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Elwing doesn’t remember much of the flight to the havens of Sirion—only a tight hand around her wrist, pulling her along as she stumbles, and then someone picking her up and running. She was passed around innumerable pairs of arms on the long march to safety, everyone seemingly unwilling to let her feet touch the ground, as if that would protect her. She keeps her head tucked in so she doesn’t see the ghosts, following them like some great host.
Elwing has the ghosts of her family at her back, and their legacy hanging around her neck, shining and still and dead. Her three-year-old self, young and naïve and stupid, who hasn’t yet learned that some things are better left unsaid, always mentions it. Her mother is right there, around the corner of the hall, her father is right behind her, she knows, and there are twin pairs of footsteps pattering down that hallway. Everyone humours her, of course—she is a child, too young to truly understand what she has lost.
She isn’t quite old enough to be put in any position of power, but she knows that she should be, at some point. When you’re older, is what everyone tells her, and she doesn’t think she’s imagining the relief in their expressions when it becomes clear that she’s growing more like a man than an elf. Still, for now, she has a retinue of advisors. She doesn't do anything at meetings except sit there and pretend like she’s listening, but they tell her that she’s important, that people need to see her. She spends her time giving names to the ghosts filling the room.
The refugees from Gondolin arrive right when Elwing turns seven, their number dwarfed by the ghosts that follow them. From the way everyone around her reacts, she understands that Gondolin was not supposed to fall, was supposed to be safe. Just like Doriath, and just like Sirion.
With Idril and Tuor there, something more like proper royalty (and really, they don’t have the luxury to be picky), Elwing slowly disappears from council meetings and reappears on the shore, mucking around with Eärendil, under the watchful eye of a nurse and a guard. Eärendil is her age and believes her about the ghosts—believes her when she says that he’s haunted by two shades, one taller than the other. He doesn’t stop believing her, even as she sees the adults’ expressions change, the more she mentions it and the more she grows up. It becomes something more like a carefully bitten-down wince.
When she turns eight, Idril takes her aside, gives her a cup of warm milk sweetened with honey, and gently tells her that it’s time for her to grow out of talking about things like ghosts. It scares people when you say things like that, she says. They’re worried about you, and they need to trust that you’ll be a good queen, when you grow up. You understand? She has a strange look in her eyes, something a little like grief and a lot like understanding. Elwing does understand—this is something that needs to be kept to herself.
Everyone at the Havens is heavy with what they’ve lost. It clings to their shoulders, drags them down. She’s the shining reminder of it; practically a beacon. They don’t need her to be haunted, too, so she folds it down as small as she can make it. She can’t stop turning her gaze whenever she sees something flitting around a corner, though. Just in case.
She swears the ghosts used to have features, carved out in painstaking detail. Now, their faces have melted away, slowly eroding. Like waves smoothing out the sand at the shore.
Elwing is fifteen when she asks Idril if she can see ghosts, too. Because she’s covered in them, looming, and sometimes her eyes go glassy and distant. Idril sighs, but doesn’t look too put upon.
“I don’t see them, Elwing,” she says, slowly. “Not like you do.”
Elwing feels something in her chest crack, a little bit. “So you knew,” she accuses. She did know that she believed her, has known that ever since she was eight, but to hear it be said out loud—why didn’t you say anything? Why did you leave me alone with these wisps of what I could have had? she doesn’t ask.
“I did,” Idril says, heavily. “I can’t see them, but I can feel them, I think. I might have been able to, if my eyes were able to see the past more clearly than the future.”
The part of Elwing that isn’t too hurt to think about something other than herself understands. “Do you want to know what they look like?” she offers. She’s not sure why. Idril is practically bent in half by the weight of the past, for all she says that she sees more of the future.
Idril straightens, painstakingly. “Yes, please,” she breathes out.
Elwing squints to discern the details, and describes the tall, proud shadow, wearing elaborate robes at Idril’s back, the smaller figure dwarfed by furs and dripping water that disappears as soon as it hits the ground, the woman with her head held high and her shoulders squared, as if bracing for a fight, and a wisp, shorter than the rest, that seems to flicker in and out of existence, as if it shouldn’t be there. Idril listens attentively, her face raw like Elwing’s never seen. At the last one, she shutters her expression closed, and purses her lips. Elwing takes it as the death knell of the conversation, and falls silent.
Sure enough, Idril gets up and smooths an inexistant wrinkle from her skirt. “Thank you, Elwing,” she says, and stalks away.
They’re in that one month of the year where Elwing is older—she’s eighteen, and Eärendil is seventeen, a fact that she will not stop holding over him. They’re sitting on a sun-warmed rocky outcropping a little ways away from the shore, Eärendil stretched out as content as a cat under the rays of the sun.
“Can I ask you something?” Elwing asks, careful to keep her gaze on the sea.
Eärendil props himself up on his elbows, looking at her quizzically. “Sure,” he says. “You’re awfully serious about this,” he adds, more playful.
“I’ve been wondering—” Elwing starts, then stops. She waves her hand vaguely in the air. “—If it bothers you, that I can see your ghosts. If it was someone else that could see mine, I think it would bother me.”
Eärendil sighs, not unlike the way Idril did. Elwing has to hide a tiny smile.
“Not really,” he shrugs. “Mostly because it’s you, though. Maybe I’d be uncomfortable if it was a complete stranger.”
Elwing hums in answer. “I don’t even know some people’s names,” she says. “and I still have to look them in the eyes and hide the fact that I know what they lost.” She thinks she’s starting every relationship on an uneven foot. She’ll always know something about the other person that they have never chosen to reveal to her.
“If they’re here, it’s because they’ve lost something,” Eärendil points out. “I think most people expect you to know that they’re grieving something, at this point.”
Elwing shrugs. Eärendil just pulls her down next to him, and she buries her face into his side to avoid seeing their ghosts standing watch, like toy soldiers all in a row.
The first time Elwing saw the sea, when they finally got to Sirion, she refused to get anywhere close to the shore. It’s so different from the tightly held forests of Doriath, where the trees held hands high above her head and the dirt was hard-packed under her feet. Here, the sea is large and loose, vast and uncontrollable. The sand shifts with every step and the air is so thick with salt you can taste it. She’s not allowed to stay away—someone probably decided that they can’t have a princess that doesn’t like their closest neighbour, and so she learns to hide her fear quickly enough. She still doesn’t stop being scared until what’s left of Gondolin arrives, and Tuor with them.
Tuor has the sea in his eyes, deepening wrinkles around his mouth, and too many ghosts to count. He knows the sea, like no one else she’s ever met. She’s heard whispers about a blessing from Ulmo, but she thinks it’s less of a blessing and more of a claiming. Tuor walks like sand is perpetually shifting under his feet, and is no less sturdy for it.
Eärendil snitches on her fear of the sea almost immediately, obviously thinking it a grievous wrong. Tuor seems to agree, if less dramatic about it than his seven-year-old son. He tells her about the tides and, when she deigns to approach the shore on her own terms, shows her the fish and the crabs and the seagulls flying high above their heads. He lets her onto a beached ship and teaches her what every single rope does. She spends quite a bit of time looking at his ghosts, but he doesn’t seem to mind. They fill up the space around him until Elwing feels claustrophobic.
Elwing has always been a little Mannish, sturdy in a way most elves aren’t, but Tuor is fully Man, wrinkles and all. It scares her, a little bit. She can easily picture him fading away, joining the ranks of ghosts that flit about Sirion.
She's shamefully relieved when he and Idril leave—the relief doesn’t overcome the sorrow, of course, but she doesn’t want to see anyone else die, be it bloodless or not.
Idril squeezes her hand when they leave, on a cold and sweet morning, the biting breeze worming in under even Elwing's thick woolen cape. Idril's hand is shockingly warm against her palm.
“Don’t get stuck looking at the past,” she tells her. It's really quite good advice, though Elwing won't know that until much later. For now, she just thinks that that's what she's been trying to do, all this time.
“I won't,” she says, for lack of anything else. “Good luck,” she adds, lamely. The enormity of what Idril and Tuor are attempting is obvious to everyone, and so no one wants to address it except in veiled words, as if that would be tempting fate. Idril understands, anyway. She squeezes Elwing's hand in answer.
In front of them, Tuor claps solidly Eärendil on the back, and he stumbles a bit before straightening up. The grief on Eärendil's face is very obvious, even if Elwing can see just as obviously how hard he's trying to not let it show. It weighs him down, is the thing. Pulls him down until he might as well be walking hunch-backed.
Idril and Tuor leave on a cold, sweet morning, the sun just peeking over the horizon as their boat fades into the distance, turning the coast they've left behind all into a glittering yellow-gold.
Idril and Tuor do not come back, and she’s twenty when she starts wearing the silmaril around her neck in earnest. Her advisors encourage it—they tell her that it would reassure the people, that this fraction of the light to be found in the Blessed Lands reminds them that all hope is not lost. Elwing is rather sick of the idea of the Blessed Lands, but hope is worth its weight in gold.
Her family has left her with the crown and this stolen piece of hope. She wears their ghosts around her neck just as well as her back, and the weight feels as if it’ll snap her clean in half (it doesn’t—it’s really infuriatingly weightless).
“I feel half-blind when I see you wear it,” Eärendil tells her, after clasping the Nauglamír around her neck. It’s not quite complimentary. Elwing looks at herself in the mirror, the light cast off by the silmaril bouncing on the surface and reflecting onto her face, smoothing it out. That light feels almost as if it could fill up the cracks, patch them up back into something less prone to shattering. When she walks, it cuts through the mire of ghosts cleanly, carving her a path where the air feels sweeter.
Elwing is twenty-nine and has twins of her own, with tiny, perfect hands, and she can’t help but see another pair of twin-ghosts superposed over them. Silver hair melds in with black, until the two are indistinguishable.
She doesn’t remember much about her brothers, but in what little memories she has, they’re always trying to make her laugh. There’s a crystal-clear snapshot of Elurín trying to distract her from crying by dropping an astonishingly pink earthworm in her hand. It worked, but only because she instantly tried to put it in her mouth.
Eärendil is good at making them laugh, when he’s there, and Elwing promises herself that her sons will feast on laughter until they’re full of it, even as she doesn’t quite believe it.
Eärendil spends his days with Círdan and comes back to her windswept and salt-licked, with his hands full of splinters. She can practically see the coast stretching out in his eyes, so far out that she can’t see the shore.
“The boat is done,” he finally tells her one evening, as she picks out the tiny shards of wood from his hands with a pair of tweezers.
Elwing hums absent-mindedly, focused on digging out a particularly stubborn one.
“I’m going to try to sail west,” he adds casually, as if he hasn’t just signed his death sentence.
Elwing carefully sets the tweezers down on her desk. “You can’t,” she says, stupidly. Her tongue feels heavy in her mouth.
“I need to try,” Eärendil says. “We can’t just stay here, stagnant and ripe for the picking. We won’t be able to defend ourselves if anyone attacks, and you know it.”
Elwing does know it—she’s spent hours poring over records upon censuses upon records, of their defenses, of their fighters, of their stores of weapons. Against a full frontal attack, their little settlement built on scraps of memories and what little hope they can muster can do practically nothing but run. Crucially, though, they’re all tired of running. She knows this, just as intimately as she knows that if Eärendil leaves, there will be a day when he just won’t come back.
“Send someone else,” she says, abruptly. “You’ve helped with the boat, surely—”
“We’ve already sent other people, Elwing,” Eärendil interrupts. “I can’t keep sending them off, while I stay safe on shore. What kind of person would that make me?”
A selfish one, is the answer he’s looking for. Well, call her selfish, because she would rather condemn ten more people to endless wandering on the waters than have Eärendil’s shadow at her back. He knows what this would do to her. He knows that it would destroy her—how often has she made him promise to not die before her?
“Are you trying to accelerate me losing you?” she asks. Her hands are trembling, so she folds them tightly together. “Do you want to make me miserable? You—you know what it would do to me. You know.”
“It’s not only about you,” Eärendil says quietly.
And Elwing knows that, she does, but—“Oh, and you’re so righteous, are you? Don’t pretend like you’re only doing this for the good of the people. Don’t pretend like it isn’t just some distant secondary goal.” She laughs sharply, piercing the quiet around them. “You would—you would rather spend your days searching the sea for people who are already gone, than stay with those you have left!” She knows she’s being cruel, but she doesn’t care about that much.
Eärendil has always been slow to anger, but that doesn’t mean he can’t give just as good as he receives. They spend the evening wielding words like weapons against each other, and she rages up and down their room until their rug is crooked.
It ends with them both laying awake on opposite sides of the bed, unable to sleep, until Eärendil gives up and leaves the room quietly. He returns a quarter of an hour later, with two steaming cups of tea, Elwing’s sweetened with enough honey to make her teeth ache, just as she likes it.
Two mornings later, she kisses him goodbye and pretends like she isn’t desperate. The sea takes, and it takes indiscriminately. It does not care about her ghosts. The longer Eärendil is away, the more she can slowly feel his shadow materializing at her back.
She starts receiving the letters after Eärendil leaves, perfectly diplomatic and chock-full with threats. We would hate to—is an oft-repeated turn of phrase, and so is the not-quite-hidden sentiment that she’s being unreasonably childish by not handing the silmaril over. She stops answering after the first three, but she reads every single one.
She tumbles out of bed when she hears frantic knocking at her door, immediately fearing the worst. She quickly pulls a robe over her nightgown and puts her hair up, through her hands are shaking too much to do it with any dexterity.
Ídhiel, one of her unofficial ladies-in-waiting, bursts into the room, looking just as disheveled as Elwing feels. The situation seems too dire for any sort of propriety. “Your Highness,” she gasps, out of breath. “There’s—attackers—an ambush, too quick to stop them, they’ve probably already made it past the walls—”
The walls! The first thing they built, but still meagre compared to the fortresses of old. Sirion was never supposed to be a fortress. It was just supposed to be safe.
“Attackers,” Elwing repeats, even as she gets dressed in yesterday’s clothes, Ídhiel rushing to help her. “What kind?” she asks, even as she knows the answer. We would hate to— runs circles around her head.
“Elves, your Highness,” is the answer. “Fëanorians,” she adds, as if it would be anyone else.
Elwing nods, and braids her hair in a singular plait down her back, as quickly as possible. “You are armed?” she asks Ídhiel, rummaging through her bedside table and pulling out a dagger, and the silmaril. She nods, pulling her own dagger from some hidden pocket.
Elwing nods back in response, and they both bolt out the room, each going in a different direction. Elwing sends up a quick prayer for her safe escape, and makes a beeline for the nursery. On her way there, she loses her dagger by burrowing it into the heart of another elf and running before any others can spot her. Sour bile crawls up her throat, but she doesn’t have the time to stop and throw up, so she swallows it down.
She takes the stairs two at a time, and hopes that the boys’ nurse had the time to hide them, if she isn’t already dead. She bursts into the nursery and instinctively knows that she’s too late. The room is so full of ghosts they’re all melding together into one great shifting mass, like fog clouding over the room. The light of the silmaril does its best to cut through, but even it can’t get rid of them completely. For a single, horrible second, she thinks her sons are among them, but then she sees a dark-haired elf, standing in the corner of the room, holding them by the shoulders. Elros gives a sharp cry when he sees her, but Elrond is quiet. She can see him snaking his hand to hold Elros’ and squeeze it tight.
The elf with them has his sword sheathed at this side, his hand not anywhere near it, but if this is who she thinks it is, it’s not a sign of peace. He simply doesn’t need it.
His companion walks into the light of the silmaril, reflecting off his deep copper hair.
“Lady Elwing,” Maedhros Fëanorion says gravely, as if they’re sitting down in a receiving room, as if they haven’t just destroyed the last bastion of safety this side of the sea. As if they don’t have her sons. “We don’t want to hurt them,” he says, even as he looks at her throat, with a strange hunger on his face. “Give us the silmaril, and we’ll leave.”
Don’t want to hurt them gets stuck in a loop in Elwing’s brain. Don’t want to hurt them, as if it’s unconscionable, as if they didn’t leave her brothers, barely older, to die in the woods. As if this boundary can be their salvation.
She can’t quite keep her gaze on his face—it keeps straying away. She sees a flash of silver in the corner of her eye. They’re going to die, she thinks, with complete and utter certainty. They’re going to die, and I will watch them die. “How can I know that you’ll keep your word?” she asks, and clenches her jaw so it doesn’t tremble.
He takes a step forward, and she takes a step back, reaching her hand behind her to feel for the window. He doesn’t go further and puts up his empty hands, as if that makes him any less threatening. “We want to avoid any further bloodshed,” he says, with blood still wet on his armour. “Just as you do, I imagine.”
She almost wants to laugh, at that. What right do they have to think that they’re in any way similar? Elwing backs up some more, until the windowsill hits her in the back. They’re going to die. She will give away the silmaril and there will be nothing keeping away the ghosts, and he will unsheathe his sword and run her through, and she will bleed out watching his brother do the same to her sons.
No matter what she does, they will die, because she escaped death when she was three and it has been chasing her to collect its debt ever since. I will not watch my sons die, she thinks, sending it up as a prayer to whoever is listening. She finds the window’s latch with her hand and flips it open. A cold breeze snakes its way into the room, blowing her hair into her face. It doesn’t dissipate the fog. She presses herself back into the windowsill until she feels herself starting to lose balance, and she sees him take a hasty step forward and reach out a hand, and she looks at her sons and hopes they’ll forgive her for not watching them die, and she lets herself topple over the ledge.
The wind whips around her, and she counts the seconds before she crashes into the rocky shore below. One, two, three—and something utterly bizarre happens to her body. It feels rather as if someone split her skin open to turn her inside out, but it doesn’t hurt, somehow, and she soars back up into the sky on steady, white-feathered wings.
She isn’t quite thinking of anything—her thoughts are both sluggish and frantic, leaving her running on a jumble of instinct. She lets the wind carry her, and it never falters and never changes course, until she sees what she instinctively knows is Vingilot, with Eärendil at the helm.
She dives towards him, and he catches her in his arms. She feels like she sheds an outer layer, and then she has two hands and two feet and her face, and the silmaril still hanging around her neck.
She grasps at Eärendil’s arms, hands scrabbling for purchase. “They’re gone,” she says, and then she can’t stop. “They’re gone—Eärendil—they’re gone, they’re dead, they took the city, and—the boys, Eärendil, the boys—” She chokes on the lump in her throat. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she acknowledges that she probably looks hysterical.
After what feels like a millennium, she pulls back and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. Eärendil still hasn’t said anything. The few sailors around them avert their eyes politely when she looks, trying to pretend like they aren’t listening in. They still all seem shaken, like a slight breeze would knock them over. She probably doesn’t look any better. She pulls herself together, plants her feet solidly on the wooden deck, and tries to feel less like she’s floating. “Sirion was attacked,” she declares. “By the sons of Fëanor, for the silmaril. I don’t know who is alive. I’m sorry,” she ends, lamely. She bursts into tears again, and hates herself for it.
“I’m sorry,” she repeats to Eärendil, later, when they’re alone (or as alone as can be), after he’s made her tell him what happened no less than three times. “I tried to keep them safe, I promise I tried, but I just—Eärendil, they were going to die, I couldn’t watch them die—”
He doesn’t tell her it’s alright, because it isn’t. “We’ll make it worth it,” he says, into her hair. “They’ll have to listen to us, now.” The silmaril still cuts between them with its brilliant light, like a small sun. She wishes she could cast it into the sea and be done with it, and she only means it with fifty percent of her being.
She haunts the ship like a wraith, trying to keep out from underfoot. She doesn’t remember much of the weeks-long journey, only that at some point the training she received from Tuor raises its head and she starts doing odd jobs around the ship, and that the sea around them is strangely still. The ghosts of her sons will never grow taller than her hip.
Eärendil must have told the other three sailors the full story, because they don’t ask. They keep respectful distance, as if she’s still their queen. If anything, she feels more like a child than ever.
The shores of Aman rise in the distance, tall and proud. Elwing doesn’t feel much about it, neither relieved nor spiteful. Eärendil looks more solemn than anything. When they’re close enough for Eärendil to jump off into the shallows and walk to the land, he does so.
He turns back at them and crosses his arms. “Stay behind,” he says, firmly. “I don’t—we’re not supposed to be here. I think the only reason they let us through is because of the silmaril, and I don’t want to risk their anger falling on you. It’s better that I go alone.”
Elwing feels suddenly incandescently angry, at that. She jumps off nimbly after him, the cold water splashing into her face, and marches off to Eärendil. “You’re ridiculous,” she says, grabbing him by the shoulders, “if you think that I’ll let you face this alone. Let their anger fall on both of us! I am not,” she punctuates her statement with a shake, “leaving you behind. Don’t ask me to leave you behind.”
Eärendil looks at her with exasperation and sadness warring in his eyes. She’s always been able to read them so easily, his eyes. He’s never been able to keep anything hidden from her. She twists around to Vingilot. “Don’t land, but wait for us!” she calls. Erellont, one of the sailors on the prow, gives her a little salute.
They walk a bit further inland and Eärendil turns to face her. “I didn’t make you go back on the ship,” he says. “But—please let me go alone, for this. I think I need to be alone. And,” he adds, with a tiny quirk of his mouth, “I don’t think I’ll be able to keep my head, if they threaten you.”
Elwing hates it, but he’s probably right. “Only if you promise to come back,” she says, knowing it to be an impossible thing to ask and asking anyway. She presses the silmaril into his hand, and he tucks it in his pocket.
“Of course I will,” he promises, and she kisses him squarely on the mouth, before watching him walk away from her again, his ghosts at his back. She hadn’t noticed, but his ghosts of Elrond and Elros are shorter than they were, when they died.
Elwing stays where they separated for a good half-a-day, before she realizes that she should probably find somewhere to stay. She starts walking along the shore, feeling rather unreal. She hadn’t realized how much being around Eärendil kept her in the present, until he left.
It takes her a few hours of quiet walking for her to start seeing buildings in the distance, brilliantly white against the equally brilliant blue sky. She walks closer until she sees fishermen on the shore, cleaning out their catch. The smell of dead fish hits her right in the face, and even as she recoils, she finds herself strangely homesick.
She walks up to them, and the nearest elf sets down his knife and turns to her. His hair is stiff with salt, and he only has one ghost, waiting at his shoulder. “Where did you come from, stranger?”
Elwing points over her shoulder, to the sea and beyond it. “From the other side,” she says.
He nods. “From the Halls?”
“No,” she says. “We sailed over.”
His eyes grow a little wider. “And the sea let you through?”
“We had—insurance,” she says. She doesn’t know how safe it is to mention the silmaril on these shores. “My husband has gone to plead with Valar,” she adds.
“Well, good luck to him.” It’s clear he doesn’t believe it’ll come to much, and they share a smile. If it’s a little bitter, she’d say she’s earned it. They’ve gathered a little group around them, all who were working in the vicinity drawn by the allure of curiosity.
The Teleri man gestures at her to sit down. “You have news, don’t you? We want to hear it.” Elwing plops down onto the sand, her weary legs not allowing any semblance of gracefulness.
“It’s not very encouraging news,” she hesitates, and most of them nod in acknowledgement.
“We weren’t expecting it to be,” a woman in the back pipes up. “But we want to know.”
So, Elwing tells them of the forests of Doriath and the mountains of Gondolin and the coasts of Sirion, of their beauty and of their fall. It takes her until sundown to answer all their questions, and by then her throat is hoarse and her eyes sting with tears. She keeps blinking rapidly to keep them at bay.
Even so, her grief is obvious—she’s too heartsick to hide it with any effectiveness, but nobody around her seems to disdain her for it, even in these lands of light. The woman from earlier pulls her to her feet, introduces herself as Telpendilmë, and invites her to supper. Elwing tries her best to look her in the eyes, and to not stare at her shoulder, where two shades hover protectively, unshakable and straight-backed.
Telpendilmë mock-bows to Elwing when they enter the city. “Welcome to Alqualondë,” she says, with a sweeping gesture, and Elwing knows, now, why these people are not unfamiliar with grief.
When Eärendil comes back for her, he’s somehow both lighter and wearier than she’s ever seen him.
“They’re going to help,” he says, and Elwing has to sit down before her legs stop supporting her. She doesn’t ask if they only decided to help because of the silmaril, but he reads it on her face anyway.
“I think—” he sits down heavily next to her. “I think they weren’t really thinking about it, and I forced them to.” Elwing thinks that that’s not really any better, and he probably knows it.
Instead of saying any of that, she asks: “What are they like?”
Eärendil waves his hand vaguely in the air. “Theyre not much like people, honestly. I always pictured them as particularly powerful, but still elf-like. They’re something else entirely.”
And really, that does nothing to prepare her for when the Valar summon them to Valimar, together this time. The air is weighed down by the sheer amount of power, until it’s so thick she can barely breathe. The Valar have no ghosts, and she almost hates them for it, blasphemous or not.
The Elder King gives his decree, and Elwing can’t really find it in herself to care. She’s given all she has to her little haven of safety, and now that it’s gone and taken her sons with it, she feels rather emptied out. She squeezes Eärendil’s hand, nonetheless.
“You have a choice,” Manwë tells them, his voice rattling Elwing’s very bones, “for if you would be counted among the Firstborn, or the Secondborn Children of Iluvatar. By that choice will you join your kindred, and by that choice will your fates be judged.”
She sees Eärendil hesitate, and that scares her more than anything else in the world. “I’m tired,” he tells her, simply. “You can choose.” Elwing knows that he will follow her in whatever she decides, and she’s tired of death. Maybe living in what are supposed to be deathless lands will let her rest.
She squeezes his hand again, and tries her best to look Manwë right in the eyes, even as it makes her feel flayed out. “We choose to be counted among the Firstborn,” she says, and hates herself for locking Eärendil to her. She can’t help but be selfish, once more.
And really, she might as well be, because he is told of his new mandate soon enough. He presses his forehead against hers, and their tears mingle together. “I’ll be back as much as I can,” he promises, and Elwing nods, wordlessly. Vingilot takes to the stars as easily as gliding through water, graceful and silent. She stares at the sky until her cheeks are tacky with dried tears.
Elwing goes about her day surrounded by ghosts, all of them hiding around corners, and disappearing as soon as she turns fully towards them. She is washing her meagre laundry and there is someone on her shoulder, she knows. She can’t help but turn back, even if she knows that nothing will be there.