Chapter Text
Will you meet me in the middle?
Will you meet me in the air?
Will you love me just a little?
Just enough to show you care?
From the heights of fair Eregion, she falls.
She is gone in a gasp—too heavy for the air to cradle her fall.
All that waits to receive her is broken earth.
She smashes, her soul jarred loose from the bindings that tether it to her body. Like a fragile flame threatened by a cold breath of wind, the fire inside her withers to almost nothing, and nearly dies.
Something calls to her—a distant, otherworldly voice that beckons from a far-distant shore: Mirdania…
Her fëa hearkens to the call, for it promises freedom from the agony that she now feels spreading through her bones.
Yet there is another voice, a cherished voice, high above, crying for her in anguish:
“Mirdania!”
How many times had she answered his call with eager steps? Followed him to the heat of the forge, ever content to sit beside him and listen to him wax on about metals and jewel craft and the masterworks of his grandfather—always his grandfather, for Curufinwë’s name was never far from his lips, and no amount of praise would ever free Celebrimbor from his long shadow...
Even after everything, her instinct is to answer him. Even after he'd banished her and the other smiths from the forge, stripped away their titles; even after she'd glimpsed his tortured form when she'd slipped across that perilous border into the Unseen World; even after Annatar's warnings that the greatest of elven smiths is lost, the love she bears for him is stubborn, and refuses to wane.
But she cannot move—her limbs refuse the instruction of her mind. Nor can she call out to him, for her voice has flown, like the last swallow, fleeing south before the oncoming winter.
And yet, though the distant call grows greater, she clings to Celebrimbor’s voice, and it is just enough to keep the last of her fading embers burning.