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When stillness came at last to the broken mountains, it seemed to stagger and collapse there, exhausted. Dawn had arrived, probably, and the wind had moved on to other urgent business. A steady sifting of ash trickled into the ruins where shapes of stone and flesh confused themselves.
And down in the lee, the Great Eagle Thorondor bent forward, like one praying to a power that offers them nothing but certainty, and he ate.
"Is that not - is that not foul to taste?" Eärendil stammered, watching the great beak do what it did best. Thorondor had no hint of decorum about him, ever. There was something beautiful to that, to the cruelty of his talons and the sharp toss of his head as he swallowed, to the fierce and ancient laws that steered his life. There was ugliness to it, too. Eärendil could not decide, at the moment, which he saw. Thick, ragged reptile skin tore free, black as the crust that forms on heated iron, that the shaper must beat away to expose the fresh red beneath.
:No,: Thorondor answered into Eärendil's mind, not looking up. :Sometimes they become foul, later in life, after lying idle on their heaps of gold. This one had no chance to do so.:
The whole world felt fouled, just now. It hurt to breathe. The air had thickened and soured, stewing the light from all distant and nearby fires into one tarry orange. Eärendil had discovered more flavors of fire than he had ever thought possible. The indifferent kind that made hills crumble to embers, the noxious kind that came from the Enemy's forges until their roofs fell in, the writhing thing that the dragon spat, and now finally, the ordinary flame it had settled into, eating away at the creature's vast abdomen from the inside out.
And there was also his own star, clear and pale, unmarked even after what it had just been used for. Even after everything it had ever been used for. Leaning against Vingilot's mast now, he still clutched it tight in both hands. So brightly it shone, the light leaked red through the muscles of his palms to cast a harsh outline onto Thorondor's stained feathers.
"Why do you eat the body, if it will burn itself up anyway?" Eärendil asked the Eagle.
A moment's pause, choosing the right words.
:Such is the nature of this work. We were kin, because our Parents are brothers, and because we shared the same sky. And though the fight was terrible, the time has come now to put our debts to rest. We owed each other this courtesy, he and I.:
The great bird readjusted his stance with a shift of feathers, and tugged hard; there came a wrenching snap.
:And besides,: he added, :I was hungry.:
"I never used to think your kind felt hunger."
:I expect you know a great deal more of the world now.:
Long ago, he had often caught sight of the Eagles as flat black shapes, drifting far above in the hemmed-in sky of his earliest home. The first time he saw one up close was the Fall, the same hour he first saw a burial.
"Yes," Eärendil muttered. "A great deal more."
Then the both of them lifted their heads skyward at a clear cry from somewhere not too distant. It cut through the gloom, and down its path, a pale sliver slid easily after. Eärendil raised one hand high in answer. He called out her name.
Gull-shaped Elwing swooped low over the moored sky ship. Thrice she circled, exchanging with Thorondor a few words in the piercing, splendid bird tongue. She brushed past Eärendil close enough for him to feel the wind from her wings, then climbed again, rowed her way through invisible tides of air, until at last she disappeared in the smoke.
Eärendil stared after her. He wished he could fly, completely free, away into endless distances. And he wished he could leap from his ship and stay forever on the solid ground he came from.
"What was the news?" he asked.
:They have done it,: said Thorondor, bowing again to his task. :She felt, as I did, when the door of the world opened and slammed shut again.:
"So it is ended," said Eärendil, and closed his eyes.
The resonance of Thorondor's silent laughter made his world buzz. It was not a mocking laugh. It felt, almost, a little sad.
:Oh, many things are indeed ended, bright one, and some of us know now to step out of the story. But still the story runs on. On and on, as the wind over the mighty sea, and for those who yet sail there remains a long way to go.:
As if summoned by name, the wind rose. It stirred Thorondor's feathers, batted at a few quiet flames that burned in crevices nearby. What a sorrow, what a comfort! There remained a long way to go.
:I seem to recall,: Thorondor hinted, :that a certain star is due to rise again with tomorrow's dawn.:
"I am, aren't I." He sighed, shook himself, and ran a hand through his hair, displacing some charred substance of disputable origin. Vingilot lacked rigging, at the moment, but he had wisely stowed as much surplus as he could fit when he set out on this mission. This left little room for food, though, and he would rather not roast himself a hock of dragon.
:It would poison you, actually. Worry not, I shall send Gwaihir to meet you with supplies, once we are through guiding the prisoners to safe ground.:
Eärendil pried open the hatch to the hold. "You make fine guides. I remember -" He stilled, then, letting his eyes drop to the star in his free hand.
The light passed through his flesh more brightly than before. The shadows of his finger bones flickered on the ground below. His time here was fast running out.
"It is not only my sons." He tried to sound reasonable, tried to keep the bitterness, the grief, out of his voice. "I never claimed to deserve to see them again. But Falathar lives, and Voronwë, Annael, Círdan - surely. Surely there is something I can do."
Once more, Thorondor paused and looked up to the sky. This time, though, he met Eärendil's eyes after.
For a moment he felt his whole being made transparent.
:All in time,: the Eagle assured - words they had all said to him over and over again. He might have even snapped at the holy emissary then and there, but Thorondor continued.
:Would that I knew better what that meant - even I only see so far. I realize you cannot make your life alone, from only your calling, not as I do. But neither must you do so forever. This I promise you, with all I am. And until then - we shall watch them as they shape a new world from the pieces we left, and offer them what we can, what we must.:
Never before had he felt that one of the High Folk understood him, made as he was out of earthly things, things like loneliness and awe, sinew and blood. But then again, the blood showed dark and sticky on Thorondor himself right now.
It was not much to hold onto.
Still, the sky would clear eventually. And when it did, everyone lost and left behind - everyone he had lost and left behind - would need a light by which to orient themselves. He had best prepare to set out, for there remained a long, long way to go.
As he dragged new coils of line from the hold with all the resolve he could muster, he felt Thorondor add, almost absently, :Whoever told you it was because you do not deserve them?:
"Get back!" cried Annael. He scrambled up the slope, herding Ferieth and Tologûr before him, just as the ground failed. Great shards of earth cleaved free from each other and tipped with a terrible noise into the sea.
Sometimes it happened with grace, the landscape bending down the way a horse lowers its head to drink. Sometimes it happened in storms. Sometimes the water simply swallowed it all up.
Muddy and spray-flecked, they helped each other to steadier footing, and stood watching the last of the landslide settle, for now. The sea roiled metallically beyond the reach of their lantern-light, shoving debris against the cliffs - trees and boards and twisted forms of metal. This bay was too new for a name, and wouldn't last long enough to get one.
"Damn," said Tologûr, leaning forward to prop himself up with hands on his own knees. "Always we come too late."
"Not always," Ferieth reminded him. "Do you remember the cooking pots? Those we managed."
Annael stared at the sky with its motionless curtain of smoke. "The cooking pots made no sense - why would they not just fashion new ones?" He thought he could make out a brightening near the horizon, distinct from the red brightness of fires to the North. "Hm," he said. "The sun."
Straightening, Tologûr brushed himself off, and said, "not nearly enough of her."
Annael hummed his agreement. "The river can lead us back instead - I suppose it's to be wet feet for the return trip then, too. A sorry sight we three shall make, squelching empty-handed back into camp."
"Everyone has got wet feet and empty hands these days," Tologûr muttered. "We will only fit in."
The Man turned briskly and made for the river, his companions behind him. Ferieth held the lantern high. As they walked, they listened to the rumble of falling boulders echo up the coast.
Downhill, away from the headland, the ground sagged, and slipped in pieces under brackish water. Grass poked up through the surface. As far as they could see, the land looked like nothing so much as bread, brown and pocked, crumbling at its edges as if into broth. They picked their way from little island to little island, and over the masses of flotsam; then they turned inland, wading up-current.
Annael had never known the river back when it was still the Gelion, running so swiftly down through the woods. Now it was just called the river. These past few months had seen it turn sluggish and muddy - yet, with its poisoned second source to the West cut off, it had flushed the last of the burning foulness into the ocean, and it was safe to travel for the first time in decades. The wise walked by river. They said the song of the Lord of Waters sounded again, softly, in Middle-Earth.
Tuor would be able to tell, Annael thought - Tuor who had followed the song off the edge of the world, and escaped all this, one way or another. He would know for certain. But whatever the cause, monsters feared to touch the river. To Annael it felt not dead. It felt like a child who has thrashed fevered through the night, whose breathing finally begins to steady by morning. That was a victory in itself.
"I think the pots made perfect sense," said Ferieth.
Tologûr glanced over at her, squinting. "Pots?"
"The cooking pots from last year, with that family of three."
"Three avid cooks, I imagine," Annael said.
"But that is exactly the point of it, Annael - the cooking mattered not at all. They would have sent us back for those pots even if they only ate thin porridge out of them. 'Tis the memory in their things they need, rather than the use of them: things someone made and lived with, even someone long gone."
"Perhaps, indeed," said Annael, who had crept from his home in the night, carrying little, and now felt a pang of longing for his battered old kettle.
"A strange new business, salvage," Tologûr remarked.
"You say that every errand."
"I am right."
"It is not so new. Your father did it at Balar, and thus got your uncle to safety."
The Man chuckled. "As I said - a strange business."
They came now to a cleft between hills where the smoke pooled thick, so they wet their kerchiefs in the river and tied them round their faces. Annael stepped carefully over the slippery stones of the riverbed, smelling the heavy tinge of fire, hearing the great silence. All the birds save the helpful vultures dwelt further inland, where plants grew; their little wafting shrills would tell him when he neared camp.
His thoughts turned to the woman of the Laegrim who had sent them on this errand. Old and quiet, she had made her stubborn living at the edge of Ossiriand these fifty years, waiting for the war to reach her. Then there was a clash with demon-wolves, which crawled slathering up the new coastline, and everyone in the settlement reckoned the hour of their death had come. But in the night, the wolves had bolted, called away. Morning found most of the houses sloughed off the cliff and the errand-setter laid up with a set of toothmarks carved into her calf - so said the six survivors who carried each other into camp that evening.
She wanted a silver charm, left hanging over the door, a charm of protection.
They waded on, encountering reeds for the first time. Ash began to sprinkle down around them, glowing briefly as it passed through Ferieth's lantern light. It always looked like snow at first, and reminded Annael of his mountain home, but then it stained everything it touched.
"I see the wind is changing," said Tologûr.
Thicker and thicker the ash came down, settling on the water and disappearing. Ferieth put a hand out to catch some and rub it between her fingers. "What madness has befallen out there now?"
They stopped moving. The world lay under a false dusk, the rolling hills and blackened tree-shapes all hidden in smoke, the quiet stirred only by the river as it murmured to itself. Arda might as well drop off into void just a minute's walk away, with them in it and no-one else.
Annael tilted his ears and listened hard for some sign. He heard nothing, but felt faintly a sense of cracking-open, or perhaps just a storm finally breaking into rain, far away.
"Something big," he hazarded. The water changed shape around his feet.
"Perhaps they have finally destroyed each other," said Ferieth, "all of them, poisoners and cleansers alike."
Tologûr slapped at her arm, indignant. "Do not say such things!"
When Tologûr watched the Great Hosts come in their thunderous light, he had been seven years old. Annael had known centuries already. He had seen the first rising of the Sun. He had seen his people sing for joy and sorrow. He had seen thousands of beautiful, shimmering cicadas sprout from the ground and wither again. He had seen a King die in the same dust as everyone else, grey turning red.
He said, "Little would it matter."
"What?"
He began to walk again, and they trailed after, Ferieth splashing her way forward with the light. "I said, little would it matter if they all destroyed each other, if we found ourselves alone. Alone, we would simply go on living."
Tologûr frowned, and quieted. Ferieth, however, spoke up: "I wonder - if we found ourselves alone, and we could not go on living after all, would anything miss us?"
Annael couldn't think of an answer. Nor did he know why it felt so important to him, to them, that something in the empty world remember their being here, if they were all gone.
Somewhere close by, a bird whistled.
They had no beds to spare, so they laid the scout out on someone's cloak, spread over the damp ground by the watch-fire. Azrabatân called Elros over, and waved back the people who rose at that.
"The same shadow-venom," Azrabatân informed Elros. "Yesterday, and he woke in the night complaining of cold, but not since. Can you reach him?"
So still lay the scout, and so ashy, most anyone would presume him dead already. Elros saw where the barb had struck, in the left side, and the blue-blackness creeping over brown skin like the lace of a funeral veil. But when he placed a hand over the scout's ribcage, he felt the weak flutter of life there.
"I can reach him," he said. "I will need my usual tools."
Azrabatân turned back to the fire. "Boiled water and his name," she clarified. The onlookers stirred to action, and between them they supplied both.
Elros had already reached for the pouch he kept clasped at his belt always. He drew forth a palmful of dry leaves and washed both them and his hands in the hot water. Then he crushed the leaves between his fingers, releasing their scent upon the air. A self-contradictory smell, clean but filled with the breath and decay of living things - the smell of the sea on long-gone mornings. The first time he used athelas, it dragged him deep into the past, and he felt himself far away and alone, perched high above a channel overrun by the wild tide. Now it made him think of home, which felt just as distant.
He cupped the scout's head with both hands and tilted it forward, crouching close, reaching for his mind. There were no words inside him, no pain, no flicker of images, only an immense cold. Elros called his name and it echoed there.
He waited without answer. But he felt something stir restlessly, like a fish sending ripples through deep stillness.
Now Elros returned one hand to the sea-smelling water, and passed it over the wound in the scout's side, and he hummed a low song. The poison reacted. It bit at him and strove with him, but in the end it was only a thing, and things change. Drawing his hand back, he saw that the water droplets left behind had gone inky black. So he poured the rest of the water there, and the stream dissolved the stain and washed it away.
This time when he called the scout's name, the presence thrashed in the emptiness, fighting its way near, until he could grab hold of some snatch of voice or memory and pull with all his might.
Something yanked his wrist, hard. Elros started. He opened his eyes - it was the scout holding on tight to him, and his own eyes had opened too. He looked terrified. He said nothing. He stared at Elros, and then his grip went slack and his eyes slipped shut again. But this time he only slept.
"There," Elros sighed, drawing back. "The rest is up to him."
Azrabatân came over and checked for herself. She clasped Elros's shoulder in thanks.
"How do you do that?" asked a young girl across the watch-fire. "Has it something to do with Elves?"
Elros laughed a little. "In part. The power came down to me from my mother's side. But foremost it is a matter of listening, and practice."
The girl nodded solemnly.
From a bloodstained, flame-eyed singer he had first heard those words. He could have asked for no better teacher: until the Vanyar came, with their tight-knit choral groups at the center of every phalanx, he had only seen Maglor wield Song with any effectiveness in war. The power in his voice fell fast and single-minded even as he leapt and ducked and swung, his brother at his back like a pillar of fire - and Elros and his own brother between them, calling it shelter.
With a sick resignation, he wondered where they had gone now.
The fire leapt, the fire swayed. That morning, chaos reigned, the sky ablaze, and everyone needed Elros everywhere. Now they waited, most at work putting things and people back together, some just blinking out in the open, all wary of the sudden quiet.
"I find it fitting that the hands of our King be the hands of a healer," Azrabatân said softly, and Elros grimaced despite himself.
"Please, say not 'king.' You and the rest of our people have my loyalty, and my protection, and my guidance wherever you need to go, but I know nothing of kingship. At least - " he dared to say it - "not outside of war."
"Neither does anyone else. They all died. Whether you like it or not, people will call you that, because we look to you."
They had had this conversation before, and it always ended the same way. But now the world lay cracked open, with its lungs exposed, and they could see how it held its breath. Cracked open but surviving. Eyes settled on him across the fire. He thought of stars. He thought of suns. Away to the East, he felt Elrond alive, moving, and right next to him he felt his people, alive, moving. His hands smelled of the sea.
Elros could have asked for no better teacher than Maglor. But Maglor had got it all wrong when he told Elros to choose, warrior or healer. "Both," Elros had said. "Watch me - I will be both."
"Well," he admitted now, "I suppose I had better do a good job of it."
And there would come days of lifted voices, of trees in bloom. There would come days of shining water. But today they had Azrabatân's broad smile, and the nods of the gathered watchers, and the scout asleep on his improvised blanket, and ash that began to fall fluttering all around, like petals.
"I see the wind has changed," said the young girl.
"So it has," said Azrabatân.
Elros took that as a sign to rise and go, for many others about the camp had need of the hands of a healer. But Azrabatân dipped her head and bowed to him, and the other watchers followed - the whole circle of them. Elros felt his mouth drop open a little. He had seen Gil-Galad in proceedings like these, of course, but at the moment he found he hadn't a single idea what to do. He could only bow back as he stammered his farewell.
Behind him, Azrabatân laughed gently, and that gave him some peace.
He walked through camp. He passed knots of people talking quietly to themselves, and others shouting. He passed old men dressing the dead for burial, and children playing, hands linked.
Of a sudden, something prickled in his head, in the familiar way that meant his brother was reaching for him. He stopped to listen while the ash floated all around. Elrond stood on a hill, with Gil-Galad, and a great buzzing that could only be an Ainu. They wanted everyone to gather. The Ainu had many important things to say to them all.
But more than that, Elrond tugged at him urgently to look up. There - in the distance, even through the smoke, they could see it: a light uprising, rising, rising, dimly haloed and steady. It sailed high above the hills, until it appeared no bigger than a star, and then at last it vanished into the hidden sky.
For weeks, the ash fell uninterrupted.
It fell as Eönwë cried victory from atop a ruined tower, and as he fought one more battle, which would not be counted in the war.
It fell as the last great wave pulled Thangorodrim down for good.
It fell on the raw new harbor where the survivors gathered, the camps mingling as everyone looked for their missing people. It fell on the free prisoners no-one trusted yet, who strayed out over unrecognizable lands.
It fell on the Westerners hoisting their gold and white sails, and on the Noldorin families talking late into the night about whether to go with them, and on Gil-Galad and his council, talking late into the night about where to find food and homes for the ones who stayed. Celebrimbor relayed all he remembered from the settling of Mithrim, anonymizing wherever possible.
At a recess he went down to the clamoring quay and met Finrod.
Apart from a design of ink at the join of his collarbones, to mark his journey through and beyond death - lines and shapes Celebrimbor recognized from some Edain warriors - Finrod looked no different at all. They spoke in Sindarin. Celebrimbor knelt in retroactive fealty and gave voice to as much of his guilt and sorrow from Nargothrond as he dared. But he had barely begun before Finrod drew him to his feet and told him he ought not bear any guilt, and somehow that made it worse.
Finrod met with the twins too, and later with just Elrond, to offer him a place on his ship home. Elrond paced and extolled the wonder and sorrow and duty and possibility of this marred land as if he were calling a whole people to action.
It chilled Celebrimbor with its familiarity.
The next day, Finrod left, and Celebrimbor went to work with the shelter-builders directly, because more than anything else he needed something tangibly useful to do with himself. It was not his craft as he loved it, as it could be, but he made things and sank them into the solid ground, and felt exhausted and anchored. Even before the war's inception, he had decided to stay in Middle-Earth.
Later, he climbed down to the shore's edge and stared at the sea in the darkness, while the ash fell on him. He thought of stars, suns, empty spaces. He thought he should tell Gil-Galad and the twins that they could call him "cousin" if they wanted.
Footsteps sounded above, on the stony bluff. He knew who it was already, and that they had been a while looking for him, and that they most likely needed the excuse to get out more than they cared to admit.
"Come up here!" called Gil-Galad's voice.
Celebrimbor found himself grinning. "And what if I would rather not?" he called back.
"Then I shall order you as your King."
"And what if I am become a wild Elf of the far woods, and know no king?"
"Then he shall order you as one concerned for your safety," said Elros. "It is awful down there, Celebrimbor - look at all the bones in the water."
"And what if I enjoy the view?"
"Then he shall order you," said Elrond, "as one who grows bored of watching you sit there brooding."
Celebrimbor picked himself up and scrambled over the ragged basalt to the three of them.
"How goes the rebuilding of the world?" he asked.
"I wish I could tell," said Gil-Galad.
They stood silent together. The night hung densely all about, with the grumble of the surf just below. Out of sight ahead, ships passed by, weaving over drowned rooftops, and out of sight behind, lanterns burned. They all looked very tired.
"Perhaps we should build a lighthouse here," Elrond suggested, and indicated where with a hand.
His brother turned, peering up and down the headlands. "Do you imagine the terrain will settle this way?"
"Yes, though we must survey first. Our people and Círdan's - we will work together, sailing the new coastline, redrawing the maps. We can make note of harbors and river mouths, stable areas and dangerous ones, good places to trade, or hide."
"It almost sounds as though you're seeking permission for something," said Gil-Galad.
The herald seemed to light up at that. "May I seek it?"
"We can discuss it tomorrow."
Celebrimbor considered first composite lens design, and then the challenges of enlarging crystal lamps without compromising their inner structure. A thorny problem, that, and one that had long vexed him - but he imagined a shore of many peoples illuminated and protected by the lights of the Noldor, the lights whose making they once held secret. How lovely they would look reflected on the water.
"Then we must also begin to refine sand," he said. "And I would need a suitable place to work."
Elros chuckled. "They have not even commissioned you yet."
"I will not do it on commission, I will do it because I must."
The twins glanced at each other with much amusement. Gil-Galad, though, tipped his head up and went still, pondering. "I like that," he announced at length. "We do it because we must."
They fell silent again, and Celebrimbor sketched furnaces in his head, until all at once Elrond stiffened, fixated on the horizon. Instantly the rest of them sprang to readiness, reaching for weapons. But when Elrond said, "Look!" his voice held only a quiet awe.
So three Elves and one Man stood on a bluff over a sea choked with the wreckage of a dead Age, and peered out into blank blackness.
"I see nothing," Celebrimbor muttered. He squinted, tried to focus further into the haze. He could discern no shapes, no moon or stars or ship-shadows or even - "oh," he said again. "I see nothing!"
Not even any little flecks drifting down on the air: the ash-fall had ended.
There came then a great onrushing of wind, an exhalation, and it was chilly and clean. It lifted their hair back like gentle hands from a time half-forgotten, and awoke in Celebrimbor something loud and bright. He wanted to weep and dance at the same time.
Elros had thrown his arms wide, and Gil-Galad was laughing and laughing. And with a whisper that turned into a roar, the rain swept over them.
The rain came in from the Sea and walked across that land, sometimes skipping, sometimes stamping. It washed the decks of partly-finished ships and tapped at the roofs of tents, where councillors ran outside with their lamps. It called forth parents clutching the hands of their children, worms from the soil, fish from the marshes. Where once monsters crouched, the rain watered the lichen that already crept over the bones. Sleeping seeds felt it, and living grasses that bloom after fire, and the remaining trees; salvagers and sailors, healers and lords. The rivers drank deep.
Soaked at the edge of the new world, Elrond began to sing. And the others joined in, too, not needing to ask each other where they had learned it or what it meant to them, or what it would grow to mean later. All they needed to do was lend their voices:
Haiyanóriessë
Untanë i sírë
Cenien Eär ar laisien immo
Sí i ulo lanta
Lindal' imya lírë
Enyalielyan, a melda hlarindo.