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“We came hungry, though the feeling was left unnamed and the burning in our bellies blamed instead on eagerness. We came for the world, we came to build the world, and so to know it like a dream knows reality.
With our breath we made the valleys and the crunch of mountains rising. With the thunder in our chests we made the seas that roar and the wind that sings; and the wings of birds and the trunks of lithe trees—the worms, the seabed, the thunder in the sky, the fire on the spit, rocks both smooth and sharp, sleeping bears, the fox’s spit, hills and salt rimming the coast. All of it, all that you see, it came from us, we bore it like a child. A melody so sweet.
We had forgotten stars, but that came later.
We did not make the Firstborn. That was not for us to make. We had our chords to strike, no more, no less.
Melkor, that dark streak in your trees. Who spreads through you like rot. What he makes comes not from the chest, nor the womb, but from the bottom of the body, the skin underfoot. Those things, the fell and the rotten, the cursed and the twisted, they who are stepped on and made into dust. They do not come from song.
You must resist what lies he crafts, what songs and tunes he makes with his open mouth. He will take you and corrupt you. Make it something he can fit under his tongue.”
“They are us?” One voice dares to ask. Cuiviénen gurgles like a child first taking milk.
Owl-eyed Varda blinks. They have taken to calling her Elbereth and so she bears the name with pride. “Do not follow that path and they will no longer be.”
The Eldar on that little dark strip pale, then nod. Varda thinks if she leaves they will try to listen, but even wise minds are easy to lead astray. What can this tale do, besides bring them to the knowledge? There had been fear when she came to them that Melkor would devour her. Manwe had nearly stopped her, before she looked him deep in his eyes and reminded him what the cost of her absence would be.
We must protect them. They are like wild children to me.
The image takes her now, that devouring; but the dark land lives on around her. The fires and the stars on the river and the whites of unblinking eyes. No, she thinks. Eru opened his mouth and has yet to shut it. I shall be here a while, to watch.