Lapsus Memoriae [Rávamë's Bane: Book 1]

Part III : Chapter 16 ~ Élanor

When I woke — properly this time — I felt better than I had in weeks. 

Don't get me wrong. I still ached like hell, and there was a thorn in my side you could have pitched a tent with. But even so, it was still a massive improvement on how I'd felt before I'd gone under.

I was in a bed for starters; I knew that before I'd even moved. There was a soft, feather pillow propping my head and back up to what was almost a sitting position, and warm, satiny covers drawn up to my shoulders. A little shift of my limbs also revealed that I wasn't in my close-fitting rinding greens anymore, but something silky and wonderfully comfy...

Someone had redressed me.

My eyes popped open, and I instantly regretted it. Unfiltered, early morning sunlight assaulted me square in the face. I groaned as my retinas were pan-fried in my head, lifting my heavy arms up to shield my face and rolling over out of path of the beam. My limbs creaked and ached from lack of use, and I felt my muscles shake with the strain of trying to support my weight. Just how long had I been out for?

And... where exactly was I now?

I uncovered my face and slowly took in the world around me, sans the painful beam of light to the eyeballs. I was lying in a white, silk covered bed the size of a small yacht, sitting in a large room the shape of a half moon — a room which I could only describe as something you might see on a Midsummer Night's Dream set design. 

Absolutely everything was white. The floors, the ceiling, the canopy over my bed, even the flowers sitting in a vase on my bedside table. The furniture was all made of a silvery, pale grey wood that had been carved and polished into simple elegance. Everything in that room looked too perfect to be real. Even the woman sitting beside my bed in a white chair was decked out in a splendid white lace gown...

Finally my brain caught up with what I was seeing.

I did an honest to goodness double take, my neck muscles protesting furiously.

Nope, I hadn't been imagining it. There, sitting serenely in a high-backed chair beside my bed, was a woman. An elven woman. She was dressed in an elegant, floor length gown, with sleeves so long they almost covered her fingers. A book was open in her lap, and she was humming a quiet tune under her breath as she read, the sound effortlessly lovely. Something silver and bright as a tiny star glinted on her left index finger as she turned a page.

If that wasn't enough of a screaming hint as to who she was, the luminous, silver-gold shimmer of her waist length hair definitely was.

My voice stuck in my throat as I tried to force words past my awed shock. 

"Um... hi?" I said wittily, my voice coming hoarse, and I could almost hear the sound of Tink repeatedly slamming her head against a wall somewhere in the depths of my mind.

Galadriel, the Lady of the Golden Wood — the keeper of Nenya, one of the three uncorrupted rings of power, and among one of the oldest beings in Middle Earth — raised her head from the book in her lap, and her crystal blue gaze met mine. The smile she presented me with could have lit up a football stadium, and dazzled the blindest of the blind.

"Hello, Élanor."

In that same way that Aragorn was ten times more intimidating with a voice to match his face, Lady Galadriel went from being breathtakingly beautiful to simply overwhelming when she spoke. Her voice was soft and gentle, yet edged with near tangible strength all at the same time. It did absolutely nothing to lessen the near mind-boggling effect of her presence. 

Looking back, there wasn't a specific thing I could pick out as being individually lovely about her. She was beautiful as all elves were, with absolutely luminous blonde hair reaching down to her hips, pale skin, and very, very tall — even when she was seated. But somehow it was as if none of that was really relevant. It was as if her external appearance had nothing to do with what really made her presence so overpowering. There was something about her quietly certain expression, the way she held herself, and the weight of ages behind her eyes. It was as if nature itself had deliberately taken every anti-female stereotype in existence and — while flipping the bird at misogynists everywhere — had created something spectacularly beautiful, powerful, and unashamedly feminine out of them all.