Chapter Text
The clearing is small and shaded, marked only by the faint trace of a path the deer use when they go to drink from the banks of the river. There are bluebells, although they are fading a little at this time of year; there is a dead trunk of an ancient oak nestled as if asleep in a bank of wood anemones, and around it a scattering of tiny saplings reaching up to the light. Other than this there is nothing so remarkable about it and certainly there seems little to distinguish it from any other glade in any other wood.
Galadriel turns slowly upon the grasses, noting distant landmarks, the position of the sun, noting tree and flower, stone and leaf, and sighs with the weariness of a traveller whose long journey has come to an end. She sits down under the shade of one of the tallest trees in the curve of one of its great roots. She unpacks a few provisions from the bag she carries: a wafer of lembas that she unwraps from the leaf that holds it, a flask of water, a green apple.
“I know you are here,” she says.
Nothing responds to her, or nothing seems to. The birds continue to sing as they were before and the wind still sighs in the treetops. The scent of bluebells is heavy and sweet.
She eats some of the lembas and rewraps the rest. “Do you remember when Melian taught me to make this? I was so impatient that it all took so long. You used to tease me until I laughed about it.”
If anything hears her it does not reply.
She bites into the apple, undiscouraged. “It has taken me some time to learn what became of you. Now that we have the rings and we understand more about the fading I understand better. We believed it could only happen in death, but we have learned – or Elrond thinks – that if there is enough sorrow placed upon one’s soul and enough of a wish to be removed from the memory of what caused it, that it might happen to the living too. Simply disappearing into the very land itself.”
Still no voice replies to her. Still nothing appears in answer to her words. And yet, it might be – it might be - that the trailing leaves of white bryony next to her are a little closer now, just close enough to brush the edge of her hand.
“I have missed you,” she says, and for the first time her voice catches in her throat and emerges off-balance and uneven. She smiles, a faint light of sunshine breaking through rainclouds. “I suppose it would be very difficult for you to speak with me like this even if you wished to and so this will be a very one-sided conversation, but all the same I will continue to have it. I have dearly missed speaking to you. I hope you are listening, somehow. Do you remember that summer you took me hunting when I was new to Doriath? We talked so much that we left the path without realising it and you refused to admit we had become lost in your own forests. You told me that you were merely showing me a more beautiful way home, and the river-mud was dear to you, and the brambles were a particular kind of bramble you wished me to appreciate, and you kept a straight face for so long but I could see in your eyes how close you were to laughing…”
She continues like this for the rest of the day’s light and long into the dusk. She speaks of joys and sorrows, of dancing in the beech-woods, of scandals and rumours that had whispered their way around the court of Menegroth, of which of these she had later learned were true all along. She shapes all these memories in her voice; she says, every so often as if it is a refrain, I have missed you. And when she seems too tired to continue she curls up to sleep where she is.
When she wakes she finds that one of the great turf-covered roots has curled itself against her, gentle and soft.
“I would like you to come back,” she says the next morning, although still she speaks to nothing but the rays of sun that break through the canopy ahead and still no voice answers her. “I have missed you. And there are not so many of us left as there might be, and we have passed through many sorrows and I fear there are many still to come. I will not mislead you on what we face. Nor will I mislead you on our chance of victory – I think it is rather slim, all told. But even your forest here will fall if the rising darkness goes unchallenged.”
There is little movement in the glade but for a pale yellow butterfly that flies here and there over the banks studded with stars of white flowers.
“I wish you had not gone to war when we were young,” she says. “But you were right to go. You were right to try. I wish I had listened. I wish I had not argued with you. I wish it had all happened differently.”
Far away in the distant reaches of forest, an echo of burbling birdsong rises and then fades again.
“Elrond believes that if enough time has passed for you to rest, you might find a way to – I don’t know. Reverse the fading and become like you were again. I don’t truly know how such things might be done but I have faith that they can be.” She is turning the ring she wears on her hand, turning and turning it. “I don’t even know that this is enough time. The war broke me in a different way than it did you and I don’t, I don’t know what it’s… I don’t know. All I can really do is speak to you like this and tell you that I would like it very much if you could find a way to return to me.”
From the high branches of one of the trees above a large leaf flutters down. It lands upon Galadriel’s outstretched hand, neatly covering her palm. She looks at it for a while.
“I suppose you wouldn’t even know who Elrond is,” she says. “He’s your own kin although a little distant. I think you will like him. He reminds me often of your brother.” And she goes on to speak of all those she has known, those lost and those still with her; of Thondir who must be somewhere now in Valinor, happy, rested, home, and rehearsing precisely how he will castigate her for leaping from that boat.
The grasses of the forest floor have not moved that she ever noticed, but now she looks down she sees that some of the long blades have nestled against her left calf, wrapped around as if in a caress.
When the night comes again she cries a little, as though allowing it of herself as a brief indulgence. “Tomorrow I will need to leave,” she says to the darkening glade around her, the shadows that almost seem to move when the trees that cast them do not. “There is too much to do and our lands are too often falling under attack, and I can’t spare any more time away. Please know that I very much wish I could stay here with you longer and I will try to return again. Please know that I have missed you so very very much. If you are ever able to return to me – go north, and cross the mountains and follow the Bruinen up towards its source. You will find a valley there where we have found refuge.”
And the night falls softer, and the glade grows dimmer, and above her the stars shine bright as hope.
“I miss you,” she says as her eyes close.
She sleeps so deeply that she doesn’t even wake with the dawn in long-ingrained habit. She sleeps so deeply that when she finally wakes, the sun is already climbing high in a clear blue sky, and the grass where she lies is already warmed by its rays. She sleeps so deeply that the hand that wakes her – solid, whole, alive – has to squeeze her shoulder to do so.
“Galadriel,” her husband says. “I’ve missed you.”