[Year 1139. Fourth Year of the March. Late Summer]
[Selas POV]
After the battle, the tradition began by accident, like most things that actually work.
We'd stopped longer than usual—three days instead of one—because half the wagons needed repairs and Eol's forge was running around the clock. The warriors had nothing to do except drill, and they'd been drilling for four years straight.
They were getting twitchy. Bored in the way that turns dangerous.
"Let them fight," Vertalas said at evening council. "Supervised, two people in a marked circle, clear rules."
"They're going to hurt each other." Thoron's voice carried the weariness of someone who'd seen too many stupid injuries.
"They'll hurt each other worse if we don't give them somewhere to put it." Vertalas didn't back down. "I've broken up three real fights this week. Not training—real. They need an outlet before someone ends up dead over whose turn it was to haul water."
I'd seen it too. The tension had been building for months—the endless march wearing on everyone differently. Some went quiet, retreating into themselves. Others went the opposite direction, looking for any excuse to swing at something.
"A circle," I said slowly, working through it. "Stones marking the boundary and no weapons. You win by submission or knockout."
Vertalas nodded. "Exactly."
"No." Maethor's voice cut clean through the tent. "We will not make sport of hurting our own."
A few of the elders shifted, murmurs of agreement moving along the table. Not loud. But firm.
"We are Quendi," Maethor continued. "Not beasts. This march has taken enough from us without turning violence into habit."
"And if someone won't submit?" another elder asked from the same side of the table. "If they won't stay down?"
Vertalas met their gaze without flinching. "Then it ends when it's settled. Better bruises in the open than a blade between ribs in the dark."
The murmurs returned—uneasy, disapproving. A line had formed, and everyone could feel it.
I let the silence stretch. Long enough for the argument to exhaust itself.
"This isn't a whim," I said, my voice steady. "And it isn't just entertainment. It's a necessity." I looked to the Elders, searching their eyes for understanding.
"People need a way to blow off steam. Either we give them that opportunity—or they'll create one themselves. And if they do, the consequences won't be good."
Maethor's jaw tightened. "You seriously approve of this?"
"I believe in the idea that solves the problem we already have." I held his gaze. "Better a fire we build inside a ring of stones than one that gets loose and burns everything around us."
I turned to Vertalas. "You set the rules and you make sure they're followed. The moment control slips, it ends."
Maethor opened his mouth again.
"Enough." I cut him off. "As Chief, I decide."
Vertalas inclined his head. "I'll handle it."
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Next day. The Circle]
[Maethor POV]
They called it the Circle.
Twenty feet of packed earth marked by stones, the crowd pressed tight around it as if it were a rite, or a spectacle. I hadn't decided which.
I stood apart from the main gathering, arms folded, watching with the disapproval I had earned the right to carry.
One of the Awakened at Cuiviénen. One of the Thirty-Three Elders of the Avari. Ancient enough to remember the first days by the waters of the lake—when we learned the world with words, not with fists.
And I had to watch as two young Lindar circled each other inside the ring—barely more than boys, moving with the nervous energy of people who'd trained to hurt but never done it for real. One got the other's arm twisted behind his back.
"Submit!"
The trapped one slapped the ground. It was over.
Applause scattered through the crowd. Hesitant at first, then growing when no blood appeared.
This is what we've become, I thought. Cheering while our children beat each other in the dirt.
The second bout moved faster. A veteran against a young fool who thought quick feet could overcome experience. It couldn't. The older warrior put him down in three moves, not unkindly, but thoroughly.
More cheers. Louder now.
By the third bout, people were shouting advice. By the fifth, I could see tokens changing hands—knife beads, carved bits of bone, anything that could stand in for a wager.
Wagering on violence. Between our own people.
I should have walked away. Should have gone to Selas with another formal objection that he would hear, consider, and politely ignore.
Instead, I watched.
Selas stood across the Circle from me, that bold scout beside him - Celestia. She looked skeptical.
Good.
At least someone else saw the madness in this.
But then he said something to her, and her expression changed. Shifted from doubt to something like reluctant understanding.
I followed her gaze. Not to the fighters—to the crowd.
They were… different. The tension that had been coiling tighter for months, the snapped tempers and petty fights and dangerous silences—it wasn't there. People who'd been avoiding each other stood shoulder to shoulder, shouting for the same fighter. Rivals from different clans slapped each other's backs when a bout ended well.
A Lindar woman and a Tatyar man entered the ring. Old grudge, by the way they looked at each other. The kind that festered when people lived too close for too long.
They fought hard. But clean— no cheap shots and hatred beyond what the Circle could contain.
The woman won. Barely.
They helped each other up afterward and clasped arms. The Noldo said something that made her laugh.
When did they last speak without snarling?
I didn't like this. It offended something deep in me—some memory of how the Quendi were supposed to be. Graceful and peaceful. Above this kind of crude physicality.
But we weren't those Quendi anymore.
The Chief caught my eye across the Circle. Nodded once, acknowledging my presence.
I didn't nod back. Let him see my disapproval.
But I didn't leave, either.
The Circle continued that day. And the next. At nearly every stop after that.
I kept watching. Kept disapproving.
And kept noticing that the fights outside the Circle—the real ones, the dangerous ones—had almost stopped entirely.
I hated that it worked.
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Year 1139. Autumn]
[Amalaë POV]
Amalaë had never expected to become someone who mattered.
Back at Cuiviénen, she'd been a singer—one voice among many in evening choruses, nothing special, nothing memorable. She'd followed Selas at the Sundering because her parents had, not because she believed in anything he said.
Belief came later. Crept up on her somewhere between the second winter and the third summer, until one day she realized she couldn't imagine being anywhere else.
Now she sat in what they called the school wagon—one of the big carts converted into a classroom that moved with the column—surrounded by faces too young to remember anything but this.
"Today," she said, "we're going to learn about where we came from."
"The wagons?" one boy asked. He couldn't have been more than five.
Amalaë smiled. "Before the wagons. Before the march. Before any of us were born."
She pulled out the teaching stone—a flat rock worn smooth by handling, images scratched into its surface with careful precision. Crude compared to real art, but children didn't need beauty. They needed something they could touch.
"This is Cuiviénen." She pointed to the largest symbol, a wavy oval meant to represent water. "The Water of Awakening. Where all the Quendi—all the elves—first woke up. Where the stars first saw us, and we first saw them."
"Was it pretty?" A girl this time, hair braided with bits of colored thread.
"Very pretty." Amalaë traced the carved lines, remembering things she hadn't thought about in years. "The water was so clear you could see stars reflected in it, like looking at the sky twice. And the trees…"
She stopped.
Realized she was tearing up.
The girl with the braids was watching her with wide eyes. Amalaë blinked hard, twice.
"The trees were tall," she continued, voice only slightly unsteady. "Taller than anything we've seen since. And around them, the first Quendi built their homes. Learned to speak. Learned to sing."
"Learned to fight?" Another child, older, already wearing a wooden practice sword at his belt like the warriors did.
"No." Amalaë shook her head. "Fighting came later. After the bad things came."
"Orcs?"
"Orcs. And other things we don't talk about with children." She set down the teaching stone. "But the Quendi learned to fight because they had to."
She looked at their faces. Children of the march, every one of them. Born on the road. Knowing nothing of stable homes or familiar forests or a sky that didn't change every night.
The boy with the wooden sword was picking at a splinter on its handle. The girl with the braids had already forgotten her question and was whispering to her neighbor.
"Now," Amalaë said, "who wants to learn the counting song?"
Hands shot up. Voices clamored over each other.
Amalaë smiled and began to teach.
{ image: Amalaë }
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Year 1140. Spring]
[Celestia POV]
Five years on the march had taught me one crucial thing: scouts couldn't keep going on foot forever.
Not at the pace we needed—ranging ahead, circling back, doing it again and again without rest.
We needed speed. Something that would let us cover ground the way we had to—three valleys in a day instead of one, high ground reached before full dark instead of after dark.
I'd been thinking about it for months.
Now, finally, I'd found what we needed.
The herd grazed in a shallow valley, spread across the grass like scattered stones.
I pressed myself flat against the rise above them, breathing so shallow my chest barely moved.
Wild horses.
{ image: HORSES }
Smaller than the horse of Oromë himself. But their legs were built for distance, and their eyes never stopped moving.
If they could be caught. If they could be learned.
I withdrew as carefully as I'd approached, backing down the slope an inch at a time until I was sure the herd hadn't spotted me.
Later that day, I found Selas reviewing scout reports near the lead wagon.
"Wild horses," I said without preamble. "A herd. Two days northeast, maybe less."
His eyes sharpened immediately—that look he got when something clicked into place.
"How close did you get?"
"Close enough to count them. They're skittish but not aggressive." I chose my words carefully. "They don't see us as predators. Yet."
"What do you need?"
"Time and patience. A few people who can stay quiet for days without going crazy." I held his gaze. "We move at walking pace right now. Horses could change that. Scouts who can cover five times the ground in a day. Wagons that don't need people hauling them until their backs give out."
Selas was quiet for a long moment.
Then he smiled—not his planning smile, his real one.
"Show me."
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
The horses became part of the caravan.
Not all of them—the wild herd still ranged free. But a few of those had decided that elves on their backs weren't the worst thing that could happen.
Celestia sat astride one now—a young mare she'd started calling Swiftwind, though she wasn't sure the horse cared about names.
"How does it feel?" Selas called from the ground.
"Strange." Celestia adjusted her weight, trying to find the balance point that didn't make the mare's ears flatten. "Powerful. I can see so much farther from up here."
"That's the point." Selas gestured toward the horizon—flat and endless as always, but somehow less oppressive when you could see more of it.
Celestia nodded, already thinking through implications. "We'll need more riders. More horses willing to carry us."
"So find them and train them." Selas's smile had an edge of challenge to it. "You've gotten this far."
She would. She'd figure it out the same way she'd figured out the rest—patience and stubbornness and the slow building of trust that couldn't be rushed.
But there was something else. Something she'd noticed over the past weeks but hadn't mentioned to anyone.
Sometimes, when she was with Swiftwind, she felt the mare's mood shift before it showed. A prickle at the back of her neck before the ears went flat. A settling in her own chest when the horse relaxed, though nothing visible had changed.
It might have been imagination. Probably was.
She'd been spending too much time with one animal. Reading patterns that weren't there.
Swiftwind snorted and tossed her head. Celestia leaned forward and slid a gentle hand along the mare's neck, letting just a thread of her Light seep through her palm. She murmured something, and Swiftwind stilled.
{ image: Celestia }
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[Year 1143. Eighth Year of the March. Winter]
[Selas POV]
A harsh winter hit like a fist.
We had known winters before.
Cold nights and frost on the grass.
But never like this.
Never with wind that never stopped, never with cold that didn't merely settle—it hunted.
Wind screamed across the steppes with nothing to slow it down—no trees, no hills, nothing but flat empty grass that offered about as much shelter as a thought. Temperatures dropped until breath turned to ice before it left your mouth.
Snow—real snow, the first most Avari had ever seen—buried everything in white silence that swallowed sound and color and hope.
We huddled in wagons, wrapped in every scrap of fur and cloth we possessed, pressed together like animals because that's what we were. The horses clustered in groups, their shaggy winter coats the only thing keeping them alive. Fires burned constantly, eating through our wood supplies faster than anyone wanted to count.
Six days into the storm, we had our first death.
Thindil. An eldest Lindar, one of the few who'd actually been alive at Cuiviénen from the first Awakening. She went to sleep one night and simply… didn't wake up.
"The cold," Mireth said when I asked. Her face was gray, eyes hollow from too many nights without enough sleep. "Her hröa couldn't keep its heat. Light helps, but even it has limits—especially when the fëa is already loosening its hold."
I stood over Thindil's body—small, still, already cooling toward the temperature of the wagon around her. Another name to add to the list. Another family to sit with, to hold hands with, to pretend I had answers for.
"Can we do anything?" I asked. "Anything at all?"
Mireth hesitated. Bit her lip the way she did when she was about to say something she wasn't sure of.
"There's something I've been thinking about. With Light." She looked at her hands like they belonged to someone else. "If we could share it—not just push it into someone, but circulate it between people, keep it flowing—maybe we could keep each other warm. Body heat isn't enough, but Light…"
"How would that work?"
"I don't know yet." She met my eyes. "But I'm going to figure it out."
She did.
By the second week, we had what she called Warmth Circles—groups of Avari sitting together, hands joined, Light flowing between them in continuous loops. The technique was crude, exhausting, and had to be maintained consciously. But it worked. Temperatures inside the circles ran noticeably warmer than the air around them.
We lost three more before spring. But without the Warmth Circles, it would have been dozens.
Mireth didn't sleep for the first four days of teaching the technique. I had to order her to rest before she collapsed.
{ image: Mireth }
—•——•——•——•——•——•—
[End of Chapter 7.1]