#b2mem prompts

[spring-into-arda]

March 8 - Prompts

International Womens' Day! Create, comment on or recommend fanworks featuring women as main characters.

The optional weekly theme is: Community, Fun, First Times

If you want to share your responses to these prompts with us, you can tag us here on tumblr, or put them into our AO3 collection.

[balrogballs]

Best-boy Finarfin

today’s (well, yesterday’s) sketches and ficlet for @spring-into-arda B2MEM music prompt, featuring Finarfin and a bonus Baby Finfin. Prompt lyrics included “I’ll tend to the flame, you can worship the ashes”.

Sketches are very rough for this one, apologies, but I was on a train and even Michelangelo did not paint the Sistine Chapel sat inside a Great Western Railway stopping service.

When he was knee-high, Finarfin had been Baby Finfin. Best-boy Finfin, eats-his-vegetables Finfin, easy-bedtime Finfin. He was content with unsolvable equations, and if bedtime was bedtime, then fine. In a way, he has not stopped being Baby Finfin.

Baby Finfin never really had anyone to play with because he was a baby and everyone was much, much older than him, and sometimes he would sit sulkily at the window all day long, stubbornly counting out the seconds. Sometimes he would tire of that, and so he would stomp back inside and build himself a house of wooden blocks and tell himself that it was just as good as racing horses in the fields outside like the big boys did.

It is much the same today.

Finarfin the Penitent lives half-awake as always, uneasy and inbetween, the lonely god of an empty world. Ponds and shallow hills and bedroom-shrines, dusk and dogged determination. He commissions statues to be carved from the steadiest stones and tells himself they are likenesses. In the face of loss he tells himself there will be a gain, that he will see everyone again. He puts mirrors at the end of most hallways in the palace, and is confident in their ability to reflect reality whilst providing the illusion that he is not alone. Finarfin sweeps up ashes and tells himself it is incense. He airs out empty rooms.

Dreams, however, persist. In Finarfin’s dreams there are miraculous returns, done things undoing themselves and it is fuelled by one of these dreams that he makes an effort to befriend his wan-faced granddaughter. Celebrían is as lonely as he is here, and their odd little friendship is dictated not by their blood tie but by their twin desires to tow lost ships back to their lonely shore.

“Arwen is a little like you,” she says. “Always sitting by the window waiting for people to return. Just like that, big-eyes and pout, my very-good girl.”

They look at each other and shudder. The fear of the left-behind steams up the mirrors, and they clasp their hands and tell themselves it is not foresight masquerading as hindsight but in fact the other way around. All their lost things would rise drenched from the sea, Finarfin tells himself, and there will be such glad cries all around. All will return. That other shore is only meant to contain them, not keep them. It is a repository, not an archive, this Middle-Earth.

Most of the time he thinks about the past. What happened then happens now in his mind, slippery and pervasive, piling up yeni after yeni. He turns old sequences over and over in his head, kneading the edges smoother and smoother until it is only rides-on-shoulders and stuck-in-apple-trees. He waits and watches, and knows that one day his future will come sailing sluggishly oversea, heads cast down, and on that day he, Finarfin the Penitent, will be magnanimous and benevolent and forgiving.

Until then, he is six-years-old with starfish hands, baby Finfin, best-boy Finfin pressed nose-to-window. He sits quietly, counting down the seconds till familiar faces crest snowcapped hills, and break through the bated blur of his breath.

[sweetteaanddragons]

B2MEM - "Ashes"

@spring-into-arda (308 words)

My first thought on seeing that one of the prompts this time was the song "Ashes" by the Longest Johns was that this was a great prompt for Elrond and Numenor; the talk about worshipping the ashes really seems to fit with later stage Numenor and tending to the flame of life and hope is a very Elrond thing.

(Okay, my very first thought when I saw that one of the prompts was a song link was an irrational certainty that it was a Rick Roll. Tumblr has made me paranoid.)

. . .

It was a hard thing to visit Numenor now. He had seen it when it was green and golden; to see it slowly crumble into ash was a hard thing.

It was elves who were supposed to be most tempted by memory and its traces of old glories; to see Men so enthralled by their own past, their own dead, felt unnatural. Elrond had known these faces when the lifeblood was still bright in their cheeks. He did not mind seeing them captured in stone, but to see more care expended on these remnants than on the ever fewer children whose voices echoed down the cold streets - it disturbed him.

There was not much he could do. The kings of Numenor did not like an elf telling them their business.

Even if the one doing so was, even now, not quite an elf.

There had been a time -

But he turned his mind firmly from memory. He could do no good there.

He could do some good here in the poorest quarter of the city in the market corner where a host of anxious mothers with infants who had caught the fever plaguing the city had gathered because they had heard he could help.

It was a good reminder that there was still some new life in the city.

“Hello, little one,” he said softly to the first squalling little one that was placed in his arms. “Let me see what is amiss. Should you like to hear a song while I do?”

It was an old song, good for soothing fevers and children alike.

He had sung it long ago to some who were now immortalized in ever more elaborate stone. He could lose himself in grief for that if he let himself.

He could.

He would not, so long as there were more children to tend.

[maya-tl]

Crablor Grab Prompt: Harp

Little drawing I did for this year's B2MEM! I love the carnival theme so much, all the games are so much fun. ❤️

[aprilertuileviresse]

Day 2 of B2MEM

@spring-into-arda : for the prompt of the day for the B2MEM, my top 3 comfort fics are :

-Another man's cage by DawnFelagund (https://archiveofourown.org/works/3832198/chapters/8548381)

This is the story of the family of Fëanor in Valinor, before everything went to hell. Before the darkening and everything. It's lovely, surprisingly peaceful at time and unsurprisingly chaotic at others. Family life.

-The World breaks everyone by Mangacrack (https://archiveofourown.org/works/3788740/chapters/8431423)

Maglor isn't very sane, but also is very strong, is family is unique, and everyone is in deep trouble. Misery likes company sort of fic.

-Red, Red Moon (Keep on Rising) by Tilion (https://archiveofourown.org/works/53281741/chapters/141506926#main)

The Halls of Mandos doesn't know how to keep the feanorians in and it's delightful. Celegorm escape with spotty memory, and sort of try to bring Elurin and Elured to their parents, and with Oromë. And Huan.

-Bonus story : The ways of Paradox, by Narya https://archiveofourown.org/works/14638137/chapters/33832815

Lovely, Maglor in modern time, that I reread almost as often as the first three. It's pretty peaceful, and Maglor is... Well... Maglor.

[z-h-i-e]

Podfic: Whatever Betide

I have been dabbling with audio recordings (or as the cool kids say these days, podfics) of some of my stories.

I finished edits on Whatever Betide yesterday. (Summary: Fëanor makes Celegorm and Curufin apologize to Finrod. This was a B2MEM fic from a few years ago, prompted by a discussion that happened in the SWG discord at the time regarding the topic of forgiveness. It has in it an OC I created as Finrod's personal assistant who has some background as a therapist, and also someone who is very unimpressed with the Feanorians -- and goes so far as to analyze Feanor, to his face, in this story. Her name is Salvillë, and the podfic has an intro/forward portion where I talk a bit about her and why I created her.)

Link to the text on AO3, where the link to the audio file is found at the top of the first chapter; the file comes in at roughly an hour and ten minutes, which is now making me rethink this whole audio recording project, except that they are turning out pretty cool with the sound effects and background music:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/38903196

[grey-gazania-fic]

Spark

A brief moment between a young Curufin and his future wife. Started for a B2MeM prompt from a few years ago, "meeting your future spouse". Rated G.

“I’m going to visit Mánaiwë tomorrow,” Atto said over dinner. “You should come along, Curvo. It’s been quite a while since you’ve seen Nyellë.”

“The last time I saw Nyellë, she hit me over the head with a toy cow so hard that one of its legs came off,” I said. It seemed necessary to point that out. Mánaiwë was a good friend of Atto’s, and I’d known his youngest daughter since we were both small, but my relationship with Nyellë had always been a little rocky.

Across the table, Maitimo snorted into his soup. “As I recall, she did that because you kept pulling her hair,” he reminded me. “Because you ‘liked the way her curls bounced’. You were hardly an innocent victim.”

“And that was fifteen years ago. I’m sure you’ve both matured,” Atto said, giving me a pointed look. “Mánaiwë tells me she’s been apprenticed to a firework maker. You’ve read a fair bit about pyrotechnics lately. I’m sure the two of you will find something to talk about.”

“Do I have to?” I asked, realizing even as I said it that the whine in my voice was unbefitting of a thirty-five year-old. I was more than halfway grown, not a small child anymore, and Ammë was already conveying with the look in her eyes alone that I was acting immature.

“Yes,” Atto said. “You have to. You don’t spend time with enough of your peers, Curvo. You know I’m pleased by how hard you work in your lessons with me, but you can’t spend every day in the company of the same half-dozen people. Besides, Mánaiwë has been asking after you. It would be rude of you to stay home.”

“Fine,” I sighed. I was comforted only slightly by the way Tyelko caught my eye, indicating with a look that he was sympathetic to my position. Different though we might seem at first glance, my older brother was probably my closest friend, and he understood my reluctance to tear myself away from the things that interested me for a social visit that was bound to be awkward, if not outright boring.

Perhaps, once I came home tomorrow, he and I could meet up with Irissë, our favorite cousin. That, I thought, would be a reasonable reward.

continue reading on AO3

[ridiculoussquid]

Some scribbly experiment with ice drawings. For B2MEM, prompt "connection", this case Tilion casting a net into the sea for Osse. This is a companion piece to my story <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/63600655">Of the Tides</a>.

[backtomiddleearthmonth]

"Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket" by James Whistler

[spring-into-arda]

Prompt Round-Up Week 1

Don't worry if you missed any of these! Late submissions are always welcome, both in the AO3 collection and by tagging us here on tumblr!

Optional weekly theme - Community, Fun, First Times

March 1 ‒ Coming home | Reunions | Missing somebody

March 2 – Community Sunday! Comment on a fanwork that was created over 1 year ago | Listen to a podfic | Rec your top 3 comfort fics

March 3 ‒  Chaos | Troublemakers | Out of Bounds

March 4 – Experimental Tuesday! Write a songfic! | Experiment with textiles | Try out an Alternate Universe

March 5 ‒  First Meetings | Games | Connections

March 6 – Meta Thursday! Share your meta/headcanons about a Tolkien character.

March 7 ‒ Audience | Ball | Court 

March 8 – International Womens’ Day! Create, comment, or recommend fanworks featuring women as main characters.

March 9 – Community Sunday! Read and comment on a story about a character you’ve never read about before! | Comment on/reblog art that features the colour purple | Listen to a fan song

[balrogballs]

Endurance: Elwing

B2MEM @spring-into-arda Match 8 - Team Idril - Prompt “Endurance” featuring Elwing transforming back to her human form after her long flight oversea — another sketch done on public transportation because I forgot the deadline, this time, a bus on a ferry with my lonely red gel pen 🥲

Note the hair, it’s meant to be an array of feathers — i wanted to do a full body sketch but being on a bus doesn’t leave you much room for detail so I contented myself with a headshot only.

[sweetteaanddragons]

Rec Post - B2MEM Week One

@spring-into-arda

The weekly theme for Back to Middle Earth month is fun, community, and first times. In honor of that, I've made a short rec list. The first three items in the list focus on community - whether that's characters joining a new one, exploring the differences between them, or mourning the end of one. The last two items in the list are for the fun part of the prompt - well, all of them are for the fun part of the prompt really, since all of these are delightful to read, but in the last two, the characters are also having fun for most of the story, and both stories also have a strong focus on humor.

An Eye for Quality - A wonderful found family Hobbit fic by Linelin, featuring a heavy focus on dwarvish culture, Bella Baggins/Thorin, and excellent Fili and Kili content.

Blessings and Rituals - An intriguing exploration between the differences between dwarvish and hobbit customs and communities by Esama.

No More the Hammers Sing - Antartica_or_bust's deeply tragic look at what happens to a community when they're down to their last stand

Alizarin - a hilarious look at the Noldor exploring synthetics by Simaetha

The Care & Feeding of Hobbits - This fic by Baylor is eleven chapters of very funny Fellowship shenanigans . . . followed by one chapter sad but ultimately heartwarming Fellowship moments.

[cycas]

Congratulations! If you’re taking asks: your Maglor meeting his wife.

The first time she saw him, he was one of eight, and she wondered if he was a Vala.

It was hideously clear, by then, that the orcs that had come pouring from the North in great numbers were not only raiding for slaves, food, and whatever took their fancy.

Her people had tried hiding at first, and then, once it was clear the orcs had come to stay this time, they had tried to fight: hunting spears, bows and reaping-hooks of herdsmen and farmers against the serried, armoured ranks of the enemy. They had tried to fight, and they had lost.

And then the Noldor had come crashing into Hithlum in shining armour, a host lit by many lamps and by a soft radiance that clung about them. At their head were eight bright figures with eyes that shone like stars, and the orcs fled from the hooves of their tall horses in terror, leaving their captives to weep with unexpected wonder and joy.

But when the surviving chieftains of Hithlum came to meet the Noldor, the shining figures took off their high helms and called greetings in voices that were strange, but friendly enough.

In their camp upon the shores of Lake Mithrim they seemed more like people, and less like some strange power from beyond the world. She went with Annael and the others to meet with them, bearing gifts of fine-woven grey cloth, smoked duck and venison, and received as her own gift a knife of some astonishingly sharp grey metal, the hilt worked with strange shapes and set with glittering stones.

It was then that she first heard Makalaurë Fëanor’s son sing, there by the lake under the stars.

She was not entirely sure, at first, that she liked the Noldor music. It did not unfold in the way that the songs of the great singers of Mithrim did; silvery notes woven together into a complex whole. Instead, he sang alone, accompanied only by the instrument he played; a mighty voice that echoed the golden light in his eyes and spoke to the stars as if they were well-known friends. But there was no doubting the power in it, and as he sang on, a song of defiance against the shadow in the North, the vision of a land filled and overbrimming with light overcame her.

The Noldor did not stay long. Annael, Renion and Faechith as the chieftains of the great families had hoped to persuade them to settle in the lands around the lake and form a strong defense against Angband. But Fëanor the king would not be stayed, not by any news of the power of the Enemy. He waited only long enough to learn their speech, to hear the full report of what had happened in the land of mists and the news from Beleriand before he marched out again, east through the mountains to the plains, and to what lay beyond.

*****The third time she saw Makalaurë, he stood before his people in the starlight. His head was high and his face defiant, and as he spoke, he wept, and the tears on his face reflected the fierce light in his eyes.

The Sindar had come out to meet their new friends in their retreat back to the lake of Mithrim. So she heard the news at the same time that many of the Noldor did, the news told in that great golden voice that Fëanor the king was fallen in battle, and that his eldest son was captured. Makalaurë would stand as king of the Noldor. They would hold the land of Hithlum within the mountains, and build up strength for a new attack.

*****The first time she spoke to him was different; more personal. She had brought in a draft of pony mares from the hills, and after she had turned them out in the big paddock for Amrod and some of his people to take a look at them, she turned and found that the Noldor king was leaning on the fence next to her.

“They don’t look much like war-horses,” he said to her in his oddly accented Sindarin, when she caught his eye.

She shrugged. “No. But we have no war-horses, here in Hithlum. These are the tallest that we have.”

He said nothing but tilted his head to look down at her, and raised an eyebrow. “They never needed to be,” she said, defensive. “We aren’t as tall as you, and we don’t wear armour. Our skills are in stealth, not in battle. But I think they will bear taller foals, if we bring them to your stallions..”

“Amrod thinks so too. I hope you’re right. I wonder, do you think any of your people might be persuaded to wear armour and to ride them, in time, if we made the armour? It’s become painfully clear to me that there are not enough of us to assault Angband alone.”

Startled, she looked back at the ponies circling the paddock in the starlight. “You can’t summon more of your people to come across the Sea to your aid?”

He scrunched up his face and laughed wryly. “There were many more that were eager to come, but… at the time, we thought this would be enough. Something of a mistake, as it turns out, but it’s too late now. We must press on with the allies that we have, and… since the Enemy holds my brother, the problem seems particularly urgent.”

She nodded with sympathy. “He holds my brother, too, I think. My father was killed, but we never found my brother’s body, and the last we knew of him, the orcs had taken him.”

He stared at her wide-eyed for a moment. “I’m sorry.”

She shrugged unhappily. “If you really think the Enemy can be defeated, you’ll find many of us here in the North who have our own quarrels with him.”

“Do you think your King Thingol might aid us?” he asked seriously. “Annael thinks not, but surely if his own people are held as thralls in Angband..”

She had to laugh at that. “We’re not Thingol’s people. Not any more. He left us.for long ages to be alone with his lady-love, and when he returned, we had grown tired of kings and left to seek our own lands in freedom.”

He smiled at her. She was getting used to those disconcerting eyes. “That’s what Annael said too.”

“It doesn’t make you angry? You’re a king.”

“Not your king, though, so why should I be angry?”

This strange king-from-across-the-sea intrigued her. “Perhaps I expect all kings to be angry!”

“Angry about wanting freedom and wide lands to wander in the starlight? That’s what we wanted, too.”

“Through sorrow to find joy; or freedom, at the least?” she quoted the Noldor saying, trying to speak the words as his language made them.

He made a face and looked away. “That was the idea. Ironic, really, given where my…our brothers are now. But we didn’t know about Angband then. We thought we would find our enemy, take our revenge and reclaim the Silmarils he stole… I think it might take rather longer than we thought it would.”

The very idea that the Enemy could be defeated was intoxicating. And, though unlikely, there were still the armies that had swept the orcs from Mithrim like leaves in a stream. “Maybe you will manage it yet. But I wouldn’t count on Thingol’s help: he thinks we can’t be trusted. That we are spies for the Enemy.”

He frowned. “A strange thought that you’d spy for the enemy who took your brother as a slave.”

“Isn’t it? But they live a very long way from Angband, in Doriath, safe behind their walls of enchantment. Annael must have told you that.”

“He did, but well… we are strangers here, in a strange land, speaking a strange tongue. I hope you’ll forgive me if I ask a question twice.”

She considered him for a thoughtful moment. “You’re a very odd king,” she said eventually. “Not that I know any other kings. But you don’t seem much like anything I’ve heard of Thingol.”

He frowned, and then shrugged. “It might be that I’m doing it wrong,” he admitted. “I never thought I’d be one, and so I didn’t do a lot of preparation. So, if I suggested to Amrod that some of the Sindar of Mithrim might be prepared to ride the foals that these ponies will drop one day, you think you might be one of them?”

She looked out again in the starlight at the ponies, which were standing calmly now, heads up and looking at the tall Noldorin war-horses grazing not so far away. They were fine, well-balanced looking beasts. It might be interesting to try their paces.

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

[z-h-i-e]

B2MEM 2021 Bingo Cards Are Posted!

Bingo Cards, in the bingoy format everyone knows and loves, have hit the B2MEM portion of the Spring Into Arda website. You can find them here in all their glory, including a PDF master file of all 24 cards

https://spring-into-arda.weebly.com/2021-mystery-bingo.html

Haven't bingo'ed before and not sure what I'm talking about?  Here's an example card -- this is one of the first prompt lists that was imagined when this year's prompts were being figured out. In order to balance the enthusiasm of bingo from the traffic on the website, the mystery bingo has been moved to the Discord channel for Spring Into Arda, and separate 'traditional' single-version bingo cards are the ones found posted on the website.  For now, if you want to try out the randomized bingo card option, you'll have to pop into the Spring Into Arda Discord to access those so the system isn't overloaded.

[i-did-not-mean-to]

B2MEM Race 2

In a twist of events, the mods have announced the new race track yesterday, along with the additional hint that raw speed shall be rewarded for this second race.

So...here are my drabbles for this second race, which have been finished roughly 10 hours after looking at the prompts.

🕊️Team Birdemic for the win!🕊️

Special shoutout to my teammate, muse, and enabler @Cílil (drabbles here) who finished ahead of me!

[grey-gazania-fic]

[SWG link here]

Gil-galad confronts her growing feelings for Elrond. Part of my Woman King AU.

Written for a very old set of B2MeM prompts: skeletons in the closet, monogamy, intimacy, marriage, Laws and Customs Among the Eldar