Chapter Text
Celechwes’s name means “swift breeze”. Her father named her for the way she ran around nonstop as a child (and as a young adult, and as an adult…)
She grew up in the Falas. Her parents were fisherfolk and sailors on the more southerly shore, but Celechwes’s heart was always on land—or perhaps in the sky. She ran up and down the beaches, through fields and forest and fen, up what hills were within reach of her parents’ house—and then she discovered horses, and she truly began to fly free. She wasn’t entirely solitary by nature, but a horse was good companionship if no one two-legged wanted to join her travels, and she saw people enough as she rode and foraged throughout the peaceful land. Eagles flew down from their eyries in the northern mountains and she raced them home again. She rarely found exactly where they roosted and she never won the races, either, but nor did she stop.
For many years she was a traveler and sometimes message-bearer, riding free through the lordless wilds. She also loved to wander idly, brushing her hands along the trunks of tall trees or splashing in wild rivers. But her true joy was in the wild rush of running, on foot or horseback, with the wind her truest companion and the landscape flying past yet infinitely wide around, behind, and ahead of her.
As orcs, wargs, and other monsters of shadow began to creep out of the north, she carried more messages, for there was naught she couldn’t outride. She became a scout, a huntress and herb-gatherer, and warrior—every profession aided by the skill of slipping quickly and quietly through the land, by horse or foot. (And everyone was a warrior eventually, as they were forced back and back and back to the shore.)
(Celechwes’s father died, then. A warg caught him by the leg; his fellows managed to pry it off and kill it, and drag him back to the safety of the sea. But his leg was lost, and his spirit, horrified and defeated, followed soon after. Her mother survived, but did not leave Eglarest again save by sea.)
Celechwes was well into adulthood when the glimmer of the land across the sea abruptly went dark, but still young as elves went. Her first knowledge of the Noldor was a great fire and clamor in the north, and the miracle of the armies of darkness somehow deciding to stop fighting and head off that way. She was one of the few swift, quiet, and uninjured enough to follow and try to find out why, so she saw the great force of the elves of the West, with their shining blades and even brighter eyes, crash down on the orcs and hunt them mercilessly through the fens.
She didn’t talk to them at that point. She went back to report to Círdan.
Nor was she part of the first careful group to sail up the shore and approach the new encampment around Lake Mithrim, where the five remaining Sons of Fëanor clustered without their father or eldest or youngest brothers. But she went up with later missions of mercy ( this is how you treat wood to last against true wind and rain, this is how you catch fish when no kindly river spirits whisper them to your line, this is how you navigate when clouds cover the stars…)
She was there when the eagle landed and Fingon the Valiant stumbled off, with Maedhros the No-Longer-Lost limp and bleeding in his arms. She stayed a little to watch the shining elves of the West-no-more stumble similarly, all seeming to bleed, into cooperation, and she returned gladly for the Feast of Mereth Aderthad, and rejoiced with the rest of Beleriad in the hope of unity, victory, and peace.
Because peace bought Celechwes the one thing she loved best: a return to her days of riding free. As a messenger once again, because there was more need than ever for it, as the lords of the Noldor set their watch. Of course, they had their own messengers, so at first she was mostly just riding inland and back to the shore between her people and others: deep into Doriath, rich with the song of nightingales; coursing up along bright and rushing Sirion; through the winding, stony paths of the Ered Wethrin to its new “High King.”
Sixty-eight years after the rising of the Sun, eight years after the Dagor Aglareb and the true start of the Siege of Angband, Fingolfin announced that he was standardizing the courier services between the forts of the Siege line. Non-Noldor were invited to join as well—nay, asked, encouraged, for (the Noldorin High King said quite graciously), even after nearly seventy years, they still knew the land far better than their clever Western cousins, and would be a great asset to the Siege and the alliance.
Celechwes joined immediately. Orcs and wargs still raided in small bands or large. Shadows still crept from Ered Gorgoroth. Ill winds bringing dark spells still blew from the north. She was eager to help guard against these horrors—and, of course, to test her speed on all-new terrain. By the time she’d thought to venture northeast of Doriath, the land there was being overrun.
Now she rode from the sharp peaks of eastern Ered Wethrin, thin paths with cliffs dropping off to show the whole of Ard-Galen stretched out beside her, to deep blue Lake Helevon on which you could tell the time based on the stretching shadows of the surrounding mountains. She picked her paths through the sticky Fens of Siroch, she ran through the twisting paths of Aglon Pass, and she raced eagles through high, tree-studded Dorthonion and the cold shrub-brush slopes of Himring. And as peace mounted, she galloped the vast, now-flowering plains themselves, where only the wind could match her pace.
(Maglor Fëanorion tried to recruit her at least twice, but not that hard—if the Gap was truly held by skill at horses or hunting, it would’ve been his brother Celegorm in command. Maglor’s cavalry was fine as cavalry go, deadly-skilled from experience as orc raids persisted, but the Gap was held by the singers of the Noldor: riders called back and forth as they patrolled and their songs were carried in the wind that swept the plains, laying sleep on the unwary or dread and helplessness on the foe. Some Eastern elves did join them, for many had great skill at singing, and desire to guard their lands. Celechwes was merely a tolerable singer, neither powerful nor loud, as was required there.)
Never before had she carried messages for so many people who knew each other well but couldn’t, by duty, danger, or half-healed grudge, simply go speak to one another. She found herself carrying more than just letters and small packages—“Your mother also reminds you to keep your ears warm,” she told a cavalry-singer of Lothlann, delivering a scarf from a burly-armed smith in Himlad. “She looks well,” she assured a farmer of Dor-lómin, of his old comrade in Thargelion. From a smirking lady in Menegroth she delivered a kiss on the cheek and a sly whisper to the ear of the young lord of Tor Sirion (young mostly for the way he blushed like a cooked salmon), and just a few years after that she delivered many of their wedding invitations.
She got to know them over time, these bright-eyed self-proclaimed “knowledgeable ones” with their blades as sharp as dwarves’, tales of bliss and honor both lost, and love of stone towers that she didn’t understand but open hills that she did. Mostly she got to know the frequent letter-writers, and letter-receivers—the worried parents, the poets spreading their latest songs, the seneschals of every fortress from Eithel Sirion to Thargelion. She even came to know some of their lords and ladies (though some she liked more than others). Blushing Lord Orodreth and Lady Mithriel who never lost her sly smile, even when round with babe, were true friends who always hosted her well. Curufin Feanorion snapped if anyone touched his mail but himself, his brothers, his son, or, begrudgingly, the mail-carrier herself. Lindwen of Aeluin somehow always found her rather than the other way around, and invited her to supper whether or not Lindwen was expecting or wanted to send anything. Ridhimsîr, Captain of the Gap, kept trying to persuade her that they could teach her to project her voice. And Princess Lalwen wrote a long letter to Lord Cīrdan every decade like clockwork—Celechwes only carried it every third letter or so, but when she did, it was a good reason to return south and visit her mother. For a week or two, until the open road called her once more.
But when her heart developed favorites, it was these: the valiant prince of Dor-lómin who always ran down the steps of his tower to fetch his own missives, be they frivolous or deathly-urgent, who smiled with determination even on those days he didn’t smile with natural cheer; and the tall lord of Himring, tragically stern for one so bright-haired and fair, yet impossibly spirited for one once chained by the Enemy, who only seemed to smile at letters from his valiant cousin (and oh how it lit up his face).
(They wrote rather a lot of letters to one another.)