Author's note:

Hi everyone, just a note to let you know that the sequel to this fic has been posted. You can find it in my profile. It is called Canticle of the Haunted. Teaser is below.

Celeborn generally preferred to travel through the treetops, however, summer had only just come to Nan-Tathren and so today he had found himself yearning for the warmth of the soil beneath his bare feet. His boots had fallen to pieces years ago, as had his shirt, which was why he now went clothed only in a pair of long buckskin leggings.

Nature had reclaimed the aspects of Doriathrin luxury that had marked his body. Summers in the south of Beleriand were far hotter than those of Doriath proper and the intensity of the sun had tanned his skin to a deep bronze and bleached his silver hair until it was nearly white. His entire physique had undergone some metamorphosis of the wild and he was leaner than he ever recalled being, not the leanness of starvation, but that which resulted from a diet of fish and deer meat, roots and nuts. The bulk of his muscles, so used to battle and the sparring ring, had lessened and lengthened to the sinewy lankiness needed for days filled with the certainty of manual labor and the possibility of an empty stomach.

Galadriel too had changed. She was slimmer now than she had ever been before, her already small breasts having nearly disappeared, her once carefully maintained nails now short and chipped, her golden hair a wild tangle of shimmering light. She had the unfortunate propensity to turn pink rather than brown, despite her lineage of Telerin mariners, and yet after a few years even her skin had begun to darken.

It worried him sometimes, not the physical changes she had undergone, for he would have thought her beautiful no matter how she appeared, but what worried him was the way that he sometimes saw her looking at herself, the way she rubbed the pad of her thumb over her short nails, or stared preoccupied at her work-worn knuckles and the sun-darkening of her skin, the way she traced lines between freckles as if she were charting constellations, or sometimes ran a hand over the nearly non-existent curve of a breast before giving him a furtive glance, one she doubtlessly hoped he did not see, as if she were trying to discern whether or not he was put off by the changes in her body. But of course he had seen, nothing about his wife escaped his notice, most particularly her thoughts. She tried to hide a great many of them from him, or to temper them at least, but even if he could not discern their exact nature, he still felt the soft pressure of them in his mind, like seeds taking root.