Title: Under a Storm of Stars
Fandom: Silmarillion
Challenge: Storm
Other prompt: Mini-Wrimo Day 30 Picture prompt: the ocean-end of a glacier in sunlight.
Rating: G
Length: 200
Content notes: N/A
Author notes: Thanks go to Zhie, Morgynleri & Runa for encouragement & sanity-checking.
Summary: Light on the Helcaraxë



Under only stars, the Helcaraxë had been beautiful, with a cold and distant grandeur, all shades of grey. In sunlight the Ice was astonishing. All the colors of water shimmering in towers and slabs and unfathomable crevasses, blues and greens and violets edged and sheened and picked out in white and crystal. It dazzled, glittered, blinded those who looked too long, and was all the more terrifying for being so very beautiful and bright. Eyes would overwhelm other, more useful senses -- hearing the quiet groan before the crack!, feeling the faintest trembles of thinner ice, precursors of ice-quakes and avalanches.

Fortunately, there was no need to know these things among other than the tiny number of persons who studied the Ice. Unlike those who had required that awareness moment to moment, crossing that expanse in the dark of sky-obscuring cloud, wind-whipped snow, storms of ice. For them, when the air cleared and the wind stilled, the clouds rolling back or wisping away, the sky filled with a storm of stars, glorious and pitiless, as unreachable as Ennor, it seemed, in the long march where the landscape did not change, until of a sudden it upended itself; yet steady, reliable guides.