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If Celegorm tries very hard, he can imagine this whole thing is a nice camping trip. Except the trees of Doriath take him out from his immersion from how unwelcoming they feel at times. Oh, and the distant howls and other menacing sounds he sometimes hears when he scouts ahead— Those snap him right out of it. Maybe Celegorm is a bit paranoid (a hereditary trait of his father's, he's sure), and even though the trees seem to like Eluréd and Elurín well enough, it's only one kinslayer and two kids against whatever dark thing the Doom wants to throw at the aforementioned kinslayer. He can't be blamed for jumping at every snap of a branch or crunch of dried leaves. Once, Elurín sneezed and sent Celegorm up a tree, drawing his bow on the source of the noise until he realized who he was aiming at. The twins had found his overreaction amusing back then, unaware of how close Celegorm had been to loosing that arrow.
Then again, if Eluréd and Elurín had any semblance of self-preservation, they would have never followed after Celegorm. It's ironic how once he failed to hold the twins' grandmother captive and now he can't seem to shake Lúthien's descendants off his back. They are a demanding pair, asking for their three meals a day, their due entertainment and rest. Lots of rest, lest they fall ill, they had warned and Celegorm, the ignorant idiot, hadn't heeded them. So far they hadn't been any sign of this 'illness' the children claimed. The first few days, he had pushed their pace hard, forgetting he was dragging two elflings with him instead of his battle-hardened followers.
Sure enough, when Celegorm was starting to think that the twins had overstated their needs, one brat hadn't gotten up one day and refused any food and water. His twin had soon fallen prey to the same fell enchantment and both were hot to the touch. Celegorm had never known himself to be prone to fussing (that was more up to his two older brothers' alley) but there he was, hovering over the children, shoving this and that remedy of pungent herbs in hopes it would rid the sickness. Eluréd and Elurín would sometimes wake from their feverish dreams to Tree-bright eyes fixed on them from the gloom of their temporary shelter.
"Celeg," Elurín whined, "you're being creepy."
"You're sleeping too much," he groused, reaching for a cloth to wipe their clammy faces at which he was rewarded with identical grumbles. Celegorm doesn't say their fully closed eyes in rest made him anxious enough he'd kept constant watch over them. After he'd convinced them to drink and eat some, the brats fell into fitful sleep. Eluréd clung to Celegorm's hand at some point, rooting the elf to the spot, but it seemed to bring him a measure of peace in whatever dark dreams he was having, so Celegorm allowed it.
Eventually, the twins beat back the illness. Crisis averted since Celegorm was halfway through climbing the tallest tree he had nearby, for better leverage to shout at the Powers. It had been days —a week, even— of watching over them and being useless to alleviate their discomfort. Celegorm told himself this was his paranoia speaking; that he had started this caretaker situationship with his hostages and that it counted as a Doomed deed. He had already committed to exchanging Dior's sons for a tacky jewel, and the Valar's terrible sense of humor would fit perfectly by cutting Celegorm's evil plan short.
Either way, no one would comment on the record time Celegorm set by slid back down the tree trunk when he heard the twins call for him. They endured his rough fussing for the entirety of a minute before batting Celegorm's hands away. The next thing that came out of their mouths was a demand for food other than the watery broth Celegorm had been feeding them. The wide grin on his face went unnoticed by Celegorm until well after he'd shot down a boar, dragged it back to camp and started skinning it. The twins, while groggy and sore, had come closer to the fire and watched as the hunter worked. Once they were sated with a filling meal, Elurín wasted no a moment to point out how creepy Celegorm was being by watching the twins unblinkingly with a grin. If his facial muscles hadn't been locked by the amount of time they stayed holding that expression, Celegorm's face would've dropped.
Instead, he played it off by ruffling the kid's hair. "This is my usual face."
"Your usual face is your constipated face." Elurín shoved his hand away with a pout.
Eluréd, meanwhile, settled back beside his twin. He looked at Celegorm sleepily. "Celeg was just happy we got better."
He gaped. "Am not!"
"Not even a little bit?"
"No!"
Elurín whispered into Eluréd's ear, knowing full well that Celegorm could hear him. "Maybe he's shy and doesn't want to say he was worried for us."
Eluréd shook his head. "He's just dumb."
Celegorm sputtered.
He was starting to keep track of the passage of time by which ailment struck the elflings. The winter he got them, he found out they were prone to 'colds' if he didn't take care of keeping them warm. When spring came by, they were nowhere near catching up to the Iathrim refugees with Eluréd and Elurín dragging their feet while complaining about the odd irritation that assailed them, their eyes red-rimmed and noses dripping. Summer with its heat and relentless Arien beating down on their backs quickly wore down the twins and made their pale skin burn. Autumn was wily in the wilderness they were traversing, often alternating between hot and freezing, sometimes with rain thrown into the mix. The grasslands became muddy, and having no cover from the terrain made Celegorm jumpy. There was real danger in being waylaid (or worse, being spotted by his brothers' scouts) and in exposing the twins to the cold and the rain.
There was no end in sight for his plight of keeping the twins in good enough health, it would seem. Come winter again, and he would need to worry about their supplies and keeping his pair of peredhil warm day and night. His mantle had been split to make a cape of sorts for each twin, and he had stacked pelts on top of them but with no needle and thread, and a more skilled hand in stitching, it had been a crude fix to their needs.
Gritting his teeth, Celegorm decided to seek out the less hairy of the mortal races he knew of. They had avoided any settlements so far, but even Celegorm could see that what they had on their backs after fleeing Menegroth and what the earth provided could only take them so far.
The Secondborn they found closest were humble foragers and hunters. Celegorm stuck out as a sore thumb, not only for the difference of races, but his sparse knowledge of their language and his obvious indisposition to interact more than necessary. Eluréd and Elurín, however, wormed their way into the community effortlessly.
While the Men had little in the way of provisions they could spare, they allowed the odd trio of elf and young peredhil to build their winter shelter within their grounds. Celegorm let the twins talk his share, given they wore their new fur coats and boots when they went out.
Celegorm alternated between putting together their shelter and hunting to trade game for other necessities. Eluréd and Elurín would come and go, flashes of silver hair and toothy grins caught in the corner of his eye. At one point, he'd sat back on his haunches while watching the fire and contemplated how this 'camping trip' had begun to resemble that worry-free period of his youth.
Arien began shortening her journeys across the sky, little by little. Dead leaves began to pile up on the ground, to the children's delight. The twins and their playmates had invented all sorts of use for the dried leaves, from piling them up to cushion their jumps to sticking them into their hair or clothes to see who was able to keep the most leaves on. Celegorm was a common target for the kids to stick leaves on. He would also play the leaf-monster that would chase them if they got too annoying or simply because he felt like terrorizing them.
Celegorm wondered if he hadn't been too careless to let the twins go unchecked. On one hand, he couldn't care less of what they told the townsfolk of him; on the other, he wondered why they hadn't tried to stab him in his sleep. While Celegorm was their only company and provider, he could understand the twins' interest in keeping in his good graces, but he wasn't blind to the opportunity he had given them. Still, the days had gone by, and no knife had come to slit his throat; he'd come back to the settlement from foraging and found Eluréd and Elurín waiting for him at their camp, a fire already started. They reminded him of tiny Telperinquar as they would tell him what they had been up to in his absence. Their minds were full of games and other unimportant things, not the dreadful schemes that roiled in Celegorm's own. The Oath never rested, after all. He hissed this stop was only until the roads became safer to travel and shoved it to the back of his mind like he did many times before. The twins turned to stare at him, although Celegorm had been certain he had not said anything aloud, and kept on with his tasks. If he split the pheasant's spine with more force than necessary, neither Eluréd nor Elurín commented on it.
The next time he made to leave, the twins latched onto his cape, prattling about wanting to find a plant of some kind. Celegorm had passable knowledge on what grew in Beleriand, but the description of the gourd-like fruit didn't ring any bells and he'd seen nothing of the like in his regular trips.
"Has it occurred to you that they're nothing more than these people's delusion?" Celegorm ground out as he resisted the two elflings pulled him towards the woodland in vain. He'd heard of Men's minds being beset by some sort of fog with age, making their memories muddled.
"Granny said they cooked great feasts with this 'squash' thing when she was as little as us."
"She just hasn't seen any grow since the Great Flame," Elurín explained.
Celegorm winced. "Nothing has grown back right, since," he said under his breath, but the twins paid him no heed.
"That's why we have to find some! Please, Celeg? Out in the wild, you can find anything." Eluréd looked up at him with his eyes wide in plea.
"Granny probably won't see next autumn," Elurín added quietly.
What a headache. This is what he gets for letting the twins endear themselves to their lodgers. He could send them back (they had rarely disobeyed him), but having grown up with many younger brothers, he knew without a shadow of a doubt that the elflings would try to go on their own anyways.
"Fine. But," he started, shaking their grabby hands from his sleeves and wagging a finger at them like he did when giving Huan instructions, "you stay where I can see you, and we return before it is dark whether we have found this dumb fruit or not."
The children squealed their assent and ran ahead like a pair of squirrels. Celegorm cursed and sprinted after them. The people from the settlement had seldom ventured as far as they did now. It was no great forest, but the further they explored the tighter together the trees grew and stretched towards the sky. More than once did Celegorm had to pull one of the twins away from a thorny or poisonous shrub they attempted to search for the mysterious squash fruit. On their way, Eluréd and Elurín had filled their pockets, one with nuts and the other with berries. Nowadays, they had needed to check with their kinslayer of a caretaker if they had the edible kinds less and less, but the last few varieties the twins showed to him became stranger and unknown to Celegorm.
This should have been a sign to turn back, but the twins argued it was not yet dark and if they had been finding new plants to them that meant that the elusive squash could be growing nearby. Celegorm could only pinch at his nose. His memory did not fail him that he had never taught them to use their words so. If Celegorm and Curufin had coerced Nargothrond's people to forsake their king, Celegorm thought that Eluréd and Elurín could do worse. Or better, depending on which side one viewed it.
It is the very next moment that he knew something was wrong. A veil of darkness fell around him, all sounds of wildlife vanished and then became a loud pounding in his ears. His surroundings, too, had become strange. His feet no longer on underbrush, but rather soft earth and all around him was overgrown with green shoots. Eluréd and Elurín, who had been waving at him to keep up not far away, were nowhere in sight. Panic shot through him.
A great rumble started then, not unlike that of a landslide, approaching his position rapidly. The ground shook, and despite not seeing either hill or cliff nearby, Celegorm took to a run away from the sounds of the quake.
"Brats! Where are you?!" he shouted, frantically looking for them.
"Celeg?"
"We're here!"
Relief was immediate, though Celegorm soon realized their voices had come from far above him, and loud as thunder streaking across the skies. He whirled around, searching for the twins up in the void-like sky despite the impossibility of the situation.
Elurín's face showed itself from above. Several times larger than Celegorm had known it to be. His mouth hung open.
"Eluréd, he's here!"
Another gigantic face appeared beside its twin's. Eluréd gasped. "Why is he so small?"
Celegorm, whose family had been frequent visitors to the domains of Aulë and Oromë, in his case, and well used to the strange ways that the Song would take shape there when it struck their whim, had never experienced something as surreal as this. He had shrunk as small as a lesser thrush. The surroundings were not the ones changed, but himself.
Right. This was either a terrible prank by the Powers left behind, or the workings of Morgoth's servants. Neither appealed to the Fëanorion, but if it had been the first, then at least it had spared Eluréd and Elurín. Celegorm lost not another moment and climbed up Eluréd's pant leg like an ant, then found his way into the child's coat pocket with the nuts they'd collected.
"What are you waiting for?" he said as if it was an usual thing to find oneself becoming pocket-sized. He pointed forward. "You have to make it back."
The twins exchanged bewildered looks, then took a few steps ahead. A shudder ran through Celegorm as they reached the invisible boundary. This felt like—
"We can't leave from this side," Elurín said, his hand comming up to press against thin air and recoiling at the sensation. "Ew."
Eluréd stared at the path they came from, now denied to them. "How are we getting back, Celeg?" he asked in a small voice.
"Seriously," Celegorm snapped from his perch. "Find a way around it. Every shield has a weak point, somewhere it cannot defend as thoroughly."
"But— we're not big and strong and fast like you. We won't be able to find a way out in time."
"I'm not of any use now," he grumbled, crossing his arms. "And I am not going to be saving your skin forever. Grow a damn spine, for once. Look around you, listen to the forest. This is like a game; you just need to figure out how to beat it."
He saw the twins' lips tremble, but to their credit they didn't cry. Eluréd and Elurín were not only talkative with him and the townsfolk, but also to the forests and their creatures. Celegorm had long learned the languages of beasts from Oromë, but to listen and speak to trees had come naturally to the twins. He was confident they would find their way if they put their minds into it.
The twins did as told, closing their eyes as they tried to make sense of the words whispered by the nature around them. Soon, they started towards another direction, holding hands. If Celegorm was smug about them adapting to the situation, they did not find out then.
The forest guided the twins' steps. Through the deep violet shrubs, around the cluster of petrified wood, across the muddy remains of a spring. The uncertainty bleeds out of them with each new scenery they encounter. Their awed voices drift between leaves and stone; Celegorm finds out that even the fluttering of wings of a hundred butterflies is too loud for his ears now. They round yet another thicket when they find it.
"Celeg, look!"
There, resting in the middle of the clearing they'd come across, lay what Celegorm had heard the twins describe as a 'squash'. A round, ridged fruit, large enough to fit snugly between the loop of the twins' joined arms.
"Huh."
"Should we take it back? It's just sitting there."
"I don't know…"
Celegorm felt the vibration through the air before the twins do, but can't warn them in time. The trees come alive, he had no other way to describe the chaos that unfolds, clinging for dear life to the rim of the pocket as Eluréd tumbles on his back along with his brother, the roots near their feet having pulled right under them. Rage and fear flare in him, and he thought through the blaze that Eru Ilúvatar could shove a thick stick up his hallowed, shiny ass if the fates kept fucking things up for Eluréd and Elurín.
"Don't you dare touch them." Celegorm didn't care he was barely five berries tall, he wasn't letting these moving trees have the twins. Woodpeckers were a force to be reckoned with, at least against trees. He sprang out of the pocket, brandishing his hatchet at the slowly approaching branch-hand. "I'll carve you a new hole if you do!"
He threw his axe with as much force as he could muster and it lodged into the creature's bark. That halted its movements, though it did not seem like the tiny axe did any significant damage. Eluréd hastily grabbed the miniature Fëanorion and kept him close to his chest as he stumbled to his feet. Elurín threw an arm in front of his twin, standing protectively as they stared up at the towering figure.
"Let me at them!" Celegorm screeched like a fëar possessed, squirming in Eluréd's hands. "I'll show them they can't mess with us! I'm going to set you and your stupid squash on fire, you hear?!"
"Mister!" the twins gasped in horror.
"He doesn't mean it, s-sir." Eluréd spoke to the moving tree while trying to hide the tiny, rabid elf in his pocket.
Elurín winced at the new wave of insults that came from Celegorm when he tried to muffle him by cupping his hands around him. He looked back at the creature with pleading eyes. "We did not mean to bother you and your forest either. We're sorry."
A low rumble came as an answer. The twins took a step back in fright. The sound continued, growing louder then thinning into a buzz like the flapping of insect wings. It kept changing, almost rhythmically, like the sway of leaves in the wind and the crackle of branches rubbing together. Slowly, after the initial terror, the elflings began to catch the voice coming from the creature.
"… sprouts, sprouts you are. Why do you have a sprite of fire with you?"
"This is…" They exchanged a look. "… our guardian. Can you help him go back to normal?"
The answering creak held a note of doubt. "I cannot undo a work that is not mine." The creature's motions were paused, but even it reacted rather quickly to the devastated expressions of the elflings. It added, "but beyond these soils, the boughs can cast their shadow no further."
"If we go outside, he'll get fixed?"
The creature had barely gotten a noise out when the other elfling spoke up, "can you please help us find the way out? We were sure the forest told us to come here, but…"
"Come hither, they whisper," it rumbled, its body of bark and roots turning away from the center of the clearing. The earth shook as it made way back towards the treeline. "Listen not to every voice, sprouts. There is moist soil here, yet not fit for you to set root; they do not know. They are young as you are, and mischief is what they tend to lean on."
Eluréd and Elurín hurried to keep apace with the creature's long stride. Celegorm's squeak of protest fell on deaf ears. After what seemed to be hours following the moving tree-person, they spied the russet tones of the setting sun ahead of them.
The creature slowed its movements until it stopped altogether, then waved at the children with a thick branch. "Go, sprouts. Do not keep the fire sprite so close it burns you."
The twins grinned up at it. "It's fine! His fire doesn't hurt us," one quipped while the other said, "Thank you, sir!"
A beat passed, then two. The creature stirred, then swayed its other branch-limb towards the elflings. "The young ones wished for you to have this. An apology for playing that trick on you."
It was the large squash that was offered to them. Eluréd and Elurín took it between both of them, dumbstruck. As they turned to thank the creature again, it was gone as if swallowed by the gloom of the forest at sundown.
Celegorm fell out of Eluréd's pocket in his attempt to avoid being squished between the fruit and the elfling. The fall was much shorter than expected, and Celegorm once more found himself with his face buried on the ground with the twins hovering over him. Normal sized twins.
"What in Manwë's huge nose was that about?"