Chapter Text
Aman was as fair as Fingon remembered, even lit by the harsh sun and inconstant moon rather than the gentle and steady light of the trees. In some ways, it had grown fairer, the majesty of the stars hanging above as he walked down the beach and loathed the beauty of this cage.
They had been kind to him in Tirion, welcoming Fingon home with fierce embraces from his brothers, a tight clasp of hands from his father, and cheek-kisses from his mother. In Alqualondë, they had allowed with grace Fingon’s bent-kneed apology. But they all expected him to be happy. Oh, they respected some of Fingon’s grief: they shared his sorrow that Aredhel had yet to return to them, pitied his pain in a fiery death. Idril even assured him that she understood the difficulty of having a child on the far shore, as if Eärendil was not now returned to her arms.
Not one of them had spoken Maedhros’s name. Fingon had been reduced to begging to discover his fate. When Idril finally proved herself the most courageous of their house by looking him in the eyes and speaking plainly, Fingon had walked from the palace, from the city, and down to the sea. He travelled north along the coast, a mirror of what he imagined Maglor was doing on the far shore, a shared grief hanging between them like Eärendil and his Silmaril in the sky above.
If he kept walking north, he would hit the Ice, and then what? The bridge to Beleriand – indeed, Beleriand itself – no longer existed, but what was to stop him from walking out onto it? From dying as he should have, all those years ago.
“Excuse me,” the elleth sitting on a log of driftwood said, “are you lost?”
Her voice was polite, and though she had addressed him in Beleriand’s most commonly understood tongue of Quenya, he caught the accent of Doriath on her tongue. By bitter irony, it sounded closer to Fëanarian than any other.
“Only by intent,” he said, and mutual recognition overcame them as Fingon stared into the eyes of Elwing Dioriel. They were dark but sharp in their wit.
“Idril sent a letter,” she said, “asking Eärendil to keep an eye out for you. I wonder if she foresaw that I would be the one to find you instead.”
“And what has the Queen of the Sindar, Lady of the Tower of Stars, sitting in the middle of a beach in the middle of nowhere long past star-rise?”
She pointed out over the sea, to a small island nearby marked by a tower, nearly invisible in the moonlight. “I live here.”
He wondered if she wandered from her tower at night from grief, regret, fear, or some miserable combination of the three. It must have been a brutal thing to drag her not just from the building, but across the water entirely.
Elwing beckoned him to a seat on the log beside her, and together they regarded the Silmaril traversing the night, the cause of their loneliness. He was seized, rather irrationally, by a desire to protect this clearly-miserable ex-monarch, though he knew that he was in large part responsible for her pain. If he had been braver, had listened to Maedhros that day on the mountain…
No, even now the idea sickened him.
“Idril also wrote,” Elwing said, “that it was the news of Sirion, of the fate of Maedhros, that sent you flying from the arms of your family.”
“He was my husband, by the old laws.”
“Is,” said Elwing, “lest you mean to tell me that Valinor has had a sudden burst of legal progressivism, or else you mean to renounce him as your grandfather did Míriel.”
It occurred to Fingon that, if he did intend to renounce Maedhros and repeat history, Fëanor might incite the Dagor Dagorath out of sheer insulted fury.
“Is, then. He is my husband, and I am sorry for all that has befallen you because of my actions.”
“Do you apologize because you wish you had acted differently, or simply because you pity me?”
It was a hard question, but not a cruel one, and there was no malice in Elwing’s tone as she asked it. If she felt hatred then it was rather like his own, a general fury directed at the nature of the world.
“Neither,” he said eventually, though it took longer for him to be sure of the honest answer than he would have liked. “Though my head knows you would have been spared much pain if I had killed him when he asked me to, my heart cannot wish to see him hurt, least of all at my own hand. And I do not pity you. I envy you, more than I have words to say.”
Elwing’s expression was to Fingon as inscrutable as that of the moon above. “You are both straightforward and honest. That is rare, I have found, among elves.”
Fingon had counted many dear friends among the men of Hithlum, and recalled how forward they were with their passions, of love and hate. He missed it.
“I am not always so blunt, when not overcome with grief.”
She nodded her understanding, and it occurred to Fingon that Elwing understood him even as she had every cause to loathe him. They together turned their attention to the firmament, to the faint music of distant stars. He remembered Turgon and Finrod running around arguing over what stars really looked like, after Grandfather first described them. Equally, he remembered seeing their full glory for the first time with painful horror as the light of the trees was stolen from them.
“I would ask you something,” said Elwing, “though I hold you under no obligation to answer.”
“Ask.” It was the least of what he owed her.
“Was there any reason they wanted them, besides the Oath and the simple beauty of them?”
It was not the question Fingon had been expecting, but it occurred to him then that he was nearly the last person left in Aman who was close enough to know.
“It depends who you mean. Fëanor’s sons wanted to make him proud. Fëanor, I have heard it said, poured more than just the light of the trees into those jewels, though in truth I had no occasion to ask him. We all wanted very badly to avenge Finwë, and you must remember that at that time it never occurred to them that the oath would give them cause to turn against any other than Morgoth and his minions. Perhaps Fëanor suspected my father of deceit when he crafted those words, but I certainly don’t think Maedhros shared that particular paranoia. What kind of person, having vanquished the enemy, would not respect the claim of a king on the craft of his own hand?”
“One with a claim of their own,” Elwing muttered bitterly, and pressed, “they had no other power by dint of their blessing, or by the tree-light they carried within them?”
Cautiously, Fingon said, “I would think that you had more experience with their actual properties than I.”
“Probably.” Once more there was silence, save the lapping of waves on the shore, and then she asked, “did Maedhros have a scar here?”
She traced a jagged line down the back of her left forearm.
“Among others. Why these questions, Dioriel?”
“My dreams are dark and strange,” she said. As Fingon envisioned her chased from her bed by nightmares of Maedhros, Elwing hurriedly added, “not in the way you imagine. I dream that we fall together into the sea, Silmarils suspended between us, and sometimes my body is his and his is mine and for all the world we are as one being with a thousand wounds. I dream we fall not through the air but through the void outside the world, in the liquid velvet that makes up all things when there is no gravity or time.”
“That is strange,” he admitted. Many elves had prophetic dreams, but even they were rarely so obtuse as this.
Rather abruptly, she said, “I’m sorry too.”
“What in Vairë’s weavings could you possibly have to be sorry for? You can no more regret your course than I regret mine – less, indeed, for yours brought the peace and safety to Beleriand that even Maedhros, when not ruled by his oath, would gladly have given his life for.”
“I pity you,” Elwing confessed, the blow of the words little softened by the quiet way in which she said them. “I can hardly imagine being you, but I can imagine rather keenly being him, alone in despair and ruled by the Silmaril. And so I pity you, for the fact that you are returned home and yet cannot bear to face your parents. For the loss of your husband, in spite of himself, and for the fact that you had to truly consider whether it would have been better to see him dead than alive.”
“You too are honest for an elf.”
“My grandfather’s blood, perhaps. I also feel kinship with the fact that you did not have the chance to raise your son.”
She won more praise than she knew for calling Gil-galad his son with no qualifiers. Though in Beleriand no one had dared say anything to his face, this was Valinor, where even the most powerful of the Noldor had been hounded over his parentage. Olwë had suggested that Fingon had ‘handpicked the current king on the far shore’ as if there had been political calculus behind loving his son. Even Fingon’s mother had put her foot in her mouth by blithely calling Gil a ‘ward’.
“Do you have much word of your son…”
“Elrond. Sometimes. He is positioned at your son’s right hand, these days.”
“Would you tell me what you know of them?” Elwing’s stories were far more likely to be personal than the primarily-political news in Tirion, which could tell him little of Gil-galad’s heart, whether he was happy and loved.
“I think,” she said, “that you had best come inside with me. Eärendil can tell you in the morning what he sees of Gil-galad, as compensation for my rudeness in interrogating you.”
“That was already forgiven,” Fingon said, but he followed her invitation, and from that night on they were unlikely friends.
--
Fingon adopted his only son on his wedding day, such as it was, and in his mind, his love for them grew together, stronger by the association, like squash and corn. Maedhros came to Barad Eithel so rarely – too busy guarding, watching the Enemy – but that day he rode in, plainly exhausted and sweaty and scarred and beautiful, and there was a child, perhaps five or six, balanced on the horse in front of him. Gil, tiny, with a fuzz of blonde hair, and perfect, spent the first hour of their acquaintance hiding behind Maedhros while Fingon and his father tried to ply him with sweets. He spent the second hour on Maedhros’s lap, listening silently and attentively as they conducted affairs of state, and in the third, he tentatively made his way over to Fingon, and asked if he could tell a story instead, because this was boring, and Fingon didn’t think he’d ever loved anybody more than he loved Gil in that moment.
“I can’t look after him,” Maedhros said that night, in Fingon’s bed. “I could love him – of course I could – but I couldn’t be any kind of father to him, and I certainly couldn’t leave him there. They’d started eating his parents. The only reason the orcs didn’t find him is because one of the adults was smart enough to hide him near the midden and it confused their sense of smell.”
“You don’t have to worry,” Fingon assured him, “but if I am to keep him – and I intended to, for as long as he and the Valar will let me – then I want to keep you too. I know you can’t make me an oath, but will you let me call you husband anyways? I would like to wake tomorrow with my husband in my arms and have breakfast with our son.”
It did happen that night and morning, but only the once.
--
Fingon made his home in Valinor deep inland, near the Woods of Oromë, with only recently-reborn Aredhel for company, and her only rarely, for she wandered long weeks at a time through verdant Valinor. He kept the hearth in the evening and tended the gardens in the morning. She sometimes left him something dead as a gift like a strange cat, and they tried not to resent each other for being there when those they missed were not.
The only person who Fingon really found tolerable was Elwing. She alone never seemed to think Fingon foolish or deluded for his continued grief, merely accepting it as a piece of him.
He ought to make his way to visit again soon. He had not for a few years now and Elwing at times isolated herself as much as Fingon did. She suffered more for it, vulnerable to her darkest thoughts in the way only those with mortal blood could be.
Eru had a sense of humour, sometimes, for no sooner than Fingon had finished this thought than a seagull crash-landed in his pond, and he dropped his trowel in surprise. Birds in the pond were not unusual – indeed, they were the reason it was no longer a ‘fish pond’ and now simply a ‘pond’ – but it was too deep inland for gulls and for this one to land so hard it must surely have been injured or exhausted.
He reached towards the water, prepared to rescue a bird, and an elven hand clasped his arm and pulled herself up. Elwing, who had always insisted that she could not repeat the miracle of transformation that Ulmo had visited upon her, emerged dripping from the water. Lilies bobbed up and down with the waves as Fingon leveraged her onto the grass.
Joy transformed her face from the wistful grace which elves praised into the vibrant, living beauty of a woman. Breathless, she flopped onto her back and bared her throat to him like a defeated animal, so he could see the familiar and unworldly jewel embedded in the flesh at the base of her neck, trailing a pattern of glistening lines like feathers as far down her chest as Fingon cared to look. It was Eärendil’s Silmaril, surely, and Fingon remembered all Elwing’s nightmares of falling, which sometimes terrified and disoriented her so badly that she ran into his arms for comfort, mumbling nonsense about being changed and missing pieces and hitting the water.
Catching her breath, she said, “there is news from Middle Earth. I could not tell you until I was sure, both that the Valar would keep it from the ears of the elves here and that what I deduced based on Eärendil’s distant observations had transpired. But this proves it, all I had ever dreamed was true of myself and so are a thousand other things I had not thought to dream.
“I can hear the song, not faint as Melian’s blood allowed me but brash and beautiful. You carry with you brass and a rainstorm and just a hint of a viol. All elves are woven into the same songs, I think, but the piece is improvisational, a balm of beauty to my ears. If one was not required for the other I would give away the Silmaril a thousand times for the song. And the wings. I can cross the world, I can see my son, I never have to fall-”
“The news,” Fingon reminded her, not unkindly, though this in and of itself was news enough that it had him reeling.
In cascading sequences of tangents, Elwing lay on her back in the garden and told Fingon of what Eärendil had seen: a being a fire that should not have been real, that came into contact with their sons and appeared to stand against Morgoth, and was increasingly recognizable to them as something that was not older than the world after all.
“Dying with a Silmaril changes you, Fingon Narvelethron, into what yet I do not know, but I do know this: you are no widower.”
It was beyond the scope of Fingon’s spirit to imagine any joy for himself in this late age, even as Elwing smiled encouragingly at him. His mind filled with visions of Maedhros falling, of Maedhros striking molten stone and being slowly consumed even as the Silmaril held him together. What manner of creature was he now, fused to the object of his torment?
No. If he had simply become a monster, Elwing would not have spoken with such glee, for she was more kind and generous of heart than would allow her to ever mock Fingon’s grief.
“You suspected for some time?”
“Suspected,” Elwing agreed, “but would not risk rending your heart if I was wrong. Now, though, I am quite sure it was him. No doubt this destiny binding us together was the source of all my dreams.”
“And he was with Elrond?”
“Sitting as peacefully as you and I, speaking of I know not what. But it surprises me less than you think. Elros never spoke with any anger at Fëanor’s sons, though I always assumed that choice was to spare my feelings. I will know the truth of their feelings soon enough, I suppose, for it is a good deal easier to know these things by direct and honest conversation than by fleeting glances from a passing ship.”
In the haze of the revelation that Maedhros lived, he had quite forgotten. “You mean to leave? With no permission from the Valar?” She hesitated. “Why then come here, Elwing? Already you have lost precious hours that you do not have, for you must be long gone from these shores before Eärendil is wanted to sail his route.”
She gazed upon him with a withering expression. “I come not to idly gossip, Fingon. It would be the height of arrogance for Eärendil and I break the bonds under which we are held to see our son and for me to not offer the same to you, my friend, who has yearned equally for the far shore.”
“You’ll bring Eärendil? You at least might skirt Námo’s restrictions on basis of flight rather than walking, but he lacks such an excuse.”
With a prim legalism that would have done proud any of her Noldorin in-laws, Elwing said, “Our judgement was given on the basis that I was either elf or man. I am neither, thus the ruling was always in error, and is null and void. Melian, after all, was not denied entry to Valinor, nor were any conditions placed on her for coming.”
This would be war. This was madness. And yet Fingon had dared doom once before for what had in hindsight been less noble reasons than this. What purity was there in vengeance that was not a thousand times surpassed in the simple love of a father for his child?
“But how shall you bring us with you?”
Patronizingly, she told him, “I suspect, invested with the power of the Song, I can shape myself into a large enough bird to carry you and Eärendil both.”
“Bold words from someone who crashed not ten minutes past.”
Elwing, with the glee of someone blessed and about to try something very foolish, threw her head back and laughed, the light of her Silmaril shining radiantly at her throat.
--
Whatever the world would have you believe, Elrond and Elros were the most precious things in the world to both their parents, even as duty oft called them away. Eärendil wept to see how beautiful they were, squished-faced and red from squalling and hideous to any except those who adored them. Elwing, even as doubt and despair overwhelmed her, went every night to kiss their foreheads just as her mother had done for her.
Elwing did not know how to be a mother. She barely had time to learn, and her advisers did not help, cautioning her against her own children as they had against Eärendil, the halfbreed child of the dishonest Noldor. Terror and exhaustion consumed her as Fëanor’s sons closed in. Elwing’s dreams grew darker by the hour, and it filled her with fear of a mis-step to see her children waking, and yet still every night, after they fell asleep, she went to them.
She hoped that, left alone, she would have learned how to be a mother to them in the daylight, how not to be ruled by fear and grief. But Elwing never had that opportunity, and she would always hate Maedhros Fëanorion for that.
--
When Elwing extended her wings and imagined carrying with her all that she held dear, imagined the strength not just to flee from danger but to fly towards it, the changes to her form came easily. Ever since her first transformation, her body had felt incomplete, unfinished in a way she had always assumed had to do with the absence of her children. Now, her body was her own, in all its forms, attuned to her wants and sense of self.
Fingon, an experienced rider of Manwë’s eagles, never seemed anything less than confident in her abilities, for all that he had teased her, but Eärendil, when he met them at the coast after bidding his mother goodbye, held on far more tightly with mortal anxiety.
“Far be it for me to ask this of you of all people,” Fingon said, “but are you afraid of heights?”
“You know,” Eärendil said, with some trepidation, “I believe you are the first to ever accuse me of that.”
“Is it true?”
Elwing felt the veracity of Fingon’s guess even as Eärendil said, “well, I did almost fall to my death as a child.”
Fingon shifted his position on her back, and it took Elwing a moment to realize that he had moved closer to allow Eärendil to wrap his arms about Fingon’s waist. “That we might be more gentle on Elwing,” he said, and her heart warmed rather with affection for them both: Eärendil, subjected to centuries of something he loathed and willing to face it again for her, and Fingon, fretting over the most minor of discomforts at a time like this.
They passed over Númenor, fair cities and fields of this island paradise, and though Elwing yearned to linger, to see those of Elros’s blood who remained there, the urgency of her cause drew her on. She stretched her wings all the further and reached out to the tendrils of the Song, to the very makeup of space and time, to speed their way, for already they were touching the beginnings of the sunset, rays reaching from behind them like the fingers of the Valar stretching out to halt them in their tracks.
All things considered their passage was easy enough, as the passage of time and the direction of their flight brought them into twilight and then to dusk. As Fingon and Eärendil worked to entertain her with lively conversation, none of the three noticed the seas growing choppy until dark clouds began to form around them.
“Manwë?” Fingon said, a hint of real fear in his voice, but Elwing tasted the salt on the air, heard the crash of waves not just below them but in the Song itself.
Ossë, she corrected, and the storm around them erupted in earnest, streaking rain and buffeting winds pushing her off course as Fingon was forced to fist his hands in her feathers.
There’s an island, Eärendil told her, pressing the image of ruins down the bond of their marriage. If we are flying north now as I believe, it is less than an hour away, and we might seek shelter from the storm in those abandoned buildings.
Fingon burst into laughter that threatened to unseat him when they first saw the blackened ruins, and did not explain why until they had set down, Elwing’s wings retreating to hover ghostly behind her elven back.
“Welcome,” he said, with an expansive gesture of his arms, “to Himring.” And though there was precious little of beauty to be found here, he ushered them into his husband’s ruined fortress with as much hospitality as if it were a palace.
--
It was incredible how much capacity the presence of a child had to make a place into a home, to alchemically alter stone walls into gold-coated halls of laughter and light. Gil-galad was not an uncomplicatedly joyous child (who could have been, so tormented by nightmares of things he barely recalled on waking) but Fingon held no fear of nightmares, and Gil-galad blossomed under his attention, delighting in Fingon’s time more than he did any material object.
“He is perfect,” Fingon told his father, “I doubt I ever seemed half so flawless.”
Fingolfin nodded his agreement, and Fingon was not sure if he should take this as compliment or insult. But what Fingolfin said next was neither:
“Has it occurred to you that Gil-galad may be trying harder to please you than you ever tried to please me?”
“I’ve tried very hard to make you proud!”
“And you have,” Fingolfin reassured, “in a thousand ways. But you have always known, I hope, that you could do less than nothing to earn my love and you would still have it always, for that is the way of parents and children, when all is right with the world. Gil-galad will have less certainty.”
“He is my son.”
“He is. But you forget, I suspect, that I know what it is to be the child of a family that elven society does not recognize. Fëanor and Findis bore the brunt of it as the eldest, but they were not alone in being the subject of staring. Gil-galad will know that people do not treat him fully as yours. He will work harder than you ever did to be worthy of your favour, if you do not convince him otherwise.”
“Did you?” Fingon asked. His father rarely spoke of his childhood, though it had shaped all of their fates.
“We did,” Fingolfin said, with a weight in his voice that told Fingon more than he had ever known before about Fëanor’s reasons for hating Fingolfin.
Fingon was still devoting himself to the task of convincing Gil-galad that his love was unconditional when Morgoth’s flames swept across Beleriand and, as the newly-crowned High King, he found he had less and less time for his son. As orcs closed in and the course of the alliance that would either cement their glory or shatter their hopes grew clear, Fingon sent him away, promising himself that he would ensure Gil-galad knew how well loved he was as soon as they reunited.
“Whatever happens,” he said, kissing his son’s hair, “you are my Ereinion, Scion of Kings.”
It was the last thing Fingon had ever said to him, and when he heard that to all the world the High King of the Noldor in Middle Earth was known as Ereinion Gil-galad, his heart ripped apart within him.
--
When at last the storm subsided, Elwing, Fingon, and Eärendil ventured out to find that, as proof of its unnatural character, there was no remaining trace of clouds in the sky. The stars above them, for the first time in a thousand years, contained no Silmaril.
Eärendil, uncharacteristic of an elf, shivered and rubbed his hands together. Elwing wrapped an ephemeral wing and a flesh-and-blood arm both around him, a gentle reminder of the fact that, despite all their tragedy, these two lovers had survived.
“That will baffle them in Middle Earth,” Fingon said, and wondered if in Valinor they had yet realized what had happened. He wondered how long it would take for anyone to realize that he too was missing, and abruptly wished he had left a note for Aredhel.
Elwing hummed her agreement at his words, but Eärendil, craning his neck up towards the stars, whispered, “I had forgotten what they looked like all together.”
“They’re fair indeed,” Elwing said, “you did not deserve to be robbed of the right to see them, a child of starlight equal to all others.”
She was a Sinda, of course, and counted among the greatest gifts of elvenkind the ability to see the stars.
Fingon, who had twice forfeited a place in paradise in pursuit of starlight, was not inclined to disagree with her, and as Eärendil burst into sobbing, Fingon too discreetly wiped away a tear.
--
Eärendil taught her to sail when they were first courting, more an excuse for the two of them to find privacy than anything else. She remembered lying on her back on the floor of a rocking boat, resisting nausea as they watched the stars, the only steady points in their shifting world. Elwing had so rarely had moments in her life of true peace, but in that moment, with Eärendil half naked beside her, she understood why Thingol had loved the stars enough to give up Valinor for them. No beauty ever could have compared to this.
--
Uinen emerged from the water in the pre-dawn light, when normally Eärendil would have been the last star in the sky, looking as gentle and fair as a mortal maid possibly could. Her form was soft and rounded, with brown skin and wavy hair that reached far down her back. Naught but the lines of gills upon her neck and the reeds that marked her in the music showed that she was other than human.
Fingon, with that instinctive courtly grace possessed by all the Noldor of his generation, bowed deeply to her, and kissed her hand. Though he must have been as frightened as Elwing felt, there was no sign of it in his appearance.
“I am sorry,” Uinen said, “for the fact that you were waylaid. Ossë and I had intended that he would obscure you from Varda’s sight, that we might speak when you reached the far shore, but he grew somewhat overly enthusiastic.”
“Your aid is most humbly appreciated, kindest and most gentle lady,” Eärendil replied, with his own Gondolin-trained politeness.
“I would ask,” said Elwing, who came from the Sindarin tradition whereby the king and queen had no obligation to bow to anyone, “how you came to know of our coming, and what cause you had to speak with us.”
Uinen’s lips curved in a mysterious smile as she sat upon a fallen chunk of what must have long-ago been the walls. “As you wish, little cousin. I knew of your coming because you have become one of us, at least in the greater part. You are something between water and air, but I believe your affinity and name to be closer to our own province, as Flame-called-Maedhros is closer to the spirits of fire than those of stone. And so I recognized your coming as one of my own, and knew what you were because I had heard, from Water-following-the-circumpolar-current, who had it from Water-that-nourishes-the-goldberry-bush herself, of the changing of Maedhros Fëanorion. It was for this reason that I wished to speak to you.”
Elwing caught a second of naked desperation on Fingon’s face.
“I would hear what you have to say,” she told Uinen. “For one who calls me kin and willingly protects me from the Queen of the Heavens, an ear is the least I might lend.”
“You may regret it,” Uinen cautioned, “when you hear the extent of my message. For you must know that, if your cause in flying here is to seek war or vengeance upon Maedhros Olnor, you will not make it to land.”
Fingon’s eyebrows rose nearly to his hairline with surprise, but he rallied quickly to say, “she does not, Lady Uinen. Indeed, my presence marks peace between us.”
“Quite so,” said Elwing, who loved Fingon, but would have murdered his husband had need required it. Or if Elrond had asked her to. “But I would know the reason for your ultimatum nonetheless.”
“Before time, the Valar and we greater Maiar and our little siblings were all entwined, in the making of our Song. But those who sang fire – needed and glorious fire, that brings life, allows it to erupt at the bottoms of the sea and sustain itself on land – were ripped from us, sundered and cast out, their minds and bodies not their own, and the heart of the world that should have been their palace was made into a prison. Though the Valar rarely came into contact with such lowly beings as the sprits of lava flows, among the smaller spirits of our world there is not a one who did not know one lost to Melkor. It is true of the currents of the ocean and the smallest of the stars and every hunting hound in Oromë’s train. I am the only maia among us to ever carry one back from Melkor’s corruption, and he corrupted only later. When I tried to repeat the effort, all I gained was burns and the knowledge that my touch of water hurt them.
“We thought we had lost them for all the ages of this world, and then, one day, Goldberry, a tributary of the Branduin, found upon her banks a flame who was not bound to Melkor. And this strange flame, who did not remember the birth of the world or even his own name, brought those who we had counted lost forever home to us.”
She told them of Maedhros, figure of Elwing’s nightmares, setting free the first of Melkor’s twisted creatures, those precursors of orcs and werewolves. Impossibly, he did not turn their service to evil. Instead, he returned one to her sister.
“By that miracle,” Uinen said, “you will be hard pressed to find a spirit on these shores who would not tear their river from its banks for him. So I warn you now as I would Manwë himself, had he come. If Valinor attempts to take him from them, it will be war, whatever Olnor himself might ask of them. And we of the sea do not intend to allow our kin to come to blows again.”
There were silent tears on Fingon’s face, as there had been since Uinen had first spoken of Maedhros’s apparent amnesia.
Elwing said, “I want no war. But it would be less than honest to say it cannot follow me. The Valar may wish to see me hunted. Námo, I know, will likely not take kindly to my argument that, since I am no longer elf nor mortal, he holds now no sway over my right to leave Valinor as I see fit.”
“Likely not,” Uinen agreed, with a twinkle of amusement in her eyes. “But it is right and just that, if Eru wishes new beings of this power come amongst us, you be treated as our equals in all things. The sea will guard you even as we guard Olnor. We owe you a debt for our silence in your suffering. Ulmo my Lord knew that he did not change you and spoke not of it.”
It had not occurred to her that there was blame to be laid there, and the anger that shot through her sent not just gooseflesh but full feathers trailing down the skin of her shoulders and arms. “You all knew? All these years I was missing a piece of myself and you knew?”
“I thought,” Uinen said, primly, “that the effects of mixing elvish, mannish and maiarin blood were not fully understood. Who knows what Lúthien could have been, had Melian not coddled her so.”
Elwing, embarrassed in her own plaintiveness, begged, “but you see now that it is part of me? That I am not whole without it?”
Uinen, as graceful as the water itself, rose to her feet and took Elwing’s hands, looking into her eyes. She was near half a foot shorter than Elwing but the power of her was clear indeed. This was a goddess who had forged the world.
“I see a little sister,” Uinen repeated, “perfect in whatever forms she takes, the song of her in harmony with Arda. You are as you are meant to be, in form of woman or elf, or bird… or fish.”
There was a leading tone to her. “You would teach me?”
“Perhaps a mammal first,” Uinen said, “that change would be easier. But it would be my honour to bring you home into the sea.”
For so many centuries, since a nurse had handed her off amidst the screams of her people, all Elwing had ever wanted was to go home. This was not a home she had ever imagined, but the rightness of it, as Eärendil smiled encouragingly at her, filled her heart with possibility.