Apple Pips
There was no home after Sirion: no gentle garden of fruit trees, no guarding walls, no shutters bolted against the dark. Maedhros’ flag hung ragged over huddled tents, stubborn red fading in the wild woods, a new tear in the cloth each time they broke camp. Tangled treelimbs gave shelter and choked out the stars. Fires flared briefly and were stamped out. At midnight the twins were hoisted onto horseback, wide-awake captives in nightclothes and blankets, held close to Maglor’s chest as they outran Morgoth’s searching hands.
Bedtime after bedtime Elros threatened to run away. There was nowhere to run.
At their first camp they left behind a crab-apple tree. A small, twisted thing, branches reaching out for lost friends, unhappy roots pushing out of mossy earth; the fruits would be small and sour, Maglor said, good only for preserves. Elros cared not. He climbed it every day, barefoot-balancing on wobbly branches, bark rough under tender toes. Keen-eyed guards forbade him climbing taller trees, but the crab-apple was his: he hauled his small body skyward, perched in the crown of branches like a throne. Scraps of sunlight coaxed tightcurled leafbuds from bare twigs. Elrond counted the days, waiting for blossom.
The tree burned, the night they left. Orcs found the tents uprooted, the Elves escaped, and set their torches to the trees. Through left-behind shadows Elros saw the blaze. He howled and kicked and pummelled Maglor’s breastplate, yelling stop! Stop, we have to save it!, while horses galloped and arrows flew and new leaves shrivelled and charred. Maglor rode one-handed, gripping Elros tight, soothing words useless to the boy whose home he burned.
“This land is dying,” he said, in the grey morning of a camp with no apple trees. “Nowhere is safe long. You must be each other’s home.”
Still Elros loved – skittering lizards, hollow-tree hideaways, secret waterfalls – and wept over every Left Behind. Clinging to Elrond could not steady him, not when the slow death of Beleriand crawled behind them inch by inch. In Elros’ nightmares the animals fled, the trees wrenched free their roots, and floodwater shattered the earth underfoot.
“Are we to die running?” he whispered, shivering under Elrond’s blanket. Elbows and knees knocked together, growing too fast to fit. Training swords waited, unready, beside the bed. Anything could happen in darkness.
Elrond grasped his hand. “Perhaps our task is only to save what we can.”
They kept whatever fit their pockets. Apple pips, a furious kitten, a three-legged lizard. The lizard scuttled quietly into death; the kitten grew into a snarling wildcat, beheading Morgoth's bats, buried in a warrior's grave; the pips hid in Elros' pocket, waiting for earth they could grow in.
He planted them in Numenor, in a blanket of soft new earth, overlooked by the shining stones of a home he never need lose. Sturdy garden walls sheltered his fragile saplings. Elros watched their leaves unfurl and their first blossoms swell into tart red apples.
King Tar-Minyatur never saw his orchard die.
500 words | @kidnapfamweek
