Title: Unclouded Thought
Fandom: Silmarillion
Challenge: Cloud
Rating: G
Length: 200
Content notes: N/A
Author notes: Thanks go to Morgynleri & Runa for encouragement & sanity-checking. Photo taken by me.
Summary: Elrond contemplates the nature of despair, and of hope



Despair was of the Enemy. Elrond knew that, blood and bone and breath. Of the Marring, and as needful to be fought as any looming engine of malice and destruction. And it could be fought: there were techniques they had learned and developed in the long years of the war. Acts of Making, of Music, of ways of thought, doing, being. Very simple things, some of them: remembering plush fur and the vibrating purr of a particular cat on a particular day; the uplift of light breaking through clouds; Clean, cool water on a hot afternoon. The glint of sunlight making gold ribbons in mist and dusty air.

Maglor and Maedhros had taught him those earliest, simplest things. They'd also taught him that assessing the Enemy's strength as too great for one's current resources, when that assessment was arrived at with facts of numbers, terrain, weather, weaponry, state of mind and stamina and so forth of all concerned, was sense, information to be used, not itself an act or admission of despair. Despair lay in not doing anything about it.

Hope was defiance. Holding on or letting go at need. Knowing day will come, whether or not you see it.

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