Chapter Text
Imladris, spring, Third Age 2908
Elladan Peredhel had a good little sackful of experiences he wished would sink into his subconscious the way memories did for mortal men. Not least among them the recollected feel of dragging his scalpel across the abdomen of Arassuil’s wife two minutes after her fëa had winged into the West, in a last-ditch attempt to get that baby out and save one of them, at least.
He had managed to do neither, and the repercussions of it were still echoing down the House’s halls, empty now of a Dúnedain heir for four generations. Arassuil in his grief and fury had even come for the shards and the scepter. Elladan had thought his father touched to give them up, but they had never been Elrond’s for anything more than the keeping. Isildur’s heir had taken them and might as well have burned the bridge behind him.
He and Elrohir had tried hard to repair the rift. But within a chieftain’s span the Peredhil were no longer welcomed in the settlements of the Dúnedain. Three hundred years had passed, and the remembrance of their friendship with the Elves was fading into myth. The folk of Westernesse grew shorter memories and stiffer necks, their already-dwindling numbers weeded ever faster by misfortune and disease.
It tormented he and Elrohir badly, and their father. A long alliance scattered to the wind like chaff. They had their sources still, but the news was never good. Plagues, and lesser illnesses that scythed them down like plagues. Returns into old practices and older superstitions. The pressing influences of lower-minded men. Fewer children, fewer villages. The Rangers keeping more to their own, their watch of the North turning ever inward.
He remembered still with a particularly sharp clarity the words of his friend, Arahad’s son, the man he himself had helped to make in those fosterling years spent in the Valley, the blood of his wife still wet on the floor: a butcher and the son of a butcher bloody-handed bastard but I will show you blood if you show your face here as long as I am living or the sons of my line…
Which is why the sight of the woman there in the doorway, tall and dark-haired and Númenorean in the bearing and the bones and the eye even from the corner of his own, made him think for a moment he was glimpsing the ghost of old alliances.
Until she squared her shoulders and strode toward him and stopped and bowed like a man. Tied high on her back, a dove-eyed, mop-headed toddler with its thumb in its mouth. She straightened and drew a good breath and said with the scantest tremble in her voice, “My lord. I am Ivorwen of the house of Dírhael of the Dúnedain, and I have come to beg a boon.”