Sunstar By Ella Broughton Sarkis

She had never met him, and had never seen him. Her family lived in his old house. Frodo had been Sam's greatest companion - closer in his heart than her mother, she reckoned. Frodo was long gone.

Tonight was gloriously beautiful, even for a Shire summer night, because tonight was High Summer. Tonight was Midsummer's Eve! The stars glinted through the deep waters of heaven like tiny distant gems sitting in the sky. The air was warm, the breeze was cool, and the lawngrass was dry. Elanor had been lying outside with her brothers and sisters. As day had faded and evening risen, everything quietened and, by the time the moon had climbed to the tops of the trees, even her oldest little brother had gone to bed. Now Elanor was alone, and the breeze whispered to her through the gooseberry thorns. A chill ran along her bare arms. She rolled herself up in a blanket and kept watching the stars. Above her head, they played parts in patterns and pictures. They looked as roughly plated as wildflowers. Sam had sewn them together for her, and she recited their names in her head. If you knew the names of the stars, if you knew what they were laid out for, you had them under you spell.

Valacirca, Helluin, Menelmacar, Wilwarin, Carnil & Luinil, Nenar & Lumbar, Anarrima, - Elanor thought she saw a movement in the hawthorn at the hedge.. A hobbit-lad.

He was fairly plain, it had to be admitted, with soft brown curls on his head and toes like the older hobbits. He was only in his tweens as her father called it, the irresponsible late teens and twenties before thirty-three (a hobbit's coming-of-age). Elanor herself was nineteen, and her daddy was already teasing her, telling her how coquettish and petulant she was becoming. She didn't mind it, because secretly she knew that Mr Gamgee rathered liked impish children. (Rosie Cotton, on the other hand, most definitely did not). The lad was, as she had already noticed, rather plain, but he had eyes brighter than Luinil that gleamed in the moonlight. She could only gaze at him as he ambled towards her, smiling amiably, apparently oblivious to her gape-jawed fish-mouthed bare-toothed wonder.

"Catching flies?," he asked with the familiar teasing tone that her father sometimes employed.

With gentle white fingers, he pressed her mouth shut and laughed at her, lying down beside her on his back. He admired the stars. She admired him. What high, elvish cheekbones he had, she mused to herself; rather like brightly glowing moon-crescents. And what dark eyelashes; long fluttering shadows on his pale skin. His fingers had been icy-cold on her nose. He made her tingle.

"What are you staring at?" he whispered, still watching the stars. He spoke so gently, it was as if he didn't want to disturb the sky. In spite of the cold, she blushed. "Nothing," she said, turning her face up at the dark sky without moving her eyes. After a moment, he turned again, startling her with those delightful blue eyes, and added, "You're still at it."

He smiled and so she laughed. At first she was embarrassed, but after a moment, he laughed with her, and she felt better. Elanor cosied into him, feeling friendly. He put his arm around her shoulders. His body was still cold, but he flickered with warmth occasionally, like a white candle in the blue breeze.

Then he spoke to her about the stars; and of Elbereth Gilthoniel, the Queen of Stars; she who first lit the night. "She who taught the torches to burn bright," he said proudly, and then he sang a song in elvish. His voice was soft, and it swelled secretively on the night air, in a strange harmony with the soughing elders on the meadow. Elanor began to drift to sleep. The lad's fingers played in her fair hair with the lightness of dream. "And that there," he said finally, almost to himself, "is Helluin, the star that never strays. Fixed, it is, firmer than the sun and stronger than the seasons. The star that won't wander more."

A dark cloud came over the moon, and the lawn was plunged into darkness. The wind suddenly threw a gust down and yanked the dreamy girl awake. Her companion had disappeared in a breath, and she couldn't see a thing. There were no lights in the house, and the empty wind bodied and blustered through the gooseberry thorns.

The cloud pulled away and the garden was flooded with soft moonlight again. The wind pulled away.

"El?," came a voice from within the house "Dad," she said, smiling. She was tangled up in the blanket. "What are you doing out here?"

He didn't answer her, and instead surveyed his garden, from hawthorn hedge over lillies, roses, rue and bleeding hearts, over the hill into the shadow of the farther fields, familiar to him though he could barely discern them. The landscape came easily to his eyes, because he could give it body from memory.

"Daddy?"

His gaze settled on Elanor and he let go his frown. "Thought I heard a voice, Sun-star," he said, and after a pause, smiled to himself. "Come on now," he said to her, offering his hand, "it's midnight. We don't want your sleepy head to be too heavy to lift off the pillow tomorrow, do we?"

Slowly, with the gait of a sleepy child, her father walked back into the dark doorway and down the corridor to bed. The moonlight had slipped unkindly under his eyes in the shape of grey waning moons. She picked herself up and folded the blanket. Taking one more look at the starry heavens from the doorarch, one star caught her eye. It had a cheeky - even fierce - glint.

"I wish I may, I wish I might," she murmured to herself, still flame-warm inside from Mr. Helluin's warm, cold, dappled touch.