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Few knew of the daughter–line of Arwen Undomiel. Fewer still spoke of it, for some did not recognise it to be a true line, and others knew best to keep it secret. Arwen’s daughter was, after all, not of her blood, even if she had poured eighty years of motherhood into the little human girl she called Nolya, after her dark, dark hair.
Arwen’s ward, the girl had been addressed, with no small amount of derision by those who considered Arwen something of a child still, a thousand years before they proclaimed her Luthien reborn. Daughter, Arwen had preferred, and among those she loved best, she had made it known.
It was something the youth of Elvenkind were prone to do; ere so often the bleeding–hearted would take on an Edain ward and raise them in the cloisters of the Eldar, love them for their short, bright lives, and mourn them long after they died. Inevitably, they would take solace in the immortality of their kin, and hold their mellowed pain distantly from themselves as a bittersweet warning of the perils that came from loving the mortal, until the pain was no more than a fleeting malaise.
Mortality is not something elves often have to contend with, not if they do not choose it. Many turn their face away from death, after the first, the tenth, the hundredth mortal they have grown to care for, as daughters and brothers and friends. Not Arwen, though. Not Arwen, who has for so long walked the thin line between mortality and eternity and found solace in neither: not Arwen, who has yearned for both.
So the fears she held of aloneness and of loss – she let them burn bright in her breast, and she loved as wholly as she could, and never once did she let the pain dim in the long years after her daughter died, for to forget was to dishonour, and Arwen would not do that to one she had loved so dearly.
***
It was curiosity in the daughter line of Arwen Undomiel, that each would bear greater resemblance to her than their blood kin, and more curious still that they had been gifted with seer sight, like that of Elrond, who had not so much cared for little Nolya as he had dreaded the effects of her death on his own daughter.
Afterwards, Elrond had been the one to put the shattered pieces of Arwen back together. Nolya had lived a long life, longer still than most of menkind, and borne a daughter with the mortal man she had loved – yet there was no solace in this, not for Arwen, who was, at the end of all things, no more than yet another mother whose child had been taken from her too soon. And for years, Elrond would hold in his heart a cold and terrible terror that Arwen would fade, as elvenkind did when their hearts broke. But Arwen did not fade, and the steel came slowly back into her eyes, and Elrond was eased.
She would do it all over again though, for her daughter’s daughter, and for the daughters that came after that. These were no motherless children, so Arwen had become a guardian in the night, who would love them from afar, and protect them if ever they strayed from their mothers’ eyes. She would lose them too, and herself each time to grief – never so great as the first, but Elrond would be gripped by old fears, and rue her affections towards the secondborn. But Arwen was strong; defiance had been seared into her upper lip since the day she was born, and with time, she no longer needed Elrond to put her back together, doing so herself. So it was: the love that Arwen gave and the heartbreak she endured, for mortals and their fleeting lives.
And then the line was lost. If Elrond were honest, his was no small relief. It unnerved him that this mortal line Arwen had chosen as her own would look so like her; more still that they possessed his own seer sight, which only few of elvenkind possessed on middle earth, and none through unblooded lines. Most, that he would see these girls sometimes, in the gardens of Imladris, and think them Arwen; then they would turn and he would see the wrinkles that lined their faces, the silver in their hair and he would think – this is how mortality would look upon my own daughter – this is how she would die.
***
In some things, Arwen was unchanging. Her stubborn love for the secondborn did not fade with time, though four hundred years had passed since mortals strayed into Imladris. Elrond had reconciled himself to it, by then, for there was really little else to do, and he decided that while he might never understand his daughter, at the very least he would accept her.
It was no surprise then that Arwen had fallen in love with a mortal man. A great man and a good one too, Elrond had thought, finding some solace in the thought. But this love, he knew, would break her as no other had before. And so it was with a heavy heart Elrond had sailed to the shores of Valinor, knowing that he would never again see his daughter, so great a measure of his heart – and how had Arwen endured this pain for so many, and so long?
Understanding touched him then, for the first time like smoke, only to dissipate into the sea spray of his last journey homeward. Arwen did not know it then – and perhaps it would have only ever brought her grief, if she were to know – but never again would Elrond be the same, for Arwen is gone from him, to a place he cannot follow. And though time softens the touch of death, Elrond Perendhel is more like his daughter than he knows, there on his carven ship, and he will cradle his memory of her in grief and love until the end of the world.
***
Strange that a thousand years onwards, more than five centuries after she has lost her daughter line, Arwen would see the face of Nolya again – a shadow in the White City amongst the mourners for her husband. The dead encircle me, Arwen would think, the dead and dear. My time on Arda comes swiftly to an end. Sorrow had been fresh in her heart then, and she did not wish to linger on old ghosts when Aragorn, who looked as he did in life still, as if he were dreaming, had not yet been lain in his grave. So Arwen had not sought out the shadow girl, and did not find her to be warm of flesh and blood.
So it is for the girl too: she is not Nolya, and she knows not how close then she stood to her forebear, the pinnacle of her mother line. She is Anduíl, after the river; she is newly come to the White City, and her daughter’s daughter will wed into the line of Gondor’s kings.
And so the line of Arwen would be as one: the first, her daughter line, and her bloodline, the second: two halves of Arwen come together at last.
(This is not of idle significance. This is fate, in its many–faceted forms. The bloodlines of Aragorn King are fate–makers, and have been long before the vainglory of Elendil. The daughter–lines of Arwen Undomiel are fate–breakers, and they will evermore possess the defiance of their forebear.)
***
Arwen Undomiel has been called many things in her life. Daughter to Elrond, Granddaughter to Galadriel. Evenstar, and Luthien reborn. Queen Consort of Gondor, to Elessar, King of Men. These are all titles that have been bestowed upon her, for such things matter in the tales that make you legend.
There is one title she claimed for herself, though. Mother, long before she was writ into history, against the workings of flesh and blood. She had cleaved her very soul apart, and spilled a little into her daughter when this she had proclaimed, and such acts of love, of such fierce defiance – leave their mark upon the world, carve divots so deep into the riverbeds of fate that no tide can turn them loose.
So, long after she is forgotten, this will be Arwen’s legacy: her daughter–line, hard fought and improbably kept – will endure. Theirs will be the love of newer legends, of briefer legends; theirs will be the courage of older kings and golden ages of men. Theirs will be the spirit of Arwen Undomiel, who endures still within them, and theirs will be the defiance which changes the world.