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“I am a monster,” she says, watching her sons walk in through the door, gingerly stepping over the corpses. She holds out her arms in a threatening gesture. Her sleeves are torn, jewelry missing, fingers dripping with blood.
“I am a monster,” she repeats as one of her sons pulls out his sword, as his brother attempts to swaddle her in a cloak, whispering that she is their mother, the lady Celebrían, that she is safe and all will be well in time.
Her voice is steady, her eyes blank. “They made me a monster.”
---
Her sons have sworn to hunt the Orcs to the ends of Arda for making their beautiful, wise, gentle mother believe she is somehow flawed.
Their father is helpless to stop them, and Celebrían’s words fail to appear, as she watches that final, fatal day in her captivity play over and over in her mind.
Her fear. Her rage.
Blood on her sword, blood on her fingers, and words of power tumbling over her tongue, calling the underground city to ruin. The detached wonder at the beauty of a firestorm as it was sucking air out of their shelters.
So many faces, bent and twisted, and grim, and even fair, now permanently set in horror.
They had only wanted a hostage in exchange for gold, or better, grain, salt and smoked meat. To survive the winter. But one of them foolishly attempted to threaten her, and then - there is a gap in her memory until she is forcing the flames down into the tunnels, watching her guards pop silently like firecrackers, the roar in her ears masking all other sounds. Watching the figures turn black, her clothes slowly getting covered in ash and tar and the smell that she knows is never going to leave her.
What has she done?
She falls to her knees, overwhelmed, and has to be given a calming draught, and once again she fails to explain that by them she did not mean the Orcs.
She already knows she will have to sail, or nobody will ever be safe from her mind snapping and her hands calling for the power that was born of her mother, but forged into the weapon by her guardian long ago, designed for bringing fire and death.
---
They sent her to Doriath just before she reached adulthood. To watch and learn how to protect your kingdom, they said, but she suspected that she had begun asking too many inconvenient questions.
She had overheard that she was not the only child of her parents, who were feared and obeyed by all. Her siblings, such as they were, were not deemed to be deserving of a name, or a life, and the less discrete servants mourned that instead of placing them at the crossroads, as the custom demanded, they had been conveniently lost in the forest. No child of Galadriel’s would be picked up by the other side, no son of Celeborn’s would grow into an Orc.
Celebrían was plagued by dreams of lost siblings, by violent rages flying sparks out of her fingertips that made her mother mention her own uncle Fëanor in awe and worry, but she was beautiful, and she had learned to be quiet, and she was allowed to grow up.
In Doriath she went by Laiwen, green-maiden, the least queenly name she could assume, and she was explicitly instructed never to mention her parentage, except to the King and Queen. She got adopted as Melian’s youngest ward, and was taught how to set the snares to ensure the protection of their realm and the confusion of any passerby, how to concentrate her outbursts, sharpen them until sparks turned into a firestorm and wind into a gale that could take down mountains, how to amplify her rage and infuse it into the creatures they had woven together out of nightmares and set to roam the lands between their city and the iron kingdom in the North.
She was their hidden power and their secret weapon, and would become one for Lórien as well.
Celebrían knew her parents had lived in Doriath before she was born, but nobody would tell her why they left, nor could she inquire openly without admitting her identity. But she was curious, and learned to be secretive, and climbed the rafters in the wide halls of Menegroth to listen to the rumors circulating between the guards, to the whispers of Melian’s maidens.
They painted a picture of a proud kinsman of Elu Thingol and of the most powerful rebel of the Noldor save their leader, who had fallen in love, and were given the task to protect Doriath. Together, Celeborn and Galadriel had scorched the lands for miles around and washed them with blood, and left them barren as a threat to Morgoth himself, but eventually their methods of interrogating the captives left the court clamoring for punishment. So Melian imposed another exile, the most lenient sentence she could craft, and even as she cast them out, she humbly offered Galadriel to teach her daughter.
She did it out of fear of creating another enemy, just as powerful as the Enemy was, Celebrían thought, her heart breaking, and just as brutal. All the rules she had grown up with now stood in a new light: the law of always shooting first, the terrified silence of the guards... The dungeons under Cerin Amroth, strictly forbidden and shrouded in a muffled mist.
---
Celebrían swore to escape from Lórien as soon as she grew up, but before she could put her feeble plans into action, a young Elven lord came to visit, begrudgingly invited by her parents, and she felt like a minor sun had burst in her chest. In her joy, as violent as her rage, she had burned an entire grove of mallorns. But when he found her among the charred branches, curled up in shame and guilt, he only laughed, and took her in his arms, and promised that the ashes will make the soil more fertile, and trees will grow again. He was not afraid of Celebrían’s moods, and joked that she would be the perfect Lady of his newly built home, the Last Homely House, the home for the broken and the lost, and in any case she was perfect for him.
What could Celebrían do but follow him home?
She sang as she rode out of Lórien, behind the Lord of Rivendell, her beloved, and singing she rode into the battle when an alliance of Men and Elves fought at the gates of Mordor. Her song turned into a lament as they spent interminable years in the siege, entrenched, slowly dying of illness and despair. And still her parents had shut off their kingdom and refused to send their armies to join the alliance, and would not offer any aid, not even when hunger and sickness began to decimate the companies of Men.
Celebrían learned the art of healing there, in the trenches, where sometimes she would work on her troops and the enemy soldiers laid side by side, and could hardly see the difference. She fought there too, with sword and spear, as she had learned back in Doriath, but Elrond helped her keep her power from raining fire above the heads of enemies and defenders both.
Over the centuries that came after, she taught her children how to heal, but never told them about the rest.
---
It only took one moment of fear, of loneliness away from her family, and the nagging worry about ever seeing them again. She was kept with all honors that would have been awarded to a foreign emissary, in rooms, which, she suspected, rivaled those of most inhabitants of this underground city that she could not make herself call a lair. But days had stretched into weeks without hearing about whether Rivendell would meet the demands of the Orcs, and Celebrían’s dreams had returned.
It only took one young guard threatening her with a spear as she was being shepherded to the main hall to discuss the ransom, and something in her mind snapped.
And then she saw her sons walk in, and blood all over her hands.