Chapter Text
Mithlond, summer, Third Age 2541
The old lighthouse-knoll stood far out across the rocky surf, and it was Arwen who discovered the sandbar hidden by an ankle’s-depth of merrily gleaming seawater.
“Does it go all the way over?” said Súlneth, already hiking up her skirt to knot above her knees.
Laurelandë lost her balance a-purpose to sit down hard in the sand. She pulled free one shoe and held it. Arwen’s were already off and discarded, there in a heap on her cloak; she was shin-deep out in the surf, bending to see some beach-creature.
“Ooh, there are sea-stars,” she said, and straightened, and shielded her eyes to look out at the lighthouse. “It’s like a bridge. See where the water breaks over it? We could walk straight across.”
“I’m not sure that we should walk straight across,” said Laurelandë, staying uncommitted with one foot still safely shod.
Súlneth said, “Come on, stop being unfun.”
“I’m not.”
“You are! Turned thirty-six and now you think you’re too old for adventures.”
“I’m not too old for adventures! I’m just too old for stupid ones.”
Arwen turned and let a breaker chase her up onto the dry beach. She cast herself down beside Laurelandë and looped their arms together and swept her hand out in a grand sketch across the skyline.
“Here we are, Laure.”
Laurelandë sighed mightily.
“Here on the sea. Have you heard of the sea, Laure? Look at it. Doesn’t it just make you think of…”
“Seasickness?”
“Númenor, I was going to say. Tall ships with foam spitting up from their bows like snow.”
“Tossing my cookies.”
“Yes, well, that was… I’m sorry. At least Elladan bent you over the deck-rail in time. You would’ve got Lady Vorindë square on the slippers.”
“Yes, thank you for reminding me.”
Arwen laid her head against Laurelandë’s. “You won’t have to get in a boat. We can just walk out to the lighthouse and poke around. The water is shallow.” She lowered her voice. “Look at it. There’s the causeway, and the gate. Look at the tower. Tol-Sirion, she was once, until the dark lord brought the wolves…”
“You are such a lunatic,” laughed Laurelandë, and pushed Arwen over in the sand.
They left their shoes and cloaks on the beach and waded down the shallow shoal while the little fish darted up to investigate their silver anklets that sparked white beneath the sunstruck water.
The lighthouse had stood unlit now for a century or more as the waves reshaped the seashore. Its skeletal trusses and the way the seabreeze moaned through its empty lantern-windows gave Súlneth a good little goose up the back of her neck. She said, “Do you think the keeper died up there?”
Arwen snorted. “Of what, boredom?”
Súlneth lowered her voice and said in grave and ominous tones, “Don’t you know the spirits of men dwell in the places they’ve abandoned?”
Laurelandë doubled over laughing. “I bet you’re afraid of wisps, and bogeys, too, and things that go bump in your closet at night!”
“I am not!”
“Gnomes! Trolls under bridges! Oh, come on, Súl, I’m only teasing. Don’t march off in a huff, I’m sorry, I’ll be finished now…”
Arwen ignored them both and leapt up onto the belly of the old lightkeeper’s dingy, which lay upturned and abandoned in the hissing seagrass. The wind whipped her skirt and lifted her hair like a black and billowing standard.
She muttered and snagged it and spit some of it out of her mouth and tied the whole wad in a great big knot and stuffed it down the back of her shirt. “Let’s go,” she said, “I can see the door is open.”
The lighthouse was built straight up from a bedrock of stones and there was a cellar beneath it, though the ladder was gone. Now a hole in the floor gaped straight down into the rocky vault, the boards broken like teeth. Enough light came in through the windows that they could see the bottom a long drop below, and the jagged walls full of… handholds.
Arwen looked up into Laurelandë’s eyes and grinned.
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