Chapter Text
Her skin burned, hot as a fever on a midsummer day, yet underneath the blood coursing through her veins chilled with the ice of the furthest northern glaciers. The name was a brand, a hot poker searing into her skin. Unrelenting. She could scarce breathe, for though the flashes of misfiring sensations shot through her like bolts of lightning, the heavy press of water forced the air from her lungs. In shock, her better senses fled her. Sshe drew the water in on instinct, hungry for the air she so craved, aware almost as soon as the Glanduin's flood filled her mouth, her mistake.
Yet, she thought, the least of many.
A hand closed about her arm and a voice called from at once near and far but, halfway between the seen and unseen, she reacted on fear alone. Seizing from her waist the dagger blessedly untouched by his hands. She brandished it before her, finding the throat of her assailant with its edge. In his eyes she saw fear.
At once, even before the person spoke again, she knew it was not Him. Water ran in rivulets off the tip of her nose, past lips that coughed water free from her throat and lungs, though she refused to break eye contact. Elrond, his eyes wide, pressed her back from him, even as his fingers tangled in the emerald fabric of her dress.
“Galadriel.”
Quiet. Patient. Compassionate. The furrow between his eyes encouraged her to let go and yet. Finrod had seemed just as concerned when he'd taken that form. Hadn't he?
No, she answered herself. In his voice had lived conviction and strength, purpose, but it was his eyes. They’d been laughing. Set to mirth at some merry private joke who’s poison she'd only just begun to understand.
Drinking of the sweet air about her, cooled by the waters as soothing as moonlight, she lowered the blade slowly. Carefully. Guarded muscles and reflexes searched for a sign, any, that this was not what it seemed, but the world remained as it was, solid and tangible. Elrond's eyes bore into hers, the furrow deepening with each second that passed without reply.
His fingers closed all the tighter, firmer, about her shoulder yet she did not feel trapped but secured, as thought that grip had tethered her galloping heart to this moment.
“What has happened?”
—
Water, rushing over and flooding her, clinging to her through her sodden clothes like some ivy she couldn’t keep at bay. It ran in rivers down her legs and neck and tamed her golden raiment of hair into a helm worthy of the deep shame that delved its way deeper and closer to her heart.
It wasn't love. She dispelled the notion at once. Though, perhaps it was a kindred of it. Even if she had wondered at it once, that thread that seemed to grow all the stronger with each challenge they’d overcome. A string that wrapped two souls together, it had seemed. A connection that thrived under opposition and in the face of mortal foes. A moment, of a moment of time in the life of an elf, yet of graver folly she had never been guilty.
No. Not love at all. But kinship. Two soldiers who wished in the darkness to reach for purpose only to realize their purpose was already with them. Two soldiers who knew that true happiness could not come from wars and battles, but had forgotten how to live without a blade in hand. Two people who reached for vengeance to wake themselves from slumber as much as they sought salvation. Or so she’d thought. And yet.
Ice crept through her shoulders, lancing through her neck to the tips of her ears. Dread of a kind she’d never known settled, molten in her stomach, hot as the fires of Orodruin, not long enough forgotten. And like when the ash clogged her throat, the urge to retch was unbearable. But she could not stop. Refused to stop.
Elrond was close behind. Little would stop her friend. Her distress had been so clear, and she’d given him no explanation. And her friend, once an orphaned boy on a beach, alone and bereft, would stop at nothing to heal the ills of those he cared for. It would comfort her, were this a wound she could share, or indeed he could somehow heal. But this mixture of terror and self-loathing brewed a more bitter draft in her than the venom of Ungoliant’s sting, she could not afford to stop and indulge in a relief she scarcely deserved. Her legs drove faster, racing across Eregion’s cobbles. She had to know.
Had He gone to Celebrimbor? Had He left her drowning in a dream, while He hurried off to work His own shadowed machinations on her kindred? Was He now standing next to the smith pouring poison into the cure the craftsman hoped to forge? Would Celebrimbor press on and create the rings He proposed? She could see their eyes now, in the recesses of her mind, gazing upon the finished rings, both hungry with ambition and dining on their pride.
Ragged and hollow, a breath tore through her throat like a doe through brambles, thrashing on its way into her chest. Her fingers clenched around her dagger in her hand, holding her fast as she hesitated a moment at the threshold. At the hastened beat of boots upon stone, she strode under the archway. Purpose surged through her upon her passing into the workshop. From the tight fingers of her right hand entwined around Finrod’s dagger it blossomed in her chest. If indeed she were to face Him again so soon, she wouldn’t hesitate. She would plunge the blade into His heart without a second thought.
A flame of relief softened her shoulders ever so slightly, however, when she saw only the preoccupied frame of Celebrimbor bent over a mechanism, attaching to it a basin of carved stone. He was alone. The words fell from her lips, without preamble, demanding if he’d finished his work, and maddeningly he didn’t answer. The mastersmith’s apparent delight at her appearance fell away. Under her pale, damp skin her heart hammered in a panicked flush of frustration. It mattered not what had happened to her.
“I fished her from the waters of the Glanduin.”
Elrond’s cheeks were flushed, color racing over the tops of the bones like sunset over sand. He rushed through the archway and drew to a halt by the wall, eyes gray and troubled as the tempest torn sea as he regarded her. It seemed to her then that she was but a child again, under the watchful gazes of her brothers and she resented it, and she understood it.
“Galadriel,”
Her eyes snapped to meet Elrond, finally for they hadn’t quite managed it before.
“Where is Halbrand?”
Galadriel’s breath came in sharp gasps, struggling to keep up with a heart that fluttered like a caged hummingbird beneath her breast, such was her shame. With His name, the betrayal bore into her sending frigid needles through her blood. In spite of herself, her lips trembled, though her voice, trained through battle upon endless battle, remained smooth as a windless pool.
“He is gone. And should he return, you shall not treat with him again,” She turned her eyes to Celebrimbor, furrowing her golden brow, “None of us should.”
The smith looked duly taken aback but nodded haltingly.
Elrond’s frown deepened further, carving a chasm of his worry into his face. When he replied, his voice had fallen down lower, smoother, softer and yet all the more insistent for its darkened register. He stepped toward her, but she flinched away. She could still remember His hands closed around hers, gentle, but unrelenting.
“What happened by that river, Galadriel?”
The words held fast, caught like thick honey and she found she could not bring herself to speak of that which she had learned. She drew a shaking breath past her lips, trying and failing to bring them forth but in the end, Galadriel fixed him in a gaze as unrelenting as the sea.
“You spoke to me once of a mistake, one you promised you would not make again.” her grip tightened around the dagger in her fist at her willingness to prey on his kindness, “I ask you to honor your promise.”
Elrond’s breath left him in a rush through nostrils flared in anger born not of hatred but of friendship.
“If you ask it, I will, Galadriel, but it goes against every instinct in me.”
Her expression softened, so much did she want to explain to him above all and yet she choked on the thought, instead replying, “Were it easy, it would not require trust.”
Trust. She had Elrond’s. Just as He had possessed hers. So much they had done, built on that trust He’d won, diving into a tempestuous ocean to save her, a stranger.
Those same sundering waves crashed upon the shore, washing about their feet, as she’d offered cool water to a grieving child, orphaned by acts yet beyond his understanding. With her compassion, she’d earned Elrond’s confidence. Now she relied on the forest that grew from the sewing of that single seed, and her heart ached for it. A maelstrom of contradictions, she met his frustrated gaze with one of her own, at once hoping her friend’s promise and love granted her a reprieve from explanation, and wishing she didn’t have to obfuscate the truth. But how could she do anything else?
A sickening chill slithered through her sending a shiver down the length of her spine. She cast it away, stealing herself, grounding her swirling, envenomed thoughts in the rooted sensation of duty. She could not fall apart. Not now. She felt brittle as blown glass, susceptible to the smallest fall. If she let herself she could crumble like a frost hewn slope, but that was not her way. It was never and would never be her way.
“Then…” Celebrimbor ran a frustrated hand through his hair, eyes darting between the two other elves, “Do we proceed?”
He asked finally, resting his hand on the edge of the basin in which he no doubt intended to draw the alloy of mithril and other precious metals to craft those two rings. Two.
The sickness swelled again, but Galadriel quenched it like a newly forged blade. In the balances of wills, two voices could never prevail. Always in opposition, they would be dividing and paralyzing the world to save it. Single-mindedness also couldn’t hope to hold the power they strove herein to create. For no matter how well-intended, absolute power given to one individual would always corrupt. A doom her Noldorin blood remembered all too well.
“No,” she answered plainly, summoning from the depths of her mind the conviction that drove her across vast plains, through howling snowstorms, and up sheer forgotten peaks.
But they must. Touched by Him, informed by Him, even influenced by Him, these plans were. What works He had interwoven into the design, she could not know. They could scarcely hope to perceive, for even in the refinement of the ore, Celebrimbor had labored under his watchful eye. Her eyes blazed, for she’d marked it suspicious, yet she hadn’t the imagination for the truth. The reality remained, however ill-advised it might be, that the blighted leaves of Lindon had strength left in them to cast out the darkness in the light of the mithril. Raw and unprocessed, the power existed, but without direction, amplification, they could do little more than hope. But to sail west and leave Middle-Earth to His dark ends… There was no choice.
“Not as planned.” she added, her brow furrowed in thought, and then she turned her blue eyes on the smith, the embers in them burning bright with certainty, “You must make three.”
“We have little ore, Galadriel,” Celebrimbor cautioned, though she noticed a wave of relief, that she understood well, for only moments before he’d thought she’d doomed him to fail in his quest to save the elves from their fading, “I worried that even Halbrand’s suggestion of two-”
“These rings must be for the elves, Celebrimbor, untouched by outside hands,” she cut him off, her voice as sharp as any blade of Gondolin, “Were you not already planning to stretch our mithril into an alloy?”
Elrond shifted, regarding her with a gaze that seared her skin, roving over her face with intent concern, and, she worried from her minute glance his direction, mounting suspicion. Unperturbed by her manner, Celebrimbor nodded.
“We were, yes, but that has proved difficult. I…”
His gaze when it met hers presently transformed. Where her harshness had knocked him off balance, now he seemed in full control of his faculties, but they seemed not to please him. Celebrimbor’s expression softened, at once apologetic as he pressed on.
“I discovered that precious metals of the quality we might mine here will not do as a match for the mithril. It demands a purity that…”
His eyes darted over her, and for a moment Galadriel wondered why he said this, but then she followed his line of sight to her clenched fist. Contained within her white knuckled fingers was Finrod’s dagger. Solid and cool though the metal had been in her grasp since she’d left Elrond behind in the current of the Glanduin it pressed into her palm. The silver and gold of Laurelin and Teleperion entwined together in twists and tangles familiar as her own finger prints. Metal that had traveled across the ocean. Metal from Valinor. Her lips parted in realization, and she looked back at him for a confirmation that, in truth, she did not need. Refusal blossomed on her lips, but acceptance, bitter as blood, stayed her tongue before she could speak.
“We could try other sources, but I’m afraid the Fading only hastens. If indeed you bid me create three ring-”
Her eyes closed and she swallowed, lips pressed in a solemn frown of resignation. She felt cold now, not as one does in a piercing arctic gale, acute and painful, but instead as one denied warmth for too long. The burning of her skin that had at first assaulted her had left, and in its wake she felt little more than the heaviness of cold. From the corner of her eye, she perceived a movement, the flutter of Elrond’s cape as he shifted, reaching fluidly to her, but her eyes left her dagger and implored him to remain where he was. He swallowed and she watched that same quiet anger hum through him as he clasped his hands instead together.
Stilling the tremble of her chin, she softened her grip on the dagger, cradling instead of clenching it and nodded slowly. So this was how she would pay for her blindness. A blade she’d carried in promise to her brother, to protect Middle-Earth. To find peace for its peoples, to guide it into the light. To rid it of darkness. How utterly she had failed.
“There is no need, Celebrimbor.”
Galadriel turned the knife in her hand, watching as the sunlight filtering through the workshop caught on each knot of the hilt, until she held the blade gingerly in her fingers. With a deep breath, heavy as the mountains, she held it out to him. He reached for it eagerly and then stopped, a kindly, fatherly smile filling the face of this grandson of Faenor.
“It will be a while yet, before I need it. Until then, Galadriel, keep it. Take from it whatever peace you may find.”
She almost loosed a bitter laugh, but it seemed her lungs hadn’t yet found the strength for mirth. Wordlessly, she returned the knife to the sheath at her side. The calm this dagger brought her had never been from peace. It had now and would ever be the calm of furious and all-consuming purpose.
Reinvigorated, now the initial disruption of her arrival had worn away, Celebrimbor turned back to his furnace, collecting from the table in front of it what looked like a silver spoon and several smooth iron rings, which he deposited closer to his mechanism. Galadriel watched him bustle, noting him cross to a doorway at the rear of the workshop and ring a small bell.
“With Halbrand, I wouldn’t need another helper. He really was marvelously talented. Even for an elf, let alone a human!” he quipped off-handedly, setting a pair of tongs on a pedestal near her.
Galadriel’s pale blue eyes flickered to the smith’s blazing with a dark warning, and Celebrimbor’s studious delight evaporated as he remembered himself.
“But of course… as you say.”
She did not respond, but instead retreated to one of the alcoves around the room’s perimeter. The emerald fabric of her dress had begun to dry, and though it had once clung damply to her skin, it now lifted away where the water no longer weighed it down. Without its weight, her skin crawled, all the worse for Elrond’s continued observation of her.
The younger elf stood, unmoved from where he’d come to rest in his aborted attempt to support her. His arms were crossed, his blue eyes narrowed. When she spared him a reluctant glance, she felt she could almost see into his mind by the taught worry in the hollows of his cheeks and the lines of suspicion creasing the soft skin beneath his eyes. He opened his mouth, as if to speak, but the words, like so many of hers, seemed hampered by the openness and the importance of this room, and this moment. Galadriel shook her head gently and then returned her attention to Celebrimbor and the assistants who presently arrived.
Metal rang about her like pouring rain on a battlefield of armor. The great bellows by the furnace roared as it stoked the coals within to scorching heat to rival the most terrible depths of the earth. It was a heat she could smell, searing her lungs. The hints of ash in her throat sent a shudder through her unrelated to the events preceding. She turned her head away, leaning out into the fresh air that rushed through the arch. The pungent aroma of damp earth and freshly bloomed flowers met her. Far more kindly a wind than she’d expected and she was struck by how the gentle countenance of Ost-in-Edhil could sooth. It would be so easy to forget, for one who never ventured beyond its borders, the dangers they all faced.
This sweet breeze tugged as her, urging her to forget, to release the morass of guilt and shame that boiled within her. Galadriel pulled herself away, reminded of Valinor’s rolling hills capped not with snow but a frosting of brilliant, shimmering white flowers, and of musical streams whose melodies plucked heartstrings as a player plucks a harp. And yet, there she also remembered the verdant green hills as He plucked the face of Finrod from her memories and perverted it. Rage raised in her like magma. Unconsciously, Galadriel’s fingers found the dagger at her hip, pressing the cold hilt deep into her palm. But as fast as it had come, it left, leaving behind it a nauseating hollow. She bowed her head, leaning back against the stone that arched its way, high overhead, the back of her hand pressed to her lips. Just for a moment, as she remembered his fingers curled so gently around her chin.
There was a flurry of movement, so sudden and quick, she thought it might have been a bird, but at the retreat of booted footsteps and the gentle thunk of a wooden door, Galadriel realized Elrond had made a hasty and altogether unannounced retreat. So sudden and sure was his departure it set aside, at least momentarily, the clenching and wholly disconcerting roll of her stomach. Her eyes lingered on the spot where he’d stood, fingers grazing over the stone, cool to the touch and soothing against skin that had grown altogether too hot again.