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Elwing’s memories of Doriath were fractured at best, slipping in and out of her mind like the gulls that flew through the mists surrounding Sirion appeared and vanished from sight. She could remember some things - the caves’ warmth, even in the depths of the corridors where others had not expected them to be warm; her father picking her up and twirling her around the room, promising she would be able to dance on her own one day; the taste of the cakes the cooks prepared each day, laughing and saying Dior’s children had inherited Elu’s sweet tooth.
Most of all she remembered her mother’s stories. Nimloth had promised, as solemn as any words Elwing had ever heard, that all of the ones she told were true. Galathil had sworn too that they were true, and Celeborn as well, though no others still lived who would tell Elwing of those early days.
But they had promised, had sworn, that Melian had been able to fly. That Melian had flown when they first found Elu again. That she had seldom flown in Doriath, but sometimes she had, wings appearing from her back in a sign of how she was not truly an elf. Melian, the great-grandmother Elwing had never met, who had left for Valinor but whose nightingales still sung of the past in the depths of the caves.
Elwing loved those stories, and dreamed of one day being able to fly herself, even if neither her grandmother nor her father had inherited Melian’s ability, and her father had seemed more confused by the idea than anything else.
The thought of flight itched beneath Elwing’s skin as she twisted her head this way and that, hoping as a child to see wings appearing from her back too, freedom and possibility appearing that she could not have stuck to the ground.
Elwing wanted.
She continued to want as an adult, as Eärendil found the freedom he sought in the waves, though it was mixed with the heaviness of fate pressing down upon him. Elwing thought sometimes that her own dreams were foolish, and pressed them down in her mind, beneath the constant thrum of others’ needs and wants that were her responsibility now. There was no time to dwell on dreams, not when there were decisions that had to be made and the lives of many dependent upon them.
Still, she remembered her wish sometimes, when the gulls appeared again and when other birds fluttered past the window as she worked. It was hard not to, when the birds were the only ones willing to listen and wait, nightingales appearing even when they should not have and singing as they had in Menegroth in years past.
And then the battle came, and Elwing stood before the cliff, a gull swooping down behind her.
“Please, Naneth,” she whispered as she leapt from the cliff, thinking of Doriath and flight and the great-grandmother she had never met.
And then she rose, wings unfolding around her.