill, to lie, to unsettle, and to endure. He saw her kneel before the empty throne as the Black Speech wound its chains through her soul.

“You are my flame unseen. My herald in the silence. My shadow at the gate...”

Ceneshar flinched. The voice echoed in his bones, even now.

He saw her rise as the Shadowflame. Striking from nowhere, vanishing into smoke. He saw the men who had feared her, the women who had cursed her name, the hosts who faltered because she was there before they ever drew steel. And he saw the Eye fall, its fire guttering to ash.

But the fire in her did not go out.

Now she walked with no banner... but still she burned. She had inherited the silence she once served, and filled it with death.

The Mirror pulsed. Deorla’s past bled back into her present. The deserters she killed rose in mockery. “No Eye watches you now,” they whispered. “But still you burn... Who do you burn for now?”

Ceneshar’s fists clenched at the rim of the basin. This woman, this creature, had passed near Naridalis. Had spoken with her. Changed her. Perhaps even turned her. She wore no mask, but she wore darkness like a mantle. Yet the Mirror showed something more. Deorla did not laugh. She did not revel.

She sat alone, clutching a dagger, sweat trailing down her brow beneath the stars. Not triumphant. Not weeping. Just... enduring.

The flame had never left her. And it was consuming her, still.

Ceneshar tried to step back from the vision, cold to the marrow. He couldn’t… but he felt he understood better now. This woman was not merely a threat, she was a relic of a broken war, a blade forged for a hand that no longer ruled, yet still sharp, still searching.

And Naridalis, his daughter, had crossed her path. Leaving an indelible mark.

That could not be ignored. Nor could it be undone….

The mirror pulsed and he felt as if he would lost his grip on the rim of the basin at any moment... but he held on.

The Mirror’s images shifted again.

Gone were the ashes of Gorgoroth. Gone the bloodied trail of Deorla’s passage. Now the waters cleared to a shape more familiar, painfully so.

Naridalis.

She stood in some darkened place, veiled by wet stone and faint light, speaking to... him.

Or what wore his face.

Ceneshar’s breath caught. The figure before her was wrong, just wrong enough, its stance too poised, the eyes too still. It moved like a memory walking, not a man.

And she believed it. Not blindly, no, she questioned, she doubted, but she listened. Her head tilted slightly in that old way, the way she used to when he recited the tales of Elbereth on winter nights.

Rage surged through him.

His knuckles whitened at the basin’s rim. How dare she? How dare she speak so tenderly, so foolishly, to a shadow puppeting his image? After everything. After she left. After she turned away from Lórien, from her kin, from him.

“You do not know me,” he whispered bitterly to the Mirror, though the words were meant for her.

And for a heartbeat, he hated her.

He hated her for that softness. For trusting the world, even still. For leaving him alone in a land he no longer understood, beneath trees that whispered of her absence every night.

But then...

He felt it.

Something around her shifted. A pulse of dread. Not from the false-Ceneshar, but from beneath. From behind the illusion.

Something watched her.

The Watcher.

Its terrible, coiling form, stretching deep under and into the mountain from the Black Pool at Moria’s walls… It was not just a presence; it was an entity, ancient and powerful, with eyes that gleamed with hunger. Its grasp was deep, seeping through the cracks in the world, reaching for his daughter.

It was not merely baiting her with his likeness. It was probing, circling, testing. And she, his daughter, wild and proud and unbowed, was on the edge of something vast and ruinous.

He knew he had to act.

And yet... something within him hesitated.

The image of his daughter before him was distorted, as if the reflection were struggling to hold on to the semblance of her true self. Her features were twisted by grief, grief that had not been hers to carry, grief that had been forced upon her. It was the same grief he had chosen to ignore when he had shut her out, but now it was overwhelming.

The mirror grew colder.

It sought her grief, sought to drown her in it. Sought to rejuvenate itself using her very essence. The words were murmurings in the cool waters of the depths beneath the mountain.

Ceneshar could feel it. It was his face, his voice, but it was not him. It was the shadow of what he could become, something that knew how to break her, to manipulate her. The more he looked, the more he felt his own soul weakening, as though some part of him was pulling away, drawn toward the dark heart of this malevolent force.

The rage in Ceneshar guttered out like a wind-blown candle.

His hand trembled against the mirror’s edge.

“Naridalis…”

He had watched her storm away from Lothlórien, cloaked in defiance and grief. He had thought it rebellion. Childish perhaps, but survivable. Now he saw differently. The shadow that reached for her was old. The darkness at Deorla’s heels had brushed against his daughter too. He could no longer pretend this was some wandering of spirit or reckless rite of youth.

She was not just rebelling.

She was being drawn.

He leaned over the Mirror fully now, as though closeness could change the vision, could cast his voice across time and stone to reach her. He stretched out his arms in vain attempt nevertheless…

She was in danger. And though he might curse her for her stubbornness, for the aching silence she left in his heart... she was his.

He would not lose her. Not to this.

Not to shadow.

The mirror rippled further….

Then, the darkness whispered. But another darkness. Distinct.

Faint at first, then more insistent, like a hand at the edge of his thoughts, weaving promises of power, power to restore order, to take control of the world that had slipped through his fingers. Power to rule. The remnants of darkness lingered, remnants of the very same evil that had once called to Sauron, that had poisoned the mind of those like him. These whispers were their lingering echo, speaking now through the mirror.

“You wish to see her saved, do you not?” a presence hissed through the growing fog in his mind. “You wish to control this fate, to shape it as you see fit? Power, Ceneshar... power is the price of what you seek. Power, and obedience.”

The mirror’s surface shimmered again, showing flashes of things he would never have wished to know. Destruction. Chaos. The broken remnants of the world that could not yet heal. The last vestiges of Sauron’s darkness, festering in the corners of the world. And yet, something, something darker still, was growing.

In that moment, Ceneshar made his choice.

His fingers tightened around the edge of the mirror. His breath came faster, his chest tight. “I will not let her fall to shadow. Not while I breathe.”

A bargain was struck in that silence, one that tied him to something older, darker, something that he would call master. He knew it was wrong, but the pull of it was undeniable. The remnants of evil that whispered through the mirror had what he needed. They offered him the order he had craved. The strength to keep his daughter safe from the Watcher.

For a fleeting moment, Ceneshar was aware of the cost, but it was too late. He would pay any price.

He called to her.

“Daughter,” he said, his voice no longer the command it had once been. Now, it was the desperate plea of a father; cracked, imperfect, but full of the love he had long since buried. “I was wrong to try and bind you. You were never meant to follow in my path. You were always meant to walk your own.”

The words trembled, as though his very soul might shatter beneath their weight. The connection was brief but sharp, the moment when the darkness retreated from the image, giving way to his voice alone.

“You are stronger than I ever was,” he whispered, his voice fading as the bond snapped tight, breaking under the pressure of his own desperation. “I see that now. Let this grief be yours, and yours alone. Bear it. And be free...”

The illusion collapsed.

He could not finish. He wanted to say he loved her…

The mirror recoiled, the coldness returning, his voice swept away by the blackness.

And as the darkness closed in, he heard one final whisper from the other’s voice:

“Your daughter is safe. Remember our accord.”

The mirror went still. The air grew cold, and the dark remnants laughed softly, their voices fading into silence.

Ceneshar stood alone, his breath heavy in the empty grove.

And for the first time, he understood the true cost of what he had chosen.

His heart burned with hatred, for Men, for the folly of Galadriel and Celeborn, for his own powerlessness. He would not sail west. Not while his daughter remained.

The vision had faded. The Mirror lay still, its surface dim as moonless water. Ceneshar’s hands no longer trembled. He stood alone beneath the mallorn leaves, though he did not feel alone.

Not anymore.

The voice still echoed in him, not Sauron’s (for he was obliterated), not this Shadowflame’s, but another. It had come in the stillness between images, when he stood before the Mirror’s heart cracked open. It had whispered with neither promise nor threat... only certainty. A dark voice, older than oaths. And it had offered him what the Light had long withheld, what Celeborn and Galadriel had kept for themselves:

The power to save her. The power he needed to have saved his wife.

And he had listened.

He had not spoken aloud. He had not needed to. The accord was struck in thought, in pain. In willingness.

He did not know what he had promised.

But already, it had begun. The words he sent to Naridalis, twisted through the Watcher’s veil yet carrying something true, the power to convey these had not come from him alone.

The clarity, the sudden reaching love, the instinct to speak of hope… it had been given to him. Or rather, unlocked. And he had wielded it.

He prayed it would be enough.

But now he saw things clearly….. his daughter was not merely straying; she had not simply passed by this shadow…. She had been following it. Drawn in by this woman. And the shape of that force now had a name.

Deorla.

The Shadowflame.

He said it aloud, quietly. Let the trees hear. Let the stars judge.

“She must be stopped.”

And yet... even as he spoke, he knew the truth of it.

He would follow her.

First to find her. Then to understand. And in time… perhaps more.

The Mirror had shown many things. Truth among them. And this truth gnawed at him still:

That what Deorla had become—Naridalis might become.

That what had shaped Deorla might one day shape him.

And that the shadow he had let in, willingly, was not yet done with him.

Ceneshar stepped back from the basin. He looked once more at the quiet waters, but they showed no future now.

Only his reflection.

And in his eyes, there was a flicker…

Of fire.

---

Image credit: Alan Lee and Paul Lasaine

“The Missing Record”

The archives were a cathedral of silence. Shelves stretched endlessly, carved from ancient stone and lined with countless tomes, their pages brittle as autumn leaves. Dust motes drifted lazily in the shaft of afternoon light that filtered through stained glass, casting muted colours on the ornate floor. Every corner of this place bore the weight of thousands of years of lore, and here, nothing moved without purpose. The Silent Archives of Lothlórien were a sanctuary, a place where knowledge held dominion and time seemed to fold inward on itself. The air was cool, dry, and heavy with the scent of old parchment and wax.

An archivist moved quickly but with care, his pale fingers tracing the spines of volumes in search of one document above all… a tome known only as ‘The Ashen Record’. An account of dark bargains, a record of forgotten arts, a key to a power that could sway minds and bind wills like Morgoth’s ancient song… or so it was said. For no Elf had even opened it in a thousand years. It held truths too dangerous to speak aloud, was marked with sigils no longer spoken of. Secrets that the Elves guarded jealously, locked away in silence…. but now it was missing.

A cold knot tightened in the archivist’s chest. His fingers trembled slightly as he ran them over the shelf again, a futile gesture against the creeping dread that coiled cold in his belly. His eyes darted to the shadows, as if the missing record might suddenly manifest from the gloom. But there was nothing but silence.

He checked again. The space where the record had always rested was empty, its absence a black hole amid the orderly collection. He swallowed and pulled his cloak tighter around him, heart quickening with dread. This was not merely a missing book, but a fracture in the very foundation of Lorien’s guarded legacy. The archivist hesitated, then, steeling himself, he turned away and made for the door that led to Ceneshar’s chamber, the Loreward of the Archives who bore the weight of their history as others bore crowns. They knew each other well; there was trust, it gave the archivist some confidence.

Each step was heavier than the last. The archivist’s mind raced with thoughts half-formed and dreadful. How could this have happened? Its absence could unravel centuries of careful guarding.

The path to the High Chronicler’s chamber was familiar, yet today it felt longer, burdened by unspoken fear. The heavy door swung open with a slow, deliberate creak. Inside, Ceneshar sat as always behind his great oak desk, the last light of day catching the silver threads of his long hair and setting his expression into sharp relief. Ceneshar looked up, eyes calm, though the archivist perceived a faint tightness around the lips; he had interrupted the High Chronicler, that much was certain.

Ceneshar’s eyes flickered… not with surprise, but something far darker, something buried deep. He gestured for the archivist to enter.

“You come at an hour when even the light wanes,” Ceneshar said, voice low but steady.

The archivist gulped, the words lodged in his throat. “Loreward, something is terribly wrong.” He hesitated, then forced himself onward. “The Ashen Record is missing.”

Ceneshar’s calm façade tightened, his fingers folding and unfolding on the desk. For a heartbeat, Ceneshar said nothing. Then his fingers laced together, knuckles pale in the failing light.

“Missing?” His voice was a shade quieter, almost measured… an attempt at control. “Impossible. I have watched over that tome myself. Are you certain?”

“Yes,” the archivist pressed. “I have searched every shelf, every chamber. It is not to be found.”

For a moment, the room was heavy with silence, punctuated only by the crackling fire and distant night sounds. Ceneshar’s fingers twitched, betraying a tension his voice sought to conceal. His gaze flicked away, tracing a line along the intricate carvings on the desk. He felt the cold grip of anxiety wrap around his heart, a feeling he had not known in centuries. He stood then, and moved to the window to hide it; his silhouette stark against the darkening sky.

“This cannot be.” His voice was taut, brittle beneath the surface calm. “The Ashen Record is not to be removed without my sanction.”

The archivist stepped forward. “Yet it is gone. If Celeborn learns of this…”

Something in Ceneshar’s eyes flickered…. He had to restrain himself from turning. Slowing his breath to a deep and calmer rate…. a fragile attempt at composure. His hands clenched at the windowsill without turning still. “Celeborn must not be involved. Not yet. This... problem is mine to bear.”

The archivist stepped closer, voice growing urgent. “But Loreward, if this knowledge is lost, or worse, used against us, what hope do we have? We cannot conceal this from the others forever.”

Ceneshar turned sharply, eyes burning with something old and fierce. “We cannot afford panic. If word leaks, the entire realm will be thrown into chaos.”

The archivist’s gaze faltered beneath the Loreward’s intensity. “Is there no hope of recovery?” he asked softly.

Ceneshar’s jaw tightened. “I wonder,” he murmured, “….if it is not lost…. but taken.”

The archivist’s eyes narrowed. “Taken? By whom? And why?”

Ceneshar finally turned to face the archivist, and his gaze darkened. “There are truths within that record… truths of Morgoth’s arts, the songs of binding and torture. Knowledge that can sway wills, warp minds, bend even the strongest to servitude.”

A shiver ran down the archivist’s spine. “Such power cannot be wielded lightly. If it falls into the wrong hands…”

Ceneshar interrupted, voice low and urgent. “Worse than wrong hands... it may already have been claimed.”

The archivist’s breath caught. “You speak as if you know more than you say.”

Ceneshar’s eyes darted toward the shadows, then back to the firelight. His fingers brushed the edge of a hidden sheath beneath his cloak.

“There are secrets I carry, burdens I bear... knowledge I cannot share, not yet.”

The archivist took a cautious step forward. “Then why not tell me? If we face a threat, we must face it together.”

Ceneshar’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Because the enemy is not always without, but sometimes within…. Because if Celeborn were to learn... if Galadriel were to interfere... the delicate balance would shatter.”

The archivist’s voice was urgent now. “Then we must act swiftly. The Record’s power... it could destroy us all.”

Ceneshar’s eyes glittered with a terrible resolve. “Yes. That is why I took it.”

The words struck the archivist like a blow. “You…”

Before he could speak further, Ceneshar moved with sudden, terrible speed. A slender blade gleamed cold in the firelight as it rose… calm, precise, and unyielding. The archivist barely caught the movement before the blade gleamed in the fading light, thrust deep and cold.

Shock froze the archivist’s features, his eyes wide and filled with disbelief. He crumpled silently to the floor, crimson blossoming across his robes.

The fire in Ceneshar’s eyes burned brighter now, a terrible, ancient flame.

He had killed before, countless times, but always the enemies of their kind; those declared foes by Celeborn and Galadriel’s decree. But kin? To spill the blood of one who shared their blood? It was a threshold he had never crossed until this moment.

And yet, the act felt... not… wrong.

As the archivist’s lifeblood seeped into the cold stone, Ceneshar’s breathing steadied. He stood motionless for a long moment, the cold blade still heavy in his hand. The firelight flickered across his face, etched with a terrible calm, yet burning with something older, something hungry.

He had crossed a boundary no Loreward dared touch, killed kin, silenced a voice meant to safeguard the past. But the knowledge in the Ashen Record was no longer a mere curiosity. It was a weapon. A song of power older than even the trees of Lorien, whispered in the shadowed halls of Morgoth’s prisons… songs to bend the will, to break the strongest, to command the hearts of many.

That song now thrummed in Ceneshar’s veins. He could feel it, a dark melody twisting his purpose.

Outside the archive, the woods breathed deep and uneasy, as if sensing the first tremors of a gathering storm. The golden light of Lorien’s eternal evening dimmed, a silent witness to the shadow taking root within its heart.

Indeed the very silence of the archive deepened, heavy with the weight of the deed done and the darkness yet to follow.

---

Image credit: Alan Lee and Paul Lasaine

“The Light That Lies”

The Silent Archive was sealed once more, its shadows deepened by the death that had stained its hallowed halls. Outside, the usual quiet of Lothlórien pressed close, unaware that beneath its golden leaves a darker tale had begun to unfold. Ceneshar stood alone for a moment, the weight of the blade still heavy in his hand, the coldness in his chest far colder than any steel. The archivist’s lifeless eyes haunted him, not with remorse, but with the urgency of what must come next.

He knew the truth could not be let live beyond these walls. Not yet. To reveal his hand was to invite catastrophe; Galadriel’s keen sight and Celeborn’s wisdom must not be aroused against him, at least not yet. The realm must see only a familiar threat… the lingering shadow… the Shadow…. flame… Yes. Deorla’s darkness had struck at Lothlórien’s heart… and the need for swift justice would follow. There was no time for remorse, only the pressing need to control the story before suspicion turned against him. But he would need to act quickly.

He exited his chambers and left the archive. Its great doors closed with a hush, but it echoed in Ceneshar's bones like the crash of a world falling. He paused, fingers trembling faintly at his sides, knuckles dotted with drying blood. Beneath his tunic, the Ashen Record lay swaddled in silk, a cold weight against his ribs, like a truth too heavy to cast aside.

Golden light, once radiant, now seemed to fall to his side, not quite on him…. and it looked strange through the high boughs of Caras Galadhon. The leaves of the mallryn no longer shimmered with golden colour; they shivered instead, restless in still air. A change had begun. The first breath of a coming storm.

He stepped down the winding stair of the talan, composed, eyes cool as river-stone, towards those walking below. Yet beneath the mask, calculation burned. This was no random madness. No accident. No desperate act. If he was to preserve what he had done, if he was to seize the greater purpose that now beckoned from shadow, he would need a story to cast before the light, and he would need allies.

More than that... he would need believers.

The call came before his feet reached the base of the tree: “High Chronicler!”

A voice, fair, soft, concerned from behind… another of the archivists. Ceneshar turned slowly, light catching in the silver cords that bound his robes.

“My Lord, there has been a tragedy... a blade where there should have been none. The archive is no longer silent.”

Gasps followed. Whispers unfurled like spider-silk as those around them listened.

“Yes Archivist, I know of this... tragedy… I go now to rouse the wardens. Tell no one else... not yet. Let no one touch the body. I say this to all of you”, as he turned to face the crowd.

He left them there, wide-eyed and paralysed, and strode with purpose. But not toward the barracks.

Not first.

---

The court of Lothlórien, such as it was, lingered always in soft assembly, noble lords and ladies of ancient lineage gathered beneath the high dome of the court-tree, the Chamber of Stars as it was known. It was to these that Ceneshar now turned, one by one. He did not speak openly. No accusations yet. No proclamations.

Instead, he walked among them with the bearing of sorrow.

And he sang.

Barely audible, a thread of harmony here. A whispered cadence there. His voice trembled with pain, real pain, for Naridalis, his daughter, and for what she had become. For what had been done to her. That pain gave the song its shape, its teeth.

To Lord Malnion, he murmured a sorrowful stanza of loss, ending with a name he should not have known: The Shadowflame.

To Lady Aléthea, he sang of fire in the woods, of broken oaths and women who walked unburned from ruin.

To Warden Veltharn, the blade-hardened captain, he sang not of grief, but vengeance, a father’s oath, and a daughter’s light defiled.

The words were subtle. The melodies? Rudimentary. But they clung like scent on skin. Old magic, dark and half-born, just as the Ashen Record had taught him. Not dominion... not yet. But suggestion. Doubt. Emotion turned just so.

---

Within the hour, the Golden Lord called for council.

The Chamber was silent as Celeborn entered, flanked by Galadriel, her presence like moonlight drawn into form. Her eyes turned at once to Ceneshar, but he held her gaze, masking the tremor within. Even now, her mind pressed gently against his... not intrusive, not demanding. A question in light.

He answered.

‘For Naridalis,’ he thought aloud as it were… casting forth his grief and fury. ‘They marred her. Broke her spirit. I must do what you cannot my Lady; to hold her tormentor to account.’

There was a pause.

Then a retreat.

Only just.

The Lady said nothing. But her brow furrowed faintly, and she looked away.

The court began.

---

“My Peers,” Ceneshar said aloud, his voice clear and weary, though the words felt hollow… how he had always been made feel lesser in their company. “I come before you bearing sorrow, but also warning. The Silent Archive has been defiled. One of our own lies slain.”

A stunned silence fell.

“By whose hand?” asked Veltharn.

“I do not know,” Ceneshar said. “But there are... signs. Traces left behind. And I have heard a name before in darker records, unbidden but ever near: the Shadowflame.”

That name moved like smoke through the chamber. Half-remembered tales stirred. An old whisper of fire in Mordor, of a woman unburned, yet wreathed in flame, cloaked in ruin and shadow; a servant of the Eye, of the Enemy.

“What was once at bay, has risen again,” Galadriel murmured, yet heard by all. Her voice was cold, distant. “I have seen her in my dream. In the waters. Ceneshar knows of what I speak.”

Ceneshar lowered his head. “Yes, then my fear is absolute. And the hand that struck down our kin was meant for me. I believe she hunts those who resist her return.”

Veltharn stepped forward. “What would you have us do, Lord High Chronicler?”

“I would seek her out,” Ceneshar replied. “I would end this before her corruption spreads further and she returns fully to her dark past… but I cannot do it alone.”

The chamber stilled. All looked to Celeborn.

“You ask for command?” he said, measured.

“I ask to defend our people. To see justice done. And... to vindicate my daughter. For the darkness that touched her once came from this same hand.”

There it was.

The truth. Enough of it to mask the deeper lie.

Celeborn turned to his wife. “Galadriel, your counsel is vital here.”

This would be a test like no other, Ceneshar knew.

Silence deepened like mist around the chamber. The assembled nobles waited, breath caught, eyes upon the Queen of the Golden Wood.

But her gaze was not upon them.

Her eyes, like still pools beneath starlight, became fixed on Ceneshar.

She did not move. She did not speak.

And yet….

‘Ceneshar…’

The voice was not a voice, but the presence of her spirit entering his mind once more… and this time, with full force… bright and endless, like a great wind stirring the high leaves of an ancient tree. It touched him without touch, breathed into his thoughts with impossible calm.

‘…do you know what you are doing?’

His heart quickened, but not from fear. He was ready. He had foreseen this.

He bowed his head slightly, as if overcome by sorrow. ‘I seek only to end a threat, Lady. One I fear we did not see soon enough.’

‘The name you spoke is not known in Lórien,’ her thought-voice replied, cool as moonlit water. ‘Yet I have seen her. In the south, moving like smoke over ruin. I delivered this vision onto you as I had seen her path cross with that of your daughter.… What did you see in the mirror? Why did you name this shadow?’

He hesitated…. just long enough.

Then, with careful sorrow: ‘Because what I saw, what the mirror showed me…. It will touch us all if left unchecked… it didn’t start with my daughter, and it won’t end unless we act….. And when the Archivist fell, when I saw the markings, I felt it in my heart. I do not know how I knew it. I only know… it was by her hand ultimately.”

Galadriel was silent.

He could feel her circling, not with steps, but with thought, like a great owl wheeling above a field of snow, hunting for a shadow beneath. She wasn't buying it.

‘You carry great sorrow...’

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘For Naridalis. She is not what she was. And I could not help her. Not when it mattered. But now…’

A silence bloomed. Within it, he allowed a true thing to rise, memories of her laughter, of her pale hair in the sun, of her hand clasped in his when she first learned to write her name in Quenya script. He did not manufacture it. He only let it breathe.

The grief was real. 

It washed over them both.

And Galadriel felt it acutely.

It dulled her edge, if only slightly.

‘…You believe hunting the Shadowflame will bring your daughter peace?’

‘I do not know,’ he replied. ‘But it may give her the chance to find her own way again. I must try.’

A long pause.

Then, like the soft closing of a door: ‘So be it.’

Her eyes shifted, just barely. The link withdrew, like a tide retreating from shore.

She looked now to Celeborn.

And aloud, she said, “If the danger moves as we believe, it must be met without delay. Ceneshar’s loyalty has never wavered. He speaks with the weight of truth. He will follow this assassin's trace to the Shadowflame. Let him go.”

Ceneshar exhaled, though he did not realise he had held his breath.

“Go,” said the Lord of Lothlórien. “Take with you those who will follow. Find this Shadowflame... and end her.”

As the council rose and murmurs of assent spread, Ceneshar bowed, concealing beneath his composed exterior the dark determination that now consumed him.

The true murderer of the archivist may not remain a secret forever. He did not have much time when he had thught to carve etching of black speech into the man's hollow face... careless, he would need to depart Lórien at the earliest.

The golden light had dimmed, a shadow now rising not just in the south, but within the very heart of their land.

Orders were given. Names chosen. A detachment of Lothlórien’s finest summoned.

But within him, the silence sang.

For he had passed through the Mirror of Ages, for the power of the mirror was never in the pool of water itself, it was always Galadriel… and he had remained unseen by her.

The song had begun.

---

Image credit: Alan Lee and Paul Lasaine

“A Wind Before the Flame”

The decision, once made, moved swiftly through the Golden Wood.

Beneath the boughs of Caras Galadhon, the Court of Silver and Light reconvened, not in anxious debate, but with ceremony, under stars veiled by golden canopy. The scent of mallorn blossoms drifted faintly on the breeze as banners were unfurled, and the names of those chosen were spoken aloud by Celeborn himself, his voice clear as ringing silver.

Twenty warriors stood in solemn array, clad in white and grey. Handpicked from the guards of the telain, the border-watchers of the Nimrodel, the riders of the Anduin patrols. There were no cheers, no cries of oath or defiance, only the stillness of resolve and the hush that comes before a storm. They had not been called to war, not openly. But all who stood there, and all who watched, knew this was not a patrol.

This was a pursuit.

And at its head stood Ceneshar; wreathed in sorrow and certainty… its architect.

Long had it been since he bore his armour. Forged in an age long past, it was not forged for war in the usual sense…. it bore no scars from battle, no stains of blood or time. Rather, it had been wrought in the high forges atop Caras Galadhon by smiths who understood the quiet weight of authority. A high-collared cuirass of shimmering silver leaf, etched with runes of preservation and memory, it marked him not as a commander of troops, but as a keeper of truth. The pauldrons were shaped like open scrolls, and the greaves bore the stylised branches of the mallorn, rooted in knowledge. It was ceremonial, yet functional, designed for the rare occasions when the Chronicler of Lórien must stand as symbol as much as scholar. Few had ever seen him wear it. Fewer still had seen what hung beside it.

Caranthir, the dual-bladed sword named for Fëanor’s fourth son, was an oddity even among Elven arms. Forged in the elder days of his youth during a sojourn in Lindon, it was a weapon of balance and precision, requiring a peculiar style of movement… part dance, part recitation, all memory. Ceneshar had trained in its forms not to become a warrior, but as a discipline of mind and motion, a meditation written in steel. In the years since, its twin edges had not seen blood. He had no intention of changing that. Yet, as he looked upon the blade now, resting once more at his side after so long, he could not help but feel a tension in the air, like a page about to be turned.

Not since the time of the Last Alliance had he donned his armour. He remembered that march, across the plains of Gorgoroth, side by side with men of Númenor and Eregion, banners high beneath a darkening sky. He remembered their hope... and their failure.

Even then, he had sensed the fault-lines.

Men had spoken of courage, but it was a courage born of desperation. They broke easily. Their loyalties bent with the wind, and their kings could not see beyond a mortal's reckoning of years.

Ceneshar had watched Elendil fall. He had even seen Isildur claim the ring and walk away from the fire, for though Elrond Halfelven did not speak of what transpired, Ceneshar could see it in both their eyes… And somewhere in that watching, something had broken in him too, or perhaps deepened.

The Elves had given all. It was Men who had faltered.

Centuries later, his wife had died on the borders of southern Gondor, caught in the wake of a failed treaty, betrayed by men who claimed friendship. A peace delegation turned to blood. The wound would never close. Grief poured from it like a poison.

Now, standing once more in armour that remembered that age, he understood something more.

He did not hate Men because they had failed. He hated them because they had never truly changed.

They rushed to speak of alliance, but beneath it always lay hunger. For power, for legacy, for command over death.

And now his daughter might be lost. To the echoes of Man’s legacy . A world shattered and reshaped in the wake of their weakness.

He had sworn never again.

He would not beg the Valar for aid. He would not seek justice through Celeborn, and certainly not through Elessar. He had the Ashen Record.

And through it, a language of deeper truth.

He looked to his right.

There stood Veltharn, his bearing precise, his gaze steady, hair still golden. Though younger than many among the gathered guard-captains, Veltharn was known for his cold discipline and the strange patience with which he wielded his sword. The tale was often told of how, in a siege of Dol Dínen, he had held a breach alone for three days, unmoving save to strike. He had not spoken throughout the siege, and some whispered he heard only what he wished to hear.

Ceneshar had chosen him as his lieutenant not only for loyalty, but for pliability.

Standing before them, Ceneshar spoke not of vengeance, but of vigilance. Not of wrath, but of remembrance. He invoked the ruin of southern woods. The darkening tide glimpsed in Galadriel’s mirror. And always, gently, he invoked his daughter’s name. He spoke of the fading of her light, not as blame, but as a wound in the fabric of the world. A grief to be redressed. He spoke of the murdered archivist, a signal to the Golden Wood of a breaking world, even after the fall of the great Enemy.

The court listened. The soldiers listened. And they believed him.

So did Veltharn.

They did not know that hours before, he had stood alone in the archives, his hands still shaking with the aftermath of murder. They did not see the smear of blood once cleaned from a dagger, nor the way he had delayed raising the alarm until he could bend others to his plan. They did not know how softly he had begun the whispering… the murmured songs with their subtle cadence… the melodies drawn from the Ashen Record. Most would not have recognised them. They were not true songs, but shadows of song. Lures. Threads cast into the hearts of nobles, each carrying the same refrain: a danger rising, a vengeance needed, a threat to the Golden Wood.

And from those whispers had risen this ceremony.

But as Ceneshar finished the litany and turned toward his newly named lieutenant, a flicker of something deeper passed between them…. no word, no movement… but understanding.

Veltharn knelt.

Ceneshar placed his hand upon the helm of his chosen, and for a heartbeat, closed his eyes, not in meditation, but in focus.

He whispered not the blessings of the Valar, but a thread of what he had learned from the Ashen Record… a phrase carved in fire into the recess of the mind. A seed, buried in command. A shape of thought too quiet for others to sense. A hook behind the eyes.

Veltharn did not stir. But something took root.

When the gathering was dismissed and the warriors dispersed to ready themselves, the wind that moved through the leaves of Caras Galadhon carried a strange cadence. No longer soft rustling, it murmured. Almost as if listening.

The hunt would begin at dawn.

---

That night, as the telain of Caras Galadhon gleamed like lanterns suspended in dream, the hush of leaves was broken only by the whisper of shifting steel and the quiet breath of sentinels.

Ceneshar stood alone upon a high platform, beyond the reach of the sentinels’ torches, wrapped in silence and starlight.

He no longer heard the wind as he once had. Not as song, nor spirit, nor memory.

He let the night air fill him. Not to calm, but to clarify.

This was not vengeance.

This was not duty.

He drew from his robe a single piece of parchment, scorched, half-crumbling, the ink almost dissolved. A page of the Ashen Record, now nearly committed to memory. Not fully. He was still learning. Still tasting the deeper meanings behind each phrase. A stanza of unmaking. A key, and a chain…

Still becoming.

He studied it… then burned it in his palm. Not in fire, but in thought, the words dissolving into the air like ash.

A gift to himself, to ensure no one else would read what he had read.

She will understand, he thought.

Deorla.

The Shadowflame.

He spoke her name silently, not in hate, but in certainty. She had gone east, abandoning her guise, shedding the falsehoods that had once cloaked her in Bree. And in doing so, she had stirred something that had long slumbered within him…. a resonance, a kindling, like flint meeting steel.

Yes, she had harmed his daughter. She had twisted the light that Naridalis once bore.

But Ceneshar knew now that this story did not begin with Naridalis.

Nor would it end with her.

Galadriel had peered into him, only days before. Her eyes like moonlight on still water, her mind brushing against his. She had suspected… something. But grief…. true, agonising grief… is its own mask. And he had worn it well. For it was not a lie. Only a part of the truth.

He was not corrupted, he told himself.

He was cleansed.

Everything unnecessary was being burned away. Even his doubt.

The Golden Wood had grown too still, too reliant on memory and the illusion of safety. But he would shatter that stillness. He would bring fire to the roots, and light to the rot.

This hunt was but the first stroke.

He turned from the parapet, and looked down at the men and women who would ride at dawn.

Below, Veltharn issued soft commands to the company. Horses were being prepared. Steel was being checked. The hunt would ride with first light.

But Ceneshar’s path had already begun.

The stars above him flickered, as though retreating.

And far below, beyond the rivers, beyond the plains, the horizon smouldered with distant clouds.

Would he be going to end her? Or would he be going to find her.

In truth, he did not yet know. 

And beneath the golden leaves of Lothlórien, where the wind once sang of peace, the forest held its breath, waiting for the flame, as one of the last lights of Lórien dimmed forever more..

---

[The story will continue in time...]

---

OOC - Re: "The Mirror of Ages" - This entry above connects with a parallel chronicle called "The Grey Descent". Featuring Ceneshar's daughter, Naridalis, the chronicle details her struggle with the Watcher in the Water. In its finale, "The Breaking Point" you can see the other side of what's happening in The Mirror of Ages.