Work Text:
Celeborn never made it back, she would never make it back and the brackish water around her ankles would consume her. Slithering against the withered leaves the something, the nothing with the weight of the stars inside of it carving a path through the shadows and detritus.
Words spin around her like bees. Loud and soft as they come in and out. The water is rising. She is in the desert.
Galadriel look at me
Fading is a delicate term, a cover of lace over the elven lands. Sun and stars filter through like hope and just as illusive. How many legions, her own cadre gone. Never gone, never gone, it is a gift and who is still speaking to her? Who is bright and alive and not faded?
He knows, he has known all along and she knew something. Knew she was not what she had been and knew that she was not the old Galadriel, she was gone.
How long had they been together, an endless cycle of days because she does not remember going to sleep or waking up. The Smith left her. A complete disregard for protocol that in any other place she would have secretly admired. She followed, dragging herself upwards out of the tower and back into the strange light.
Silence breaks again in her ears, in the stone around her thick with layers of words and fungal colonies.
Galadriel look at me
The Smith calls to The Commander, but that is an old name. For a different person in a different age. Now she is this, bursting new growth when all else is stunted. Intertwining with the new branches of him. They are all that is left.
The Commander left a record of her end and Galadriel knew it by heart, almost as if she had written the words herself. The other self, the water rising in the desert. A new age comes to pass. The Herald, The Star, Celeborn alive in the moldering pages inside the lighthouse.
Burning together. A room of mirrors, and none of the reflections are what they are. No longer The Smith, he is dark, frightening, he will not fade away but he will not be bright. Not her. Commander no longer, doomed no longer. The nothing of it all will not fade this new her, she will never be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the morning and the night! Fair as the sea and the sun and the snow upon the mountain!
Sauron
New names for new places between the stars and the beginnings of buds on thorny stems. She brought him back here unwilling and now they are bound. If there is any separation left between here and then she cannot remember it, only the feeling that there was a divide. She will take him into her like a carnivorous thing and she will conquer the divide on her whims and not his. Queen of the brightness, consuming, the secret desire of her heart fulfilled.