crack_van | Lighting the Lamps by solvent90 (PG-13)

Fandom: EARTHSEA
Pairing: Ged/Tenar
Length: ~1000 words
Author on LJ:

solvent90
Author Website: LJ memories & Yuletide, though I'm not aware that she has written any more in this fandom
Why this must be read:

In Tehanu, Le Guin reunites Ged & Tenar, 25 years after they meet in The Tombs of Atuan. Ged has sacrificed his power to save the equilibrium, and is having trouble coming to terms with the loss. Tenar long ago abandoned her life as priestess & mistress of the labyrinth, and has lived an ordinary life as a farmer's wife & widow. The spell of celibacy that bound Ged as a wizard is over, and as Le Guin puts it, Tenar teaches him 'the mystery that the wisest man could not teach him.'

This period is a popular setting for fanfiction, much of which is very true to canon. 'Lighting the Lamps' is a quiet, unsentimental vignette, which captures the flavour of Tehanu. It weaves around the consequences of the celibacy spell, and does a particularly good job of bridging the gulf between The Tombs of Atuan & Tehanu, linking Ged & Tenar's past lives with the present.

She had found everything in Re Albi so foreign and strange. The damp, the heights, the forest. And in the village, the farmers, tailors, tinkers, weavers, their wives and quarrels; the men, everywhere, their eyes flickering over her, the women with their endless, equable chatter, their flirting with the men and laughter with each other. After the desert and the dark, the bright complexity of village life had been a strange new pattern to learn, a maze she stumbled in, feeling young and awkward and foreign.

Lighting the Lamps by solvent90